Brain research, in many ways, can be regarded a field still in its infancy, making it ripe for the夸张的主张，神话和刻板印象that threaten to discredit the value of real scientific progress. To celebrate Brain Awareness Week and shed light on some of the major recent advances that are set to change lives in the years to come, we called upon our neuroscience and neurology editors for their thoughts in response to the following question: ‘What advancements in the past 2 years do you anticipate will have the biggest impact on people’s lives?’

From see-through brains to personalised medicine in psychiatry, here is a collection of extracts from their responses, serving to highlight the progress and benefits of various areas of brain research, through the eyes of experts in the field.

Evolving technologies in neuroscience

“A new technique calledCLARITY是由Karl Deisseroth和他在斯坦福大学的团队开发的，这使大脑透明，从而有助于理解微电路水平的大脑的显微镜结构…deep brain stimulationhas been shown to be effective in controlling severe forms of depression and Parkinson disease… andgenome studies, combined with iPS干细胞研究, have revealed many genes and molecular mechanisms linked to psychiatric disorders.”

– Bong-Kiun Kaang, co-Editor-in-Chief,Molecular Brain

阅读更多有关how deep brain stimulation may help alleviate depression，阅读我们的研究概要生物群体.

“Without a doubt, the most amazing advancement in behavioural neuroscience in the past two years has been as a result of the work of Karl Deisseroth.Optogenetics, the technique that he developed to study the effects on behaviour of single cell stimulation/inhibition, has revolutionized our thinking and taken our understanding of brain and behaviour to the next level. He and his collaborators have shown that behavioural patterns that are relevant to a range of psychiatric disorders can be controlled by dynamically modulating specific neuronal projections…. Altogether, an outstanding contribution to neuroscience research.”

- 薇薇安·罗素（Vivienne Russell），主编，Behavioral and Brain Functions

“我们认为，大脑研究中最令人兴奋，最有前途和挑衅的进步之一是恢复编码内存集成神经设备(REMIND), a form of brain-machine interface that encodes, predicts and produces patterns of neurological activity for specific memories…The project, funded by the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) offers new hope for individuals with certain types of traumatic brain injuries, stroke, and perhaps forms of neurodegenerative disorders that induce dementia, and also raises neuroethical issues, questions and discourse focusing upon possible ways that such technology can- and should – be employed.”

- 詹姆斯·乔丹诺（James Giordano）和凯文·多诺万（Kevin Donovan）医学中的哲学，伦理和人文科学

The use of biomarkers in diagnosing Alzheimer’s

“It is generally acknowledged that Alzheimer’s disease is an insidious process that has a long silent phase during which pathology builds long before symptoms… Using biomarkers related to brain pathology and biochemistry has enabled a more detailed timeline of preclinical stages of Alzheimer’s disease to be charted…Several amyloid PET ligands have been approved… and will soon enter the clinical arena. Clinical utility studies, although few in number, have all shown that clinical diagnosis and confidence in clinical diagnosis will change by using these new methods.”

- 托德·戈德（Todd Golde），道格·加拉斯科（Doug Galasko）和菲利普·斯克尔滕斯（Philip Scheltens）Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy

有关编辑的观点的完整说明，请阅读我们的特别Biome问答。You can also get to know more about the search for biomarkers in Alzheimer’s disease in ourpodcast道格拉斯Galasko,编辑Peripheral Biomarkers special series, and in our问答与作者Jamie Toombs和Henrik Zetterberg一起在其生物标志物测量研究中发表Alzheimer’s Research & Therapy.

Insights into brain fluids and barriers

“In the field of brain fluids and brain barriers, the most important recent advances and still-advancing areas of research include new methods to deliver drugs through the blood-brain barrier to treat brain tumours and other neurological diseases; a revision and extension of the classical view of fluid circulation within the brain, enabled by new imaging techniques, and leading to revised views on the distribution within and clearance from the central nervous system of endogenous and exogenous substances; and the development of agents to prevent blood-brain barrier dysfunction in neurological disease.”

