“Nobody has really measured neurotransmitter behavior at this spatial scale and timescale. Having a tool like this will allow us to explore potentially any neurotransmitter-related disease,” says Michael Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering"
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They seem to really be talking this up, for example “any neurotransmitter related disease”. Is dopamine implicated in every neurotransmitters related diseas? Last time I checked, no it isn’t. There are dozens of neurotransmitters which cause these diseases. They are not all dopamine.
What will we be the effect of this?
No, but the technique need not only be limited to dopamine in the future.
Just another tool for understanding how the brain works. With a better understanding of what is going wrong, new treatments may be developed. Also could be useful when measuring the results of potential treatments, with faster results than trial and error. In the further future, these types of materials would be necessary for the development of brain implants that could act to measure the need for medication or brain stimulation adjustments.
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Hopefully this can be used on humans soon. I feel like I would be a great candidate, take me off meds for an hour or two and I become completely endlessly psychotic.
I know for some of us it’s on and off on and off.
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Yep! They’re working in it. Frustratingly slow, but they are working.
"This study is part of a larger collaboration between Cima’s and Graybiel’s labs that also includes efforts to develop injectable drug-delivery devices to treat brain disorders.
“What links all these studies together is we’re trying to find a way to chemically interface with the brain,” Schwerdt says. “If we can communicate chemically with the brain, it makes our treatment or our measurement a lot more focused and selective, and we can better understand what’s going on.”
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The reason I’m losing hope, one of the researchers who discovered this said in the article that it is needed to discover something about learning in mouse models. While that is great for understanding learning, I don’t see how it is leading to progress in Sz treatment for humans.
Anyhow, who knows, there is always a possibility that this new technique will be cheap and effective enough to be widely used by mental illness researchers.
I want it to be used in psychotic humans. Hopefully it will result in a better understanding of psychosis. So far the way we measure psychosis is through using those annoying little checklists. Very ineffective.
Yeah, I get you. But ultimately it’s just a tool like a microscope or CRISPR or a 3D printer, different researchers will use it for different things.
I agree it would be very enlightening to use to model the chemical makeup of a psychotic episode.
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I read someplace that when CRISPR was first developed, they were mostly using it to make better yogurt. Doesn’t seem to be a great use of an amazing technology, but they’ve since moved on to far more exciting things.
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Please, please schizophrenia research labs around the world, please use this technology to tackle sz and cure the disease!
That’s all…
Or at least learn how to treat us perfectly with no side effects. That is a cure in its own right.
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This is so encouraging, thank you for posting it, if this technology can be used to understand negative and cognitive symptoms and devise a treatment it will have destroyed sz.
Hopefully sooner rather than later.
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