News

Wednesday, October 6, 2021
Donnelly receives NIH Transformatiive Award to lead multicenter ALS study

Chris Donnelly and colleagues will work with the Mayo Clinic-Jacksonville and MIT in a five-year, $9M effort to identify molecular and genetic mechanisms that cause amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.   Learn More

Wednesday, September 22, 2021
Sexual assault linked to later brain damage

Rebecca Thurston and colleagues have found connections between childhood sexual abuse or adult sexual assault and cognitive decline, dementia and stroke during aging. Learn More

Thursday, September 16, 2021
Brain Institute offers seed grants for Alzheimer's Disease research

The Brain Institute is offering up to $25,000 for one year for basic science research projects in dementia, in keeping with its Assault on Alzheimer’s initiative. Learn More

Friday, September 3, 2021
WIRED: You're not alone -- monkeys choke under pressure

A study reported in PNAS describes how decoding the neural signals of movement in high-stakes scenarios could help advance the field of neuroprosthetics operated under brain control.   Learn More

Wednesday, September 1, 2021
Lacomis leads clinical effort on BCI implanted in blood vesseks

Neurologist David Lacomis is co-principal investigator on a $10M NIH grant to Carnegie Mellon to test the novel Stentrode in patients paralyzed by ALS or stroke.  Learn More

Thursday, August 26, 2021
Nature Medicine: Brain tissue inflammation drives Alzheimer’s disease

Lead author Tharick Pascoal, MD, PhD, and colleagues show that activation of microglial cells is key to the spread of pathologically misfolded proteins in the brain. Learn More

Monday, June 21, 2021
Post-Gazette: Why brain trauma appears linked to ALS

Eric Anderson, Uday Pandey and colleagues showed that repeated head trauma leads to protein build-up that could explain the higher incidence of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in football players.  Learn More

Thursday, June 10, 2021
SCIENCE features Pitt research on brain-body connections

Work by David Levinthal, MD, PhD, and colleagues suggests that stress disrupts vagal pathways, thus hindering digestion and allowing ulcer-inducing bacteria to damage the stomach.  Learn More

Monday, May 24, 2021
NYT: Blind man's sight partially restored through optogenetics

Jose-Alain Sahel and colleagues report in Nature Medicine how they added light-sensitive proteins to the man’s retina, which when paired with high-tech goggles gave him a blurry view of objects. Learn More

Thursday, May 20, 2021
Sense of touch improves control of robotic arm

In Science, bioengineers describe how adding artificial tactile perception with a brain-controlled robotic arm cut in half the amount of time it took to grasp and move objects. Learn More

Wednesday, May 19, 2021
Novel immunotherapy boosts long-term stroke recovery in mice

“The beauty of this treatment is in its wide therapeutic window,” says senior author Xiaoming Hu in the Department of Neurology. Learn More

Wednesday, May 12, 2021
80% of hospitalized COVID patients have neurological issues

A global study headed by Sherry Chou found that half the patients had acute encephalopathy, and that pre-existing neurological conditions like migraines or dementia doubled the risk.    Learn More

Saturday, May 8, 2021
Rare form of ataxia linked to RNA metabolism in neurons

An international collaboration led by Udai Pandey reports in Nature Communications the discovery that mutations in the protein GEMIN5 cause developmental delay and loss of coordination. Learn More

Wednesday, May 5, 2021
Pitt and Wash U get $10.7M grant to study genetics of Alzheimer's

Ilyas Kamboh and colleagues will look for genetic underpinnings of plaques and tangles that form due to abnormal accumulation of amyloid-beta and tau proteins.   Learn More

Wednesday, May 5, 2021
Unusually thin cortex seen in young teens at risk for psychosis

Maria Jalbrzikowski reports in JAMA Psychiatry that the thinning was most pronounced in several temporal and frontal regions of the brain. Learn More

Friday, April 30, 2021
Neurological conditions pose higher risk of death from COVID-19

Sherry Chou, who heads the Global Consortium Study of Neurologic Dysfunction in COVID-19, tells USNews & World Report about findings in a study of more than 3,700 patients in 13 countries.   Learn More

Wednesday, April 28, 2021
Protein in dopamine neurons makes aging female brains more resilient

Pitt scientists found more VGLUT in dopamine neurons of female fruit flies, rodents and human beings than in males, correlating with older women's lower incidence of neuron loss. Learn More

Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Rare rewards amplify dopamine responses

The Stauffer group reports in Nature Neuroscience a first step to understanding how value and reward-probability distributions are coded in the brain.   Learn More

Friday, March 12, 2021
Pennell named chair of neurology

Page B. Pennell, MD, whose research focus is on patients with epilepsy, comes to Pitt from Harvard Medical School and will start July 1.  Learn More

Wednesday, February 17, 2021
Pitt launches neuroimaging and therapeutics center

A $1M gift from the Tull Family Foundation aims to enhance multidisciplinary collaboration in neuroscience, imaging and treatment. Learn More

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