Researchers discover a new neural pathway in the brain

This finding may have implications for the treatment of, among other things, facial pain

. Researchers at the Radboud University Medical Center have discovered imaging techniques discovering a new neural pathway in the brain. This discovery could have consequences on the treatment, among others, facial pain.

In 2016, researcher Dylan Henssen of Radboudumc's Department of Anatomy and Neurosurgery wrote an article in which he first spoke of the possible existence of this neural pathway. This was based on their research in patients with facial pain. When stimulating certain parts of the brain, they had the idea that there should be a nerve connection not only to the right, but also to the left branch. But this relationship had never seen or described anyone.

Henssen: "We had this idea because we saw that some patients with nerve pains responded less well to treatment in the brain than others." In the human brain literature, we do not have the same problem. We have not found anything about this, but we have seen that, in different animal species, such a left-right branch had already been described, for example in mice, rats and frogs, and in different species of monkeys. a stimulant to continue our search for possible ramifications in the human brain. "

Forgetting the Exit
With the help of powerful MRI scanners and special microscopic research, the brains of deceased people were successfully . to demonstrate the new neural pathway. The nerve path is a cleavage of the facial nerve in the brainstem. "It's the nerve that can afflict patients with facial pain," Henssen said. "By scrutinizing the deceased's brainstem and then examining it under the microscope, we found that there were two splits instead of one split."

The fact that the researchers have never seen it before is mainly due to the use of a unique microscopy technique that helps Henssen and his colleagues better visualize and understand the brain's construction . This technique, polarized light imaging (PLI), uses polarized light to show patterns in brain tissue that can not be seen with normal microscopes

Special Discovery
The PLI was developed in German. Radboudumc's anatomy department is the only one in the Netherlands to have a PLI as Van Cappellen van Walsum's research group is working with Oxford, where the PLI has been working for some time. Henssen mastered and applied the technique to Jülich and, together with the German researchers, the Nijmegen researchers came to this conclusion.

Henssen: "This is a very special discovery because we have not created new nervous jobs for a hundred years, people's brains have discovered more, but also, because I hope this discovery will provide better treatment to patients with facial pain. " Henssen is very cautious about this last point: "We are working on follow-up experiments, but I can say very little about the results: Pain is not one of the scientific or political priorities, but fortunately, we are lending more and more to it. of attention. "