Can Stomach Cancer Be Cured | Gastric Cancer Stages

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When people talking about stomach cancer (gastric cancer); ‘Can it be cured -- is it curable?’, ‘What are the stages of the disease’, and ‘What are the current treatments?’ are some of the most frequently asked questions! You might also like to read diagnosis & tests of gastric cancer, before continuing!



This disease can develop and occur in any part of

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How high are you exactly?

Your brain might not be sure.

Spiral stairs at the Vatican (I took this picture)

In a study out last year, Hayman et al., (2011) investigate whether the classic place cells and grid cells of the rat brain also encode vertical height. 

We've discussed place cells before, so read this if you want to get back to the basics. Grid cells are a sort of extension of place cells.  They are cells that fire in a regular pattern over an area while you move around in it. 

 

like this (source)

The red dots represent when the neuron fires and the black line represents the path that the animal (probably a rat) was traversing.  As you can see the neuron fires when the rat reaches any of the points that make up a regular grid.   

But this is just the rat crawling around on a flat surface. What happens if you have the rat move vertically?  Does a vertical grid show up? Hayman et al. tested exactly that by introducing the rats to the exciting world of rock climbing.

Figure 1E Hayman et al., 2011

 

While the rats were climbing around on this rat-sized rock wall, the cells that had fired in a grid pattern on a flat surface actually fired in a striped pattern on the pegboard. 



Figure 2A Hayman et al., 2011



On the left is the cell firing like a normal grid cell on a flat surface, but on the right a grid cell (not the same one) is firing in a striped pattern on the vertical climbing wall.

The authors suggest that this might be just the normal grid showing up but extending along the vertical plane. In other words, each point of the grid includes the space directly above and directly below it and basically forms a grid of columns. 

This finding could mean a number of things:

1. The brain does not encode vertical space very specifically.

2. Vertical space is encoded, just not in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex (where place cells and grid cells reside).

3. A rat's brain doesn't encode vertical space, but maybe brains in other animals (flying animals for example) do.

In a mini review of this paper, Savelli and Knierim (2011), suggest that future experiments on flying mammals known to have grid cells (such as bats) would shed light on the third point. 

Vertical grid cells in 'the flying squirrel'? (source)

I agree and I also wonder if the entorhinal cortex of humans could develop three dimensional grid cells under certain conditions.  Could people who really need to know where they are in vertical space, such as trapeze artists or gymnasts, develop a more specific sense of height?

© TheCellularScale
 

Hayman R, Verriotis MA, Jovalekic A, Fenton AA, & Jeffery KJ (2011). Anisotropic encoding of three-dimensional space by place cells and grid cells. Nature neuroscience, 14 (9), 1182-8 PMID: 21822271

Savelli F, & Knierim JJ (2011). Coming up: in search of the vertical dimension in the brain. Nature neuroscience, 14 (9), 1102-3 PMID: 21878925

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How Can You Get Stomach Cancer - More Facts!

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Gastric cancer or more familiar known /called as ‘stomach cancer’ is one of serious diseases that often diagnosed at later stages, and this is one of the major reasons of why it is very difficult to be treated. And therefore, having adequate knowledge about this disease is very helpful for you and your doctor to catch it earlier. So, how can you get stomach

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More FAQs about Lupus Skin Rash!

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Lupus (a kind of autoimmune disease or also familiar known as ‘chronic inflammatory disease’) can affect any part of your body. Problems associated with skin (changes of skin) are common in most people with lupus. About two-third or 80 percents of patients with this chronic inflammatory disease complain about some types of skin disease (such as lupus skin

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Different Types of Lupus | Complications | Home Remedies

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What are different types of lupus? This chronic inflammatory disease is categorized into a group of autoimmune diseases. It can affect/attack any part of the body and that’s why it can cause many symptoms and complications -- read also lupus symptoms in women and men. And in many cases; kidneys, heart, skin, lungs, brain, joints and blood are some common

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Taste cells in weird parts of your body

Everyone knows that taste and smell are intimately related, but what you might not know is that you have actual 'taste' cells in your nose (the nasal epithelium to be exact). 

Don't drink this way (source).

But before you go try to drink through your nose, read on, the story gets weirder.  These 'taste' cells express the T2R receptor which senses 'bitterness'. However, if you sniff some 'bitter' molecules into your nose, you won't feel like you are tasting bitterness because these cells don't go to the official 'taste' part of the brain.  In fact, they do something even cooler.  I'll let a previously-blogged-about author, Dr. Finger, explain:

"Since the SCCs synapse onto polymodal pain fibers in the trigeminal nerve, activation of the SCCs by bitter ligands evokes trigeminally mediated reflex changes in respiration." (Finger and Kinnamon 2011)

The SCCs are the 'solitary chemosensory cells' which are the 'taste' cells in the nose that I was talking about. And basically what Dr. Finger is saying is that when stimulated, these cells cause you pain and change the rate at which you breath. This is probably because it is not evolutionarily healthy to have something bitter up your nose and you might not want to breath it in deeply. Might be poison. 

If taste cells in the nose isn't weird enough, here is a diagram of all the other strange places in your body where 'taste' cells have been found:


Taste cells in the body Figure 2 (Finger and Kinnamon 2011)

So why do you need taste cells in your stomach? Well these cells don't send signals to the taste center of the brain either, but they do release ghrelin, which is an appetite-inducting peptide.  Since the taste receptors in the stomach have T1R receptors which respond to sweetness and amino acids (glutamate), this could be a signal saying 'yum, this is good stuff, keep eating'.

But why would there be taste cells in the bile duct? 
The authors of this review paper don't have that answer either:

"The composition of fluid in the bile ducts is dictated by secretions of the liver, pancreas, and gall bladder, so why is it necessary to diligently monitor the composition of biliary fluids and they move from gall bladder to intestines?" (Finger and Kinnamon 2011)

The moral of the story: Even though cells in weird parts of the body are shaped like taste cells and have taste receptors on them, they don't necessarily make you feel the feeling of taste, but they might serve other important survival functions.

© TheCellularScale


Finger TE, & Kinnamon SC (2011). Taste isn't just for taste buds anymore. F1000 biology reports, 3 PMID: 21941599

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Common Lupus Symptoms in Women and Men!

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Since lupus is more common in women than in men, it’s reasonable that ‘what are common lupus symptoms in women’ is one of frequently asked questions. In fact, about 90 percent of people with this disease in the U.S are women -- according to a published article on official site of the U.S Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women’s Health! And

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