New
Radioactive Tracer Lights Up
Brain’s Connections to
Study Disorders
Various brain
Disorders change the physical nature of*synapses in the brain, but this fact has been useless in clinical practice because evaluating*these changes could only be done once the patient passes away. **w researchers at Yale University have developed a technique, published on in journal
Science Translational Medicine, that relies on PET (positron emission tomography) and a **vel
Tracer to image billions of synapses at the same time.
Their
Radioactive Tracer was engineered to grab onto the*synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A (SV2A), which after injection can be viewed on a PET scanner.
The researchers first tried it on a baboon and then in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy, imaging the tell-tale signs of reduced synaptic connections.
“This is the first time we have synaptic density measurement in live human beings,” said Yale’s Richard Carson, who is senior author on the study, in a statement. “Up to **w any measurement of synaptic density was postmortem.”
Study in
Science Translational Medicine:
Imaging synaptic density in the living human brain…
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New Radioactive Tracer Lights Up Brain’s Connections to Study Disorders appeared first on
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