PLT Test Blog

Piperine/Pepper             Resveratrol/Red wine          Sunitinib/Sutent    This post is all about lowering chloride within neurons, by increasing the expression of the transporter that lets it leave, called KCC2. Today’s post is one I never finished writing from last year; I looked up the price of Sutent/Sunitinib and then I remembered why. It does again highlight how cancer drugs, when they become cheap generics, will provide interesting options for autism treatment. It also shows again how Rett Syndrome is getting attention from researchers. It also highlights that really clever Americans are looking for bumetanide alternatives, in the false belief that bumetanide has troubling side effects that cannot be managed/mitigated. The study is by some clever guys in Cambridge Massachusetts. Another group of clever guys from MIT burned through $40 million dollars a few years ago trying to develop R-Baclofen for Fragile-X...

I have written several posts about dendritic spines and their varying shapes (morphology).   This sounds like a rather obscure subject, but it looks like it may be a key area where both behavior and cognition can be modified, even later in life. Homer Simson after using a Wnt Activator   Dendritic spines In a typical neuron (brain cell) you have dendrites at one end and so-called axon terminals at the other. When neurons connect with each other, an axon terminal connects with a dendritic spine from another close by neuron.   Axons transmit electrochemical signals from one neuron to the dendrites of other neurons.   The junction formed between a dendritic spine and an axon terminal is called a synapse. One neuron can have as many as 15,000 spines, some of which are picking up signals from axon terminals of other neurons. The number and shape of these spines is constantly changing and not surprisingly defects in this process affect both cognition and behavior. The othe...