Alzheimer's disease research progress in the Mediterranean region: The Alzheimer's Association International Conference Satellite Symposium.

As research and services in the Mediterranean region continue to increase, so do opportunities for global collaboration. To support such collaborations, the Alzheimer's Association was due to hold its seventh Alzheimer's Association International Conference Satellite Symposium in Athens, Greece in 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was held virtually, which enabled attendees from around the world to hear about research efforts in Greece and the surrounding Mediterranean countries. Research updates spanned understanding the biology of, treatments for, and care of people with Alzheimer's disease (AD_ and other dementias. Researchers in the Mediterranean region have outlined the local epidemiology of AD and dementia, and have identified regional populations that may expedite genetic studies. Development of biomarkers is expected to aid early and accurate diagnosis. Numerous efforts have been made to develop culturally specific interventions to both reduce risk of dementia, and to improve quality of life for people living with dementia.

Addressing the disparities in dementia risk, early detection and care in Latino populations: Highlights from the second Latinos & Alzheimer's Symposium.

The Alzheimer's Association hosted the second Latinos & Alzheimer's Symposium in May 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was held online over 2 days, with virtual presentations, discussions, mentoring sessions, and posters. The Latino population in the United States is projected to have the steepest increase in Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the next 40 years, compared to other ethnic groups. Latinos have increased risk for AD and other dementias, limited access to quality care, and are severely underrepresented in AD and dementia research and clinical trials. The symposium highlighted developments in AD research with Latino populations, including advances in AD biomarkers, and novel cognitive assessments for Spanish-speaking populations, as well as the need to effectively recruit and retain Latinos in clinical research, and how best to deliver health-care services and to aid caregivers of Latinos living with AD.

Nutrition state of science and dementia prevention: recommendations of the Nutrition for Dementia Prevention Working Group.

Observational studies suggest that nutritional factors have a potential cognitive benefit. However, systematic reviews of randomised trials of dietary and nutritional supplements have reported largely null effects on cognitive outcomes and have highlighted study inconsistencies and other limitations. In this Personal View, the Nutrition for Dementia Prevention Working Group presents what we consider to be limitations in the existing nutrition clinical trials for dementia prevention. On the basis of this evidence, we propose recommendations for incorporating dietary patterns and the use of genetic, and nutrition assessment tools, biomarkers, and novel clinical trial designs to guide future trial developments. Nutrition-based research has unique challenges that could require testing both more personalised interventions in targeted risk subgroups, identified by nutritional and other biomarkers, and large-scale and pragmatic study designs for more generalisable public health interventions across diverse populations.

Committing to Memory: Memory Prosthetics Show Promise in Helping Those with Neurodegenerative Disorders.

Cell phone chimes, sticky notes, even the proverbial string around a finger-these timehonored external cues help guard against our inevitable memory lapses. But some internal help to the brain itself may be on the way in the form of what's being called memory prosthetics. Once considered to be on the fringes of neuroscience, the idea of adding hardware to the brain to help with memory has gathered steam. In 2014, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) made a US$30 million investment in memory prosthetic research as part of the Obama administration's Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative. In August 2016, Kernel, a startup based in Los Angeles, California, announced its goal to develop a clinical memory device for those debilitated by neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

Digital Tracking of Cognitive Decline: Researchers Are Co-opting Computers in their Efforts to Detect Early Signs of Dementia.

Pinpointing where healthy brain aging leaves off and dementia begins is difficult. Is a slip in memory an expected outcome for a too-busy person or a warning of something else? If an empty-nester loses the motivation to cook, is it a sign that the person is enjoying retirement after a lifetime spent cooking or an early sign of a cognitive decline?

Rhythmic activity in a forebrain vocal control nucleus in vitro.

The learned vocalizations of songbirds constitute a rhythmic behavior that is thought to be governed by a central pattern generator and that is accompanied by highly patterned neural activity. Phasic premotor activity is observed during singing in HVC [used as a proper name following the nomenclature of Reiner et al. (2004)], a telencephalic song system nucleus that is essential for song production. Moreover, HVC neurons display phasic patterns of auditory activity in response to song stimulation. To address the cellular basis of pattern generation in HVC, we investigated its rhythm-generating abilities. We report here the induction of sustained, rhythmic activity patterns in HVC when isolated in vitro. Brief, high-frequency stimulation evoked repetitive postsynaptic potentials (PSPs) and local field potentials (LFPs) from HVC neurons recorded in a brain slice preparation made from adult male zebra finches. These rhythmic events were sustained for seconds in the absence of ongoing, phasic stimulation, and they had temporal properties similar to those of syllable occurrence within zebra finch song. Paired recordings revealed synchrony between repetitive PSP and LFP occurrence, indicating that a population of cells participates in this patterned activity. The PSPs resulted from multiple, coordinated, fast-glutamatergic, synaptic inputs. Moreover, their occurrence and timing relied on inhibitory synaptic transmission. Thus, HVC itself has rhythmic abilities that could influence the timing of neural activity over relatively long time windows. These rhythmic properties may contribute to song production or perception in vivo.

Steering Organoids Toward Discovery: Self-Driving Stem Cells Are Opening a World of Possibilities, Including Drug Testing and Tissue Sourcing.

Since the 1980s, stem cells' shape-shifting abilities have wowed scientists. With proper handling, a few growth factors, and some time, stem cells can be cooked up into specific cell types, including neurons, muscle, and skin.

Highlights from the 2016 Schizophrenia International Research Society Conference, April 2-6, 2016.