- Richard Keep and Hazel Jones，主席上的编辑，Fluids and Barriers of the CNS

The ‘prion-like’ spread of neuropathology

“最近鉴定出病毒状病理学的传播是阿尔茨海默氏病和帕金森氏病等多种疾病的共同点，这使神经科学研究领域更加紧密地研究了可能统一临床上不同神经退行性疾病的机制。最近发现，乙酰硫酸盐蛋白聚糖，与肝素非常相似的细胞表面分子，可介导聚集的蛋白质种子的细胞摄取，从而导致传播不同神经退行性疾病的脑病理学的传播。我们认为，这些最新发现为打击各种神经退行性疾病的疾病进展提供了新的机会。”

- Gujun Bu，Huaxi Xu（总编辑）和Henrietta Nielsen（执行编辑），Molecular Neurodegeneration

Lifestyle patterns and neuropathology

“这是越来越认识到neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer´s, Parkinson´s and stroke, are not only determined by unfavorable biology and genetics, but are highly influenced by adverse lifestyle patterns, such as smoking, obesity, low education, and reduced cognitive, physical and social activity. Behavioral, cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying beneficial and detrimental environmental effects on brain pathology represent an attractive focus of recent interdisciplinary research. This is eventually expected to affect prevention and treatment of the most common diseases.”

- 主编Werner Paulus，Acta NeuropathologicaCommunications

有关此新兴概念的更详细概述，请阅读Acta Neuropathologica’s special issue onlifestyle neuropathology.

Focusing on early development in autism

“在过去的几年中，尤其是神经发育障碍，尤其是自闭症的重要研究领域一直是早期发展。最近的发展包括分子遗传学研究，这些研究揭示了遗传期间“自闭症易感性基因”表达的时机。

行为和神经影像学研究开始表明，在相对典型的发展时期，自闭症在生命的头几年中展开。这种行为发展伴随着脑指标的随之变化，观察到

through imaging, electroencephalography (EEG) and event-related potentials (ERP), which are likely to provide insights into brain mechanisms underlying the onset of autistic behaviour as well as specific biomarkers for early detection.”

– Joseph Piven, Editor-in-Chief,Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders

You can continue reading on the latest developments in autism research in our生物群落问答with Joseph Piven.

Personalised medicine in psychiatry

“Should we assess every risk possible?Risk assessmenthas become an important topic in psychiatry and a growing research field in different indications. We do risk assessments for patients at risk of psychosis as we would for those at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. But once we know the risk, how do we inform patients and what impact does it have? A recent article published in theAmerican Journal of Psychiatryfound that those who knew their positive risk status for Alzheimer’s not only judged their memory worse but also performed worse on the objective test in comparison to those who unknowingly had the risk allele. Based on these results, we should carefully revisit and reconsider our future efforts concerning risk assessments.”

– Florian Seemüller, Section Editor,BMC精神病学

“Although several psychological and pharmacological treatment options are available for anxiety disorders, not everyone responds well to each option and finding a good treatment fit can take many months or longer. Recent studies have begun to use structural and functional neuroimaging measures to help predict治疗反应in anxiety disorders. Although the literature is currently small, pre-treatment neuroimaging measures show great promise, and future research will be needed to determine the relative predictive power of neuroimaging measures as compared to clinical and demographic measures.”

– Lisa Shin and Ahmad Hariri, Editors-in-Chief,Biology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders

Find more information on the current challenges and controversies in personalized medicine, take a look at ourBMC Medicine审查还有我们的生物群体podcastwith Claire Barnard and Eric Topol.

改变心理学方向

“I think that the most important change to have happened to psychological research in the past two years is not a theoretical advancement. It’s been the realisation that the field needs to change and improve upon research practices and statistical rigour. Psychology is now leading the way in making reforms to the scientific research and publishing process that will have a huge impact on future research in many areas of science.”

- 副编辑彼得·埃切尔斯（Peter Etchells），BMC心理学

Sex-based differences in neuroscience, neurology and psychiatry

“Greater attention is being paid to the sex of people with neurological and psychiatric disorders. A particular example concerns the increasing and converging lines of evidence showing that Alzheimer’s disease impacts men and women differently. Two-thirds of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease are women; and remain disproportionally prone to Alzheimer’s even after adjusting for their longer life expectancy. Crucially, diverse evidence from brain imaging, post-mortem analyses, hormone therapy, genetics and neuropsychology all converge on the idea that Alzheimer’s disease affects men and women differently. Future assessment of sex-based differences in cognition may be critical in contributing to the diagnosis and treatment of such conditions.”

– Keith Laws, Section Editor,BMC心理学

学习更多关于sex-based differences in cognition and other neuroscience-related topics in our dedicated journal,Biology of Sex Differences.

-This blog post has been prepared and edited by Elizabeth Bal-