Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have discovered that removal of cilia from the brain’s striatum region impaired time perception and judgment, revealing possible new therapeutic targets for mental and neurological conditions including schizophrenia, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, autism spectrum disorder, and Tourette syndrome.
The striatum processes and integrates new environmental sensory information and coordinates the time sequence of motor responses. A common feature across specific mental and neurological disorders is a profound decline in patients’ ability to adjust to variations in their surroundings and accurately estimate the timing and termination of voluntary actions.
The study, recently published online in the journal Molecular Neurobiology, uncovered the first evidence of the important role cilia play in timing-dependent dysfunction.
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