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Seeking Relief From Brain Injury, Some Veterans Turn to Psychedelics

By Dave Philipps A van full of U.S. Special Operations veterans crossed the border into Mexico on a sunny day in July to execute a mission that, even to them, sounded pretty far out. Listen to this article with reporter commentary Over a period of 48 hours, they planned to swallow a psychedelic extract from the bark of a West African shrub, fall into a void of dark hallucinations and then have their consciousness shattered by smoking the poison of a desert toad. The objective was to find what they had so far been unable to locate anywhere else: relief from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury symptoms. “It does sound a little extreme, but I’ve tried everything else, and it didn’t work,” said a retired Army Green Beret named Jason, who, like others in the van, asked that his full name not be published because of the stigma associated with using psychedelics. A long combat career exposed to weapons blasts had left him struggling with depression and anger, a frayed memory and addled concentration. He was on the verge of divorce. Recently, he said, he had put a gun to his head. “I don’t know if this will work,” Jason said of psychedelic therapy. “But at this point, I have nothing to lose.” Psychedelic therapy trips like this are increasingly common among military veterans. For years, psychedelic clinics in Mexico were a little-known last-ditch treatment for people struggling with drug addiction. More recently, veterans have found that they also got lasting relief from mental health issues they had struggled with since combat. No one tracks how many veterans seek psychedelic treatment in Mexico. Clinic owners estimate they now treat a few thousand American veterans a year, and say the number is steadily growing. Many of the veterans have free access to the U.S. veterans’ health care system but find standard treatments for combat-related mental health issues to be ineffective. The Department of Veterans Affairs announced this month that, for the first time in more than 50 years, it would fund research into psychedelic therapy. But while the research is conducted, the treatments will remain inaccessible to most veterans, perhaps for years. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29608 - Posted: 12.21.2024

Stress can dull our capacity for joy: mouse brain patterns hint at why

By Max Kozlov Joylessness triggered by stress creates a distinct brain signature, according to research in mice1. The study also reveals one brain pattern that seems to confer resilience to stress — and another that makes stressed animals less likely to feel pleasure, a core symptom of depression. These findings, published today in Nature, offer clues as to how the brain gives rise to anhedonia, a resistance to enjoyment and pleasure. The results also provide a new avenue for treating the condition — if the findings are validated in humans. “Their approach in this study is spot on,” says Conor Liston, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, who was not involved in the work. The experiments fill “a big gap”, he says. “Anhedonia is something we don’t understand very well.” More than 70% of people with severe depression experience anhedonia, which is also common in those with schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological and psychiatric conditions. The symptom is notoriously difficult to treat, even in those taking medication, Liston says. “Anhedonia is something that patients care about the most, and feel like it’s least addressed by current treatments,” he says. To understand how the brain gives rise to anhedonia, Mazen Kheirbek, a systems neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues studied mice that had been placed under stress by exposure to larger, more aggressive mice. Typically, mice have a sweet tooth and prefer sugar water over plain water if given the option. But some stressed mice instead preferred plain water — which Kheirbek and his colleagues interpreted as a rodent version of anhedonia. Other mice subjected to the same stress preferred the sugar water. The authors labelled these animals ‘resilient’. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 29592 - Posted: 12.07.2024

Hypochondria Is a Real and Dangerous Illness, New Research Shows

By Joanne Silberner To describe the destructive effects of intense health anxiety to his young doctors in training at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City, psychiatrist Brian Fallon likes to quote 19th-century English psychiatrist Henry Maudsley: “The sorrow which has no vent in tears may make other organs weep.” That weeping from other parts of the body may come in the form of a headache that, in the mind of its sufferer, is flagging a brain tumor. It may be a rapid heartbeat a person wrongly interprets as a brewing heart attack. The fast beats may be driven by overwhelming, incapacitating anxiety. Hal Rosenbluth, a businessman in the Philadelphia area, says he used to seek medical care for the slightest symptom. In his recent book Hypochondria, he describes chest pains, breathing difficulties and vertigo that came on after he switched from a daily diabetes drug to a weekly one. He ended up going to the hospital by ambulance for blood tests, multiple electrocardiograms, a chest x-ray, a cardiac catheterization and an endoscopy, all of which were normal. Rosenbluth’s worries about glucose levels had led him to push for the new diabetes drug, and its side effects were responsible for many of his cardiac symptoms. His own extreme anxiety had induced doctors to order the extra care. Hypochondria can, in extreme cases, leave people unable to hold down a job or make it impossible for them to leave the house, cook meals, or care for themselves and their families. Recent medical research has shown that hypochondria is as much a real illness as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. This work, scientists hope, will convince doctors who believed the disorder was some kind of character flaw that their patients are truly ill—and in danger. A study published just last year showed that people with hypochondria have higher death rates than similar but nonafflicted people, and the leading nonnatural cause of death was suicide. It was relatively rare, but the heightened risk was clear.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 29567 - Posted: 11.20.2024

