The Tohoku University team wanted to find out if whole-brain rather than focused LIPUS is effective in treating mouse models of dementia, and if it was, what was happening at the molecular levels to achieve this. Focusing LIPUS treatment on a region in the brain called the hippocampus, which is involved in memory, has also been found to improve dementia in mice, but the details of how it does this need to be more fully investigated. Other studies have reported that LIPUS increases the production of proteins involved in nerve cell survival and growth, in addition to a role in promoting nerve regeneration. Shimokawa and his team had conducted previous studies showing that LIPUS improved blood vessel formation in pigs with myocardial ischemia, a condition where there is reduced blood flow to the heart.
This limits the types of drugs and cell therapies that could be made available to treat dementia. Also, the cells lining the brain's blood vessels are tightly packed, forming a blood-brain barrier that prevents large molecules from crossing into the brain tissue.
But there are currently no curative treatments available for vascular dementia or Alzheimer's disease, the most common causes of dementia.
"The LIPUS therapy is a non-invasive physiotherapy that could apply to high-risk elderly patients without the need for surgery or anaesthesia, and could be used repeatedly," says Shimokawa.ĭementia affects about 50 million people worldwide, with 10 million new cases occurring every year. The team, led by cardiologist Hiroaki Shimokawa, found that applying low-intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS) to the whole brain of the mice improved blood vessel formation and nerve cell regeneration without having obvious side effects.
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