#microglia

CEPH THE MICROGLIA IS HERE

Nothing will stop her from her duty of protecting the host’s life- She has only one goal and she will achieve it.

More infos about her here

Death Mask

Death has many faces – as well as there being different types of cellular death one, called programmed cell death (apoptosis), can play protector (eradicating faulty cells), sculptor (eg. removing cells to define finger shapes during development), or destroyer. Nerve cell death by apoptosis is well known as a marker of neurodegenerative diseases, such as glaucoma and Alzheimer's. Reaction with a fluorescently-tagged protein called annexin-V has long been used in research to highlight apoptosing cells in samples, and in the early noughties a method was developed to track such cells directly in patient's retinas to identify disease and its progression. Now, however, researchers studying the retina in live mice (pictured), reveal that annexin-V (magenta) can also react with cells that aren't in the process of dying – a population of microglia (a type of immune myeloid cell, all stained green here). So, it appears that more precision is needed when homing in on dying retinal cells – there's a risk they're being obscured by annexin-V-positive myeloid cells.. Written by Lindsey Goff

Image from work by Kiyoharu J. Miyagishima & Francisco M. Nadal-Nicolás, and colleagues

Retinal Neurophysiology Section, National Eye Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Published in in Neural Regeneration Research, 2025

ask me some vocaloid-related questions?

10. Song you've been listening to obsessively lately

has to be SICK by Yuyoyuppe [Spotify] [Youtube] bc after years it's finally gotten an official release! now you may say that's an EP and not a song, but its a 16 minute song to me.

13. Favorite song that came out at least 10 years ago

oh, Meltdown by iroha(sasaki), easy. this is what I say is my favorite vocaloid song, if I have to pick. it's a song that feels like it really utilizes the strengths and character of vocaloid, and this also makes me impossible to please when it comes to covers of the song. EMA's cover is pretty good, though...

17. Favorite cover by a real person

*falls to the floor and coughs out blood* you're making me choose...? my favorite araki cover...?

He is around 201 cm.Even though he's taller than most of the microglia's,he's actually the shortest one in his personal macrophage group

10/1/1989

His scars are blue.However,there is no sign of cyanosis caused by hypoxia

The only person he fears is Ast

Propaganda!

Microglia are a type of glial cell located throughout the brain and spinal cord. As the resident macrophage cells, they act as the first and main form of active immune defense in the central nervous system (CNS).

Excerpts:

Long-haulers with brain fog say that it’s like none of the things that people—including many medical professionals—jeeringly compare it to. It is more profound than the clouded thinking that accompanies hangovers, stress, or fatigue. For Davis, it has been distinct from and worse than her experience with ADHD. It is not psychosomatic, and involves real changes to the structure and chemistry of the brain. It is not a mood disorder: “If anyone is saying that this is due to depression and anxiety, they have no basis for that, and data suggest it might be the other direction,” Joanna Hellmuth, a neurologist at UC San Francisco, told me.

...

For more than a year, she couldn’t read, either, because making sense of a series of words had become too difficult. Angela Meriquez Vázquez told me it once took her two hours to schedule a meeting over email: She’d check her calendar, but the information would slip in the second it took to bring up her inbox. At her worst, she couldn’t unload a dishwasher, because identifying an object, remembering where it should go, and putting it there was too complicated.

...

Robertson, meanwhile, was studying theoretical physics in college when she first got sick, and her fog occluded a career path that was once brightly lit. “I used to sparkle, like I could pull these things together and start to see how the universe works,” she told me. “I’ve never been able to access that sensation again, and I miss it, every day, like an ache.” That loss of identity was as disruptive as the physical aspects of the disease, which “I always thought I could deal with … if I could just think properly,” Robertson said. “This is the thing that’s destabilized me most.”

...

Michelle Monje, a neuro-oncologist at Stanford ... thinks that in most cases the virus harms the brain without directly infecting it. She and her colleagues recently showed that when mice experience mild bouts of COVID, inflammatory chemicals can travel from the lungs to the brain, where they disrupt cells called microglia. Normally, microglia act as groundskeepers, supporting neurons by pruning unnecessary connections and cleaning unwanted debris. When inflamed, their efforts become overenthusiastic and destructive. In their presence, the hippocampus—a region crucial for memory—produces fewer fresh neurons, while many existing neurons lose their insulating coats, so electric signals now course along these cells more slowly. These are the same changes that Monje sees in cancer patients with “chemo fog.” And although she and her team did their COVID experiments in mice, they found high levels of the same inflammatory chemicals in long-haulers with brain fog.

...

Perhaps the most important implication of this emerging science is that brain fog is “potentially reversible,” Monje said. If the symptom was the work of a persistent brain infection, or the mass death of neurons following severe oxygen starvation, it would be hard to undo. But neuroinflammation isn’t destiny. Cancer researchers, for example, have developed drugs that can calm berserk microglia in mice and restore their cognitive abilities; some are being tested in early clinical trials. “I’m hopeful that we’ll find the same to be true in COVID,” she said.

...

“Some people spontaneously recover back to baseline,” Hellmuth told me, “but two and a half years on, a lot of patients I see are no better.” And between these extremes lies perhaps the largest group of long-haulers—those whose brain fog has improved but not vanished, and who can “maintain a relatively normal life, but only after making serious accommodations,”

...

Kristen Tjaden can read again, albeit for short bursts followed by long rests, but hasn’t returned to work. Angela Meriquez Vázquez can work but can’t multitask or process meetings in real time. Julia Moore Vogel, who helps lead a large biomedical research program, can muster enough executive function for her job, but “almost everything else in my life I’ve cut out to make room for that,” she told me. “I only leave the house or socialize once a week.” And she rarely talks about these problems openly because “in my field, your brain is your currency,” she said. “I know my value in many people’s eyes will be diminished by knowing that I have these cognitive challenges.”

...

Many long-haulers try to push themselves back to work and instead “push themselves into a crash,” ... Post-exertional malaise is so common among long-haulers that “exercise as a treatment is inappropriate for people with long COVID,” Putrino said. Even brain-training games—which have questionable value but are often mentioned as potential treatments for brain fog—must be very carefully rationed because mental exertion is physical exertion. People with ME/CFS learned this lesson the hard way, and fought hard to get exercise therapy, once commonly prescribed for the condition, to be removed from official guidance in the U.S. and U.K. They’ve also learned the value of pacing—carefully sensing and managing their energy levels to avoid crashes.

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