This is interesting to me because there is a long history of using pacemaker stimulators in the cerebellum to help manage neurological symptoms from brain injury. It was noted back then that the stimulation improved emotional symptoms and concentration that wasn't supposed to be part of the neurological profile......
"A beautiful, lobular structure," is how Krystal Parker describes the cerebellum - a brain region located at the base of the skull just above the spinal column. The cerebellum is most commonly associated with movement control, but work from Parker's lab and others is gradually revealing a much more complex role in cognition that positions the cerebellum as a potential target for treating diseases that affect thinking, attention, and planning, such as schizophrenia.
A new study from Parker's lab and the lab of Nandakumar Narayanan at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine finds that stimulating the cerebellum in rats with schizophrenia-like thinking problems normalizes brain activity in the frontal cortex and corrects the rats' ability to estimate the passage of time - a cognitive deficit that is characteristic in people with schizophrenia.
"Cerebellar interactions with the frontal cortex in cognitive processes has never been shown before in animal models," says Parker, UI assistant professor of psychiatry and the first faculty hire of the new Iowa Neuroscience Institute. "In addition to showing that the signal travels from the cerebellum to the frontal cortex, the study also showed that normal timing behavior was rescued when the signal was restored."
The UI study, which was published online in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, adds to the accumulating evidence, including recent human studies from Harvard University, that suggests cerebellar stimulation might help improve cognitive problems in patients with schizophrenia.