The 2016 Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS) Conference, held in Florence, Italy, attracted approximately 1,800 attendees from over 54 countries to the stately Firenze Fiera Conference Center from April 2-6, 2016. Providing plenary sessions, special sessions, symposia, workshops, oral presentations and poster presentations, this 5th Biennial SIRS Conference focused on "Deconstructing Schizophrenia towards Targeted Treatment." In conjunction with the Schizophrenia Research Forum, a Web project of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and with our thanks to the SIRS organizers and staff, we bring you the following selected highlights.

Controlling Seizures Through Chemogenetics: A New Technique May Provide a More Precise Way of Targeting Faulty Circuitry in the Brain.

Electricity is the currency of our nervous systems. Thinking and planning, walking and talking, eating and sleeping-all our mental and physical activities are driven by electrical signals moving through the brain. This electrical traffic ebbs and flows in consistent patterns across different brain regions, carrying information from one neuron to the next.

New Frontiers in Robotic Surgery: The latest high-tech surgical tools allow for superhuman sensing and more.

Over the past 30 years, robots have become standard fixtures in operating rooms. During brain surgery, a NeuroMate robot may guide a neurosurgeon to a target within the pulsing cortex. In orthopedics, a Mako robot sculpts and drills bone during knee and hip replacement surgery. Dominating the general surgery field is the da Vinci robot, a multiarmed device that allows surgeons to conduct precise movements of tools through small incisions that they could not manage with their own hands.

Highlights from the Biennial International Congress on Schizophrenia Research (ICOSR), March 28-April 1, 2015.

The 2015 International Congress on Schizophrenia Research, held in Colorado Springs, Colorado, attracted over 1,000 attendees from March 28-April 1, 2015. With the gracious assistance of Congress directors Carol Tamminga and Chuck Schulz, as well as meeting staff Dorothy Denton and Cristan Tamminga, we bring you the following reports on various Congress sessions concerning approaches to prevention in schizophrenia and social cognition.

Cellular, circuit, and synaptic mechanisms in song learning.

Songbirds, much like humans, learn their vocal behavior, and must be able to hear both themselves and others to do so. Studies of the brain areas involved in singing and song learning could reveal the underlying neural mechanisms. Here we describe experiments that explore the properties of the songbird anterior forebrain pathway (AFP), a basal ganglia-forebrain circuit known to be critical for song learning and for adult modification of vocal output. First, neural recordings in anesthetized, juvenile birds show that auditory AFP neurons become selectively responsive to the song stimuli that are compared during sensorimotor learning. Individual AFP neurons develop tuning to the bird's own song (BOS), and in many cases to the tutor song as well, even when these stimuli are manipulated to be very different from each other. Such dual selectivity could be useful in the BOS-tutor song comparison critical to song learning. Second, simultaneous neural recordings from the AFP and its target nucleus in the song motor pathway in anesthetized adult birds reveal correlated activity that is preserved through multiple steps of the circuits for song, including the AFP. This suggests that the AFP contains highly functionally interconnected neurons, an architecture that can preserve information about the timing of firing of groups of neurons. Finally, in vitro studies show that recurrent synapses between neurons in the AFP outflow nucleus, which are expected to contribute importantly to AFP correlation, can undergo activity-dependent and timing-sensitive strengthening. This synaptic enhancement appears to be restricted to birds in the sensory critical and early sensorimotor phases of learning. Together, these studies show that the AFP contains cells that reflect learning of both BOS and tutor song, as well as developmentally regulated synaptic and circuit mechanisms well-suited to create temporally organized assemblies of such cells. Such experience-dependent sensorimotor assemblies are likely to be critical to the AFP's role in song learning. Moreover, studies of such mechanisms in this basal ganglia circuit specialized for song may shed light more generally on how basal ganglia circuits function in guiding motor learning using sensory feedback signals.

Highlights from the 2012 Schizophrenia International Research Society Conference, April 14-18, 2012.

The 2012 Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS) Conference, held in Florence, Italy, attracted more than 1,600 attendees from 53 countries to the stately Firenze Fiera Conference Center from April 14-18, 2012. Providing four major plenary sessions, thirty-five symposia sessions and six workshops, this 3rd Biennial SIRS Conference was jointly sponsored by Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry and SIRS. In conjunction with the Schizophrenia Research Forum, a Web project of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and with our thanks to the SIRS organizers and staff, we bring you the following report on the meeting's discussions concerning drug therapy development for schizophrenia, psychological and social treatment for schizophrenia, and the challenges of predicting psychosis with brain imaging.

Noradrenergic modulation of activity in a vocal control nucleus in vitro.

Norepinephrine (NE) can profoundly modulate sensory processing, but its effect on motor function is less well understood. Birdsong is a learned behavior involving sensory and motor processes that are influenced by NE. A potential site of NE action is the robust nucleus of the arcopallium (RA): RA receives noradrenergic inputs and has adrenergic receptors, and it is a sensorimotor area instrumental to song production. We hypothesized that NE modulates RA neurons, and as a first test, we examined the effect of NE on RA activity in vitro. We recorded spontaneous activity extracellularly from isolated RA neurons in brain slices made from adult male zebra finches. These neurons exhibited regular tonic activity with firing rates averaging 5.5 Hz. Bath application of NE rapidly and reversibly decreased firing for the majority of neurons, to the extent that spontaneous activity was often abolished. This was likely a direct effect on the cell recorded, because it occurred with blockade of fast excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission or of all synaptic transmission. The NE-induced suppression involved alpha2-adrenergic receptors: yohimbine, an antagonist, completely reversed the suppression, and clonidine, an agonist, partially mimicked it. Perforated patch recordings revealed that NE induced a conductance increase in RA neurons; however, this did not prevent cells from firing when stimulated by afferents in HVC. For some neurons, NE application resulted in an increase in signal-to-noise ratio for spikes evoked by HVC stimulation. Thus NE could strongly modulate the spontaneous activity of RA cells, potentially enhancing signals relayed through RA.