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Asked by shark fin!!!! to Omur, Maddison, Jimi, Hayley, Chris on 11 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by moizy.
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Omur Tastan answered on 11 Mar 2016:
We have to study brains in great detail and learn how they develop, how they function. So when there is a problem, we know exactly what to target. Once we know our target, we can try and develop treatment for those diseases! 🙂
Like in the lab, I study fruit fly brains, but they are very similar in certain aspects to our own brains. Fly brains are much simple structures compared to human brains and therefore much easier to study. 🙂
Once we find answers to our questions(like a drug/medicine screen) regarding brain diseases in flies, then we try and apply the same logic to higher organisms like mouse or rats. And, if everything looks ok, we can test drugs on humans and start clinical trials and sometimes some of these drugs work really well and can cure some brain diseases or help us slow them down.
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Jimi Wills answered on 11 Mar 2016:
It depends on which disease.
There are degenerative diseases like Alzheimers and Parkinsons. I worked on Parkinsons disease for my PhD… and a lot of the problem seems to be that the brain cells are under chemical stress, and have problems dealing with that.
However, opinions about how this disease happens are still quite different depending on who you ask… treating Parkinsons disease is easy enough in the short-term, but curing it in the long term is very difficult when people still aren’t exactly sure how the disease happens at the early stages.
It’s not possible to dissect a human brain until after the person dies. That’s why people work on animal, e.g. flies. My work was in rats… and we could see that when the rats first showed signed of Parkinsons, there was nothing visibly wrong with the brain (using a microscope). It was only later that the brain cells started to die. I found that lots of proteins involved in chemical stress responses were present in the diseased brain cells but not the healthy ones, which indicates that there’s increased chemical stress. And that’s what I believe is the underlying cause of Parkinsons… but others will tell you something different.
(for anybody who’s interested, I also believe that alpha-synuclein is the medium-term solution, not the cause… and that its job is to mop up and store away the bad chemicals to they can’t hurt the rest of the cells… which is particularly important for “Parkinsons cells” because they make dopamine, and dopamine is a very stressful chemical for a cell!)
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Hayley Moulding answered on 15 Mar 2016:
There are lots of different brain diseases and because of this we need lots of ways to fight the different types of disease. So things like brain cancer can be fought against with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy (using lightsa and chemicals). Other brain diseases like dementia and neurodegenerative disease (which means break down of the brain cells) can be cured or treated using drugs that we can swallow and we might be able to start treating them by replacing bad genes. This is called ‘gene therapy.’ We are still trying to see how this works though and we don’t have a final answer yet. There are lots of was though that could work.
Comments
eastendersluver commented on :
so if our brains fall asleep, would we not know any logic?
Hayley commented on :
OH! Clever! So our brains don’t really every fall asleep. Our brains just go into ‘low activity’ mode compared to during the day. Our brains are still really active when we sleep and are needed to make memories and clean up after a long day in the brain!! We do still know logic when we are asleep. Sleep helps us to be a lot more logical. We need sleep to make us less emotional and to act very logical. It is really important in logic.