Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

Lena Ting

Insights into Parkinson’s balance problems

Loss of balance and falls are big concerns for people living with Parkinson’s disease and their caregivers. Researchers at Emory and Georgia Tech recently published a paper in PLOS ONE providing insights into how sensory and motor information are misrouted when people with Parkinson’s are attempting to adjust their balance.

When the researchers examined 44 people with Parkinson’s, their history of recent falls correlated with the presence and severity of abnormal muscle reactions. This could help clinicians predict whether someone is at high risk of falling and possibly monitor responses to therapeutic interventions.

People with Parkinson’s tend to lose their balance in situations when they are actively trying to control their center of mass, like when they are getting up from a chair or turning around. Disorganized sensorimotor signals cause muscles in the limbs to contract, such that both a muscle promoting a motion and its antagonist muscle are recruited. It’s like stepping on the gas and the brake at the same time, says J. Lucas McKay, who is first author of the paper.

Physical therapists are sometimes taught that balance reactions in Parkinson’s patients are slower than they should be.

“We show this is not true,” McKay says. “The reactions are on-time but disorganized.”

The paper extends groundbreaking work on how muscles maintain balance, conducted by co-author Lena Ting in animals and healthy young humans, to people with Parkinson’s. Co-authors of the PLOS One paper include Ting and Parkinson’s specialists Madeleine Hackney and Stewart Factor, director of Emory’s movement disorders program. McKay is assistant professor of neurology and biomedical informatics.

McKay says that sensorimotor problems may be a result of degeneration of regions of the brain, outside of and after the dopaminergic cells in the basal ganglia.

“We have to speculate, but the sensory misrouting would be occurring in brain regions like the thalamus — not usually the ones we think about in Parkinson’s, such as the basal ganglia,” he says. “This suggests that future therapies involving these areas could reduce falls.”

The set-up that researchers used to measure balance reactions resembles an earthquake simulator, and was designed and customized by Ting. The photo shows one of the Parkinson’s study participants, being watched by a physical therapy student.

The apparatus can produce around 1 g of acceleration inside of 12 inches of travel, which is “definitely enough to knock someone over,” McKay says.

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Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment

A new term in biophysics: force/time = “yank”

Biologists and biomedical engineers are proposing to define the term “yank” for changes in force over time, something that our muscles cause and nerves can sense and respond to. Their ideas were published on September 12 in Journal of Experimental Biology.

Expressed mathematically, acceleration is the derivative of speed or velocity with respect to time. The term for the time derivative of acceleration is “jerk,” and additional time derivatives after jerk are called “snap,” “crackle” and “pop.”

The corresponding term for force – in physics, force is measured in units of mass times acceleration – has never been defined, the researchers say.

Scientists that study sports often use the term “rate of force development”, a measure of explosive strength. Scientists who study gait and balance — in animals and humans — also often analyze how quickly forces on the body change. It could be useful in understanding spasticity, a common neuromuscular reflex impairment in multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury, stroke and cerebral palsy.

“Understanding how reflexes and sensory signals from the muscles are affected by neurological disorders is how we ended up needing to define the rate change in force,” says Lena Ting, PhD, professor of rehabilitation medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. Read more

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Neuro Leave a comment