The existing approach to brain stimulation for rehabilitation after a stroke does not take into account the diversity of lesions and the individual characteristics of patients’ brains. This was the conclusion made by researchers of the Higher School of Economics and the Max Planck Institute of Cognitive Sciences in their article, ‘Predicting the Response to Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation in Stroke’.
Mobile and web-based applications available today allow patients to self-diagnose and self-prescribe treatment. Galina Polynskaya and Margarita Mesropyan have examined to what extent patients and doctors trust such technology.
Scientists at the Higher School of Economics, the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IBCh RAS), and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center created a genetic model that helps to understand how the body restrains autoimmune and oncological diseases. The researchers published their results in Nature Immunology.
Scientists at the Higher School of Economics and the Russian Academy of Science’s Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology have developed a new methodology for identifying biomarkers (indicators) of both early- and late-stage Parkinson’s disease. Their findings were published in the journal Molecular Neurobiology.
Researchers at the Centre for Bioelectric Interfaces and the Centre for Cognition & Decision Making of the Higher School of Economics utilized electroencephalogram (EEG) and the event-related potential (ERP) technique to study neural activity during simultaneous interpretation of continuous prose. Using event-related potentials as an index of depth of attention to the sounding fragment, the researchers assessed the competition between memory and auditory perception during simultaneous interpretation. The results of the study were published in the journal PLoS ONE.
Scientists of the Higher School of Economics, Indiana University, and École normale supérieure clarified how alcohol influences the dopamine and inhibitory cells in the midbrain that are involved in the reward system and the formation of dependency on addictive drugs. The results of the study were published in the article ‘Dynamical ventral tegmental area circuit mechanisms of alcohol-dependent dopamine release’.
An international group of collaborating scientists that includes HSE Professor Vasily Vlasov has analyzed data from 195 countries on the spread of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia between 1990 and 2016. The results have been published in the journal The Lancet Neurology.
One of the most obvious changes that comes with ageing is that people start doing things more slowly. Numerous studies have shown that ageing also affects language processing. Even neurologically healthy people speak, retrieve words and read more slowly as they get older. But is this slowdown inevitable? Researchers from the Higher School of Economics have been working to answer this question in their article ‘No evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing in sentence processing’.
Researchers from the Higher School of Economics and the Turner Scientific and Research Institute for Children’s Orthopedics have discovered that in children with arthrogryposis, the power of electrical activity in the brain cortex decreases, while its dynamics remains the same as in healthy children. The results of the study were published in the paper ‘Characteristics of electrophysiological activity of the cerebral cortex in children with arthrogryposis’.
Globally, the burden of neurological disorders (Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, stroke, epilepsy etc) has increased substantially over the past 25 years. This problem is the topic of a recent report by the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) international project, which was published in The Lancet. One of its participants is Vasily Vlassov, Professor at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences.
