Thursday, July 04, 2024

Controlling electrical pulses may offer promise for treating mild traumatic brain injury


ByDr. Tim Sandle
July 1, 2024
DIGITAL JOURNAL

Brain preserved in formaldehyde. — Gaetan Lee (CC BY 2.0)

New research has been examining brain connectivity and trauma. The timing pattern of electrical signalling plays a role in regulating the strength of synaptic connections after brain injury, particularly strengthening them with the same patterns that would otherwise weaken those connections in the normal brain.

Brain stimulation is increasingly being used in the clinic to treat a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders such as depression, Parkinson’s disease, chronic pain, and Alzheimer’s disease but little attention, until now, has been paid to the patterns of the stimulation other than frequency.

Virginia Tech scientists with the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC have demonstrated that specifying the timing pattern of neurostimulation – impulses used to activate the brain’s own electrical signalling mechanisms – can rebalance the strength of synaptic connections between nerve cells, selectively up- or down-regulating those connections.

The research shows the importance of considering the use of more natural, noisier patterns of impulses of activity for neurostimulation as a means to effectively treat brain disorders like concussions and other mild traumatic brain injuries.

According to lead research Michael Friedlander: “Our results suggest that we may be able to use different patterns of brain stimulation to help treat mild traumatic brain injuries.”

He adds: “By adjusting things like the timing, frequency, and consistency of the stimulation, we might be able to strengthen specific connections in the brain, which could help improve brain function after injury. It has not escaped our attention that the electrical and synaptic signalling in the living brain is generally anything but regular.”

Elaborating on the process, Friedlander says: “We wanted to build on that natural noisiness that the brain uses to see if patterns that mimic those might have some intrinsic capacity to activate signalling pathways to re-adjust strengths between nodes in living neuronal networks that have otherwise been functionally compromised such as occurs after injury.”

“While our study in laboratory rats is directed specifically at mild traumatic brain injury, it may also provide useful information to be applied to treatments of other brain conditions in people,” Friedlander said.

The new research is the first to look at the effects of systematically and precisely controlling the timing patterns of neurostimulation.

Notably, the researchers found that irregular patterns at certain frequencies appear to affect injured brains differently than normal brains, strengthening their connections with other nerve cells, while in the normal brain, those same patterns weakened the connections.

This demonstrates how neurostimulation can be delivered in a way that is more irregular. While highly irregular patterns of stimulation in the normal brain led to a decrease in the strength of connections between neurons, yet in the injured brain, that same irregular pattern of stimulation, at the same frequency and continuity, resulted in a strengthening of those connections.

The research appears in the Journal of Neurotrama. It is titled “Synaptic plasticity in the injured brain depends on the temporal pattern of stimulation.”


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