When genes mutate, it can lead to the development of diseases. But there are exceptions. If the gene RIM1S is altered in nerve cells, it can also have a positive effect, leading to higher intelligence.
How can physicians help patients suffering from mental health disorders like chronic pain, depression and stroke? An interdisciplinary team of researchers at TUM is developing new methods to investigate the neuronal patterns underlying these conditions.
When a fruit fly starts walking or flying, its insulin-producing cells are immediately inhibited. This could be one explanation for why exercise promotes health.
How do the gut and the brain interact, and can this even trigger disease? There is growing consensus within the research community that the nervous and digestive systems interact with each other. How exactly, however, is still largely unknown. The German Research Foundation (DFG) is now funding a new clinical research unit at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erangen-Nürnberg (FAU) that will investigate the interaction between the digestive and nervous systems with reference to inflammatory and degenerative diseases, the first collaborative research group in Germany to explore the “gut-brain axis”.
Can surgeons quantify the risk of aphasia when removing a brain tumor? To find out, researchers at Klinikum rechts der Isar of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are analyzing the brain as a network. In a current study with 60 patients, they already achieved an accuracy rate with three quarters of their predictions.
Rare diseases, as the name indicates, only affect a small part of the population. However, for those affected they are particularly challenging, often especially because research into such rare diseases tends to be less of a priority. One of these diseases is hereditary spastic paraplegia (HSP), a disease that causes spasms and weakness in the leg muscles, increasingly affecting mobility as the disease progresses. Approximately 77,000 people across Europe suffer from the condition. Researchers have already discovered that the disease starts in nerve cells in the brain. These are obviously particularly difficult to investigate.
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