News by Subject Medicine & Health

Many people with HIV on antiretroviral therapy (ART) have viral genetic material in the cells of their cerebrospinal fluid, and these individuals are more likely to experience memory and concentration problems, according to a NIAID-funded study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The findings suggest that HIV can persist in the nervous system even when the virus is suppressed in a patient's blood with medication.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have described unique populations of neurons and associated cells in the spinal cords of patients who died of ALS.

HIV DNA remained in the cerebrospinal fluid of half of participants with well-managed HIV (virologic suppression in the plasma), confirming that the central nervous system (CNS) is a major reservoir for latent HIV. Individuals who harbored HIV DNA in the cerebrospinal fluid were more likely than other study participants to experience cognitive deficits on neurocognitive testing.

Blood samples taken over several years from cognitively normal study participants who developed Alzheimer disease were analyzed along with samples from individuals who did not develop the disease to evaluate whether there is an association between neuronal-enriched extracellular vesicle biomarkers (particles shed by all cells and found in blood) and Alzheimer's disease.

A new study has concluded that people who wear a hearing aid for age-related hearing problems maintain better brain function over time than those who do not.

MIT neuroscientists have identified distinctive patterns of neural activity that encode prior beliefs and help the brain make sense of uncertain signals coming from the outside world. For the first time, they showed that prior beliefs exert their effect on behavior by warping the representation of sensory events in the brain.

Even after nearly a decade of strict HIV treatment, cells sheltering the virus could be found in the cerebrospinal fluid of half of participants in a national clinical trial of people living with HIV. Moreover, those participants had higher likelihood of cognitive deficits than their peers without cells harboring HIV in their spinal fluid.

Defective potassium channels involved in pain detection can increase the chance of developing a headache and could be implicated in migraines, according to research in mice published in eNeuro.