It’s Not Necessarily All about the Delivery in Huntington’s Disease

It’s Not Necessarily All about the Delivery in Huntington’s Disease

Existing models of Huntington's disease posit that deficits in BDNF delivery to the striatum contribute to atrophy and motor impairment. In this issue of Neuron, Plotkin et al. (2014) show that BDNF delivery is normal but downstream signaling via TrkB and p75 is impaired, leading to corticostriatal synaptic dysfunction.

It's Great But Not Necessarily About Attention

I point out that Mack and Rock manipulated both expectation and attention and suggest that their results ('inattentional blindness') may have been caused by lack of expectation rather than lack of attention. This alternative reading of Mack and Rock's results is supported by other findings, which suggest that 'pure' manipulations of expectation produce 'blindness' whereas 'pure' manipulations o...

In heart failure, all beta-blockers are not necessarily equal.

The Carvedilol or Metoprolol European Trial (COMET; Lancet 2003; 362:7-13) found that in patients with heart failure, survival appears to be better with carvedilol than with immediate-release metoprolol tartrate. Whether the target doses used were equivalent (carvedilol 25 mg twice daily vs metoprolol tartrate 50 mg twice daily) has been debated, but the COMET trial shows that drugs in the same...

Gesture Production during Spatial Tasks: Its Not All About Difficulty

Previous research has shown that speakers gesture more when describing imagistic information than when describing nonimagistic information. One explanation for this finding is that spatial information is more difficult to describe verbally than non-spatial information. In the present study, we designed two novel tasks, one verbal and one spatial, in which difficulty and spatiality were not conf...

Applying Bioinfomatics Strategies in Huntingtons Disease Research