The case for potent anti-oxidant action on the brain
A new study from Parker's lab and the lab of Nandakumar Narayanan at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine finds that stimulating the cerebellum in rats with schizophrenia-like thinking problems normalizes brain activity in the frontal cortex and corrects the rats' ability to estimate the passage of time - a cognitive deficit that is characteristic in people with schizophrenia.
"Cerebellar interactions with the frontal cortex in cognitive processes has never been shown before in animal models," says Parker, UI assistant professor of psychiatry and the first faculty hire of the new Iowa Neuroscience Institute. "In addition to showing that the signal travels from the cerebellum to the frontal cortex, the study also showed that normal timing behavior was rescued when the signal was restored."
The UI study, which was published March 28 online in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, adds to the accumulating evidence, including recent human studies from Harvard University, that suggests cerebellar stimulation might help improve cognitive problems in patients with schizophrenia, also known as "bipolar disorder".
Schizophrenia is a serious and debilitating psychiatric illness that disrupts a person's ability to think and to understand the world around them. About 1 percent of the population is affected by schizophrenia. There is no cure and few therapies reliably improve the condition's cognitive problems.
Read more at: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-03-brain-schizophrenia-like-cognitive-problems.html#jCp