‘Mileage clock’ found inside brain could help diagnose Alzheimer’s
A “mileage clock” in the brain was first placed by scientists who said that “fascinating” findings can help diagnose Alzheimer’s.
The researchers allowed rats to run around a small arena and then recorded the brain activity of rodents from a part of a known part to memory and navigation.
According to reports, they found cells known as “igniting” and “grilled cells ında in a pattern reflecting one kilometer clock.
Human volunteers later joined a scaled version of the test, which showed that it was an hour of the human brain.
Scientists say the findings published in the magazine Existing Biology, It helps to identify Alzheimer’s disease as well as revealing some basic studies of people’s internal navigation system.
Professor James Ainge, chief writer from the University of St Andrews, Told to BBC: “The specific brain cells we have recorded are in one of the first areas affected in Alzheimer’s.”
The study was the first work that shows that regular marking of “grilled cells” was directly linked to the ability to predict traveling distances directly.
Prof Ainge said: ın Imagine that you are walking between your kitchen and the seating room. [These cells] The brain’s ability to put yourself in the environment in your mind – providing this internal map. “
The research elaborates how this “cognitive map” works, including what will happen when it is broken. It was found that a change in the environment could lead to mistakes in both rats and people to make mistakes in distance forecasts, for example, when the darkness or fog landed.
In their experiments, scientists trained the rats to run a certain distance in the rectangular arena, rewarding the rodents with the right distance and a treatment while traveling back.
It was found that mileage counting cells in the brain of animals fired regularly while the animals were running the right distance.
Prof Ainge explained to the publisher: “The more regular the ignition pattern, the animals predicted the distance they had to go to get this treatment.”
When the shape of the rat arena changed, the researchers caused the ignition model to be irregular, and that the animals have difficulty running the distance that they had to move before they begin to get their treatment.
Prof Ainge described the findings as “fascinating, and was compared with times when visual ground signs suddenly disappeared in fog. “This kind of chronic predicts less.
In a further experiment, human volunteers completed the same test, but in the 12m x 6m arena. Similar to rats, the participants began to make mistakes when evaluating distances when the researchers moved the walls of the arena.
He added the potential practices of the future and the potential practices of the findings, including Alzheimer’s conditions: “People have already created it. [diagnostic] For example, games you can play on your phone to test navigation. We were really interested in trying something similar, but we especially look at the distance estimation. “
