{"id":706,"date":"2003-05-20T03:26:42","date_gmt":"2003-05-20T03:26:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=706"},"modified":"2011-05-01T18:34:50","modified_gmt":"2011-05-01T23:34:50","slug":"making-old-brains-young-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=706","title":{"rendered":"making old brains young again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Perhaps it&#8217;s not the fountain of youth just yet,  but a team of neuroscientists has found a way to reverse an age-related  change in really old monkeys. Visual function is known to decline with  age: the elderly just don&#8217;t do as well as youngsters in discriminating  shapes and orientation. However, in the May 2 <em>Science,<\/em> Audie  Leventhal  of the University of Utah School of Medicine and his colleagues report  that they&#8217;ve been able to reverse that decline in vision. By applying  tiny amounts of the neurotransmitter known as GABA to the brains of  30-year-old macaque monkeys (equivalent to 90-year-old humans), they  were able to restore the monkeys&#8217; ability to distinguish the orientation  of lines and the direction of moving objects. Leventhal suggests that  neurons in old monkeys lose their &#8220;pickiness&#8221; and fire indiscriminately  due to an age-related decline in GABA, which appears to help neurons  stay selective, allowing the brain to function at its peak. When  Leventhal blocked GABA in the brains of young monkeys, the neurons lost  their orientation and direction selectivity, in effect aging the animals  20 years. <\/span><\/p>\n<h6><em>This news brief appeared in the Random Data column of the <\/em>Boston Globe&#8217;s<em> Health\/Science section on 5\/20\/2003.<\/em><\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps it&#8217;s not the fountain of youth just yet, but a team of neuroscientists has found a way to reverse an age-related change in really old monkeys. Visual function is known to decline with age: the elderly just don&#8217;t do &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/?p=706\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-globe-3","category-news-briefs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=706"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1194,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions\/1194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agnieszkabiskup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}