eWEAR: Revealing how the mouse brain’s reward center responds to deep-brain stimulation
Meeting Reports
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Oct 17, 2022
Many such individuals also struggle with overeating and binge-eating disorders, which can be difficult to manage even with behavioral and pharmacological therapy.
In recent years, deep brain stimulation (DBS) has emerged as a promising treatment for intractable psychiatric conditions, including obsessive compulsive disorder and treatmentresistant depression. In DBS, an electrode is lowered into the patient’s brain to deliver pulses of current directly to a specific brain region.
The promise of deep brain stimulation is that one can modulate activity in spatially-specific brain regions and dysfunctional neural circuits. However, deep brain stimulation’s efficacy is constrained by our limited understandings of both neural circuit function and the neural effects of brain stimulation.
The study in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, authored by a team led by Dr. Robert Malenka and Dr. Boris Heifets in Stanford’s Departments of Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, and Dr. Casey Halpern, now of the University of Pennsylvania, begins to address these shortcomings by recording how brain activity in mice’s “reward center” changes in response to deep brain stimulation [2].
Many such individuals also struggle with overeating and binge-eating disorders, which can be difficult to manage even with behavioral and pharmacological therapy.
In recent years, deep brain stimulation (DBS) has emerged as a promising treatment for intractable psychiatric conditions, including obsessive compulsive disorder and treatmentresistant depression. In DBS, an electrode is lowered into the patient’s brain to deliver pulses of current directly to a specific brain region.
The promise of deep brain stimulation is that one can modulate activity in spatially-specific brain regions and dysfunctional neural circuits. However, deep brain stimulation’s efficacy is constrained by our limited understandings of both neural circuit function and the neural effects of brain stimulation.
The study in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, authored by a team led by Dr. Robert Malenka and Dr. Boris Heifets in Stanford’s Departments of Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, and Dr. Casey Halpern, now of the University of Pennsylvania, begins to address these shortcomings by recording how brain activity in mice’s “reward center” changes in response to deep brain stimulation [2].
