An international team of researchers has provided valuable insights into the brain's noradrenaline (NA) system, which has been a longtime target for medications to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, depression, and anxiety.
Equally important beyond the findings is the groundbreaking methodology that the researchers developed to record real-time chemical activity from standard clinical electrodes which are routinely implanted for epilepsy monitoring.
"Instead, we focused on what's already being used in patients for medical procedures," said Montague, who is also a professor in the Department of Physics at the Virginia Tech College of Science and in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine.
"The LC-NA system is believed to regulate arousal and attention and is a pharmacological target in multiple clinical conditions, but our understanding of its role in health and disease has been impeded by a lack of direct recordings in humans," said co-corresponding and lead author Dan Bang, associate professor of clinical medicine and Lundbeck Foundation Fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark, and adjunct associate professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute.
"While it has been possible to record electrical brain activity in humans in a variety of settings for many years, this gives us only half the picture. How those neurons communicate with neurotransmitters in real-time, at short-timescales, has generally been much more difficult to study," Asaad said."In addition to the scientific value of this study, the techniques it demonstrates will be of tremendous value for a broad range of studies.
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