Measuring the activity of the brain can tell researchers a lot about how a healthy brain functions, as well as when the functioning is disrupted, whether by psychiatric disorders like depression or schizophrenia, or neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. The tools that scientists use to measure and track that brain activity, such as fMRI and EEG, are already quite sophisticated. But more precise tools that take different kinds of measurements could help researchers learn new information about the brain.
The debilitating effects of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, ALS, and Huntington's, are due to the loss of or damage to many cells in the brain. Treatments for these diseases can slow their onset, but as of yet, they can't reverse or cure this damage. In the past, scientists have tried to do so by injecting individual neurons into the brain's of animal models of these diseases to replace those that had been destroyed. But the individual cells usually didn't survive, so they offered no benefit.
Neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or Creutzfeld-Jacobs are tough to diagnose. Outward symptoms can obviously be an indicator, but symptoms for many neuro-disorders overlap while protein biomarkers for each illness, called amyloids, are difficult to distinguish between. But researchers at UCSD are developing a new diagnostic tool that could soon let doctors diagnose a patient's neuro-degenerative condition simply by gazing into his or her eyes.
