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Survival Diet
UAB Uses Nutrition Science to Fight AIDS in Africa
By Tara Hulen
As medical mysteries go, this one is particularly heartbreaking. Several years ago, UAB clinicians began a large-scale program to bring lifesaving antiretroviral therapy to Zambia. But to their surprise, the same wonder drugs that revolutionized AIDS treatment in the United States produced untoward side effects in Africa.
Scientists at UAB’s Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ), which administers the program, were perplexed. “In the first 90 days, an unexpectedly large number of patients die after the drugs are started,” says Douglas Heimburger, M.D., a researcher and professor in nutrition sciences and medicine at UAB. “But if they can get through the first 90 days, the patients’ mortality rates are very similar to patients on similar therapies in the United States.”
The Plastic Brain: Part 2
UAB Neuroscientists Stretch the Boundaries of the Mind
By Bob Shepard
Image courtesy of J. Palop
The brain, as we saw in last week's story, is "plastic" in the sense that it can reshape itself after injury. But the power of plasticity doesn't stop there, says David Sweatt, Ph.D., chair of the UAB Department of Neurobiology, director of the Evelyn F. McKnight Brain Institute, and Evelyn F. McKnight Endowed Chair for Learning and Memory in Aging. According to Sweatt, the brain is also able to strengthen the connections between neurons—and even make new neurons.
Neurons, Sweatt explains, are the fundamental information-processing units of the brain. But they do not work in isolation; instead, each neuron communicates with thousands of its neighbors through specialized connections called synapses. “It turns out that perhaps half of the synapses in the adult nervous system have a robust capacity to change the strength of the connections between neurons,” Sweatt says. “That is an important part of how the brain works, how we store information, and how we adapt to environmental stimuli.”
It is also an important part of memory, says Sweatt—in fact, he argues, synapses are the keys to memory. And once scientists understand how the adult brain strengthens certain synapses, they can begin to manipulate the process—finding ways to slow down or delay the inevitable memory loss associated with aging.
The Plastic Brain
UAB Neuroscientists Stretch the Boundaries of the Mind
The big news in neuroscience these days is that you can change your mind. Not just in superficial ways, either, such as opting for milk over creamer or paper instead of plastic, although plasticity has a lot to do with it. The field is abuzz with mind-bending research indicating that the adult brain can be shaped—repaired, expanded, optimized—in ways that were unimaginable only a few decades ago.
You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, the saying goes. And for decades, scientists thought the same thing about the human brain. An adult brain, the textbooks said, is not plastic—that is, it has no ability to change, to grow, to repair itself if injured. At birth, in infancy, and through childhood, the central nervous system is malleable; it can grow and change depending on different stimuli. But researchers were certain that this ability fades upon maturity, leaving the adult brain with the capacity to diminish—through injury, disease, or simply old age—but not to grow new cells or structures, or to repair the damage it accumulates over a lifetime. Distinguished Spanish neuroscientist Ramón y Cajal summarized the viewpoint succinctly in 1913: “Everything may die; nothing may be regenerated.”