No bandage needed: electrical impulses to major nerve help stop bleeding

By Max Kozlov Forget the gauze and bandages: electrical stimulation near the ear might help to reduce bleeding. Researchers hope the technique could one day be used before surgery, childbirth and other events that pose a risk of dangerously uncontrolled bleeding. The treatment, called a ‘neural tourniquet’ by its creators, helps to turbocharge the activity of platelets, which are cell fragments that form blood clots, according to preliminary results presented at the 2024 Society for Neuroscience conference. “Anybody who’s worked in the emergency or operating room knows how gruesome it can be to lose somebody to bleeding,” Jared Huston, a trauma surgeon at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, who co-developed the treatment, tells Nature. “Bleeding can kill you much faster than sepsis.” Bleeding’s heavy toll Haemorrhage, or uncontrolled bleeding, accounts for about 60,000 deaths in the United States each year1. To try to reduce that number, Huston and his colleagues are developing a treatment that targets the vagus nerves, which are large networks of nerve fibres that link the body with the brain. Despite its name, the treatment does not work like a typical tourniquet that blocks blood flow to injured appendages. Instead, the electrical pulses help to stimulate the spleen, which stores about one-third of the body’s platelets. The stimulation prods the spleen to ready platelets to form a clot. To test the treatment, the researchers made small cuts in the ears of healthy pigs2. Compared with animals that didn’t receive the treatment, treated swine lost 50% less blood, and the duration of their bleeding was 40% shorter. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29517 - Posted: 10.16.2024

Teen Girls’ Brains Aged Rapidly During Pandemic

By Ellen Barry A study of adolescent brain development that tested children before and after coronavirus pandemic lockdowns in the United States found that girls’ brains aged far faster than expected, something the researchers attributed to social isolation. The study from the University of Washington, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, measured cortical thinning, a process that starts in either late childhood or early adolescence, as the brain begins to prune redundant synapses and shrink its outer layer. Thinning of the cortex is not necessarily bad; some scientists frame the process as the brain rewiring itself as it matures, increasing its efficiency. But the process is known to accelerate in stressful conditions, and accelerated thinning is correlated with depression and anxiety. Scans taken in 2021, after shutdowns started to lift, showed that both boys and girls had experienced rapid cortical thinning during that period. But the effect was far more notable in girls, whose thinning had accelerated, on average, by 4.2 years ahead of what was expected; the thinning in boys’ brains had accelerated 1.4 years ahead of what was expected. “That is a stunning difference,” said Patricia K. Kuhl, a director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the study’s authors. The results, she added, suggested that “a girl who came in at 11, and then returned to the lab at age 14, now has a brain that looks like an 18-year-old’s.” Dr. Kuhl attributed the change to “social deprivation caused by the pandemic,” which she suggested had hit adolescent girls harder because they are more dependent on social interaction — in particular, talking through problems with friends — as a way to release stress. The difference between the genders “is just as clear as night and day,” Dr. Kuhl said. “In the girls, the effects were all over the brain — all the lobes, both hemispheres.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 13: Memory and Learning; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 29477 - Posted: 09.11.2024

How the stressed-out brain can weaken the immune system

By Sara Reardon Stress can make people feel sick, and bacteria in the gut might be to blame, according to a study1 in mice. The research suggests that a stressed brain directly shuts down specific glands in the gut, affecting gut bacteria and the body’s broader immune system. The study “is a technical tour de force”, says neuroscientist John Cryan at University College Cork in Ireland, who reviewed the study. Most work on the gut–brain connection has focused on how bacteria affect the brain, so Cryan welcomes research into how psychological states can exert ‘top-down’ control of bacteria. “It’s a really cool part of the puzzle”, he says. The research was published on 8 August in Cell. Researchers have long known that the gut and brain ‘talk’ to each other. Under stress, the brain spurs the release of hormones that can trigger gut conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease. And certain bacteria in the gut can release chemical signals that affect the brain and behaviour. Your brain could be controlling how sick you get — and how you recover But the neural communication pathways are less well understood. To find out more, neuroscientist Ivan de Araujo at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, and his colleagues focused on small organs called Brunner’s glands that are found in the walls of the small intestine. Little is known about these glands, other than that they produce mucus and contain numerous neurons. De Araujo’s team found that removing the Brunner’s glands of mice made the animals more susceptible to infection. It also raised markers of inflammation, a flood of immune chemicals and cells that can damage tissues. The team saw a similar effect in humans: people who’d had tumours removed from the part of the gut containing Brunner’s glands had higher levels of white blood cells — a marker of inflammation — than people who’d had tumours removed from other areas. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Three Studies of MDMA Treatment Retracted by Scientific Journal

By Andrew Jacobs The journal Psychopharmacology has retracted three papers about MDMA-assisted therapy based on what the publication said was unethical conduct at one of the study sites where the research took place. Several of the papers’ authors are affiliated with Lykos Therapeutics, the drug company whose application for MDMA-assisted therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder was rejected last week by the Food and Drug Administration. The company said the research in the retracted papers was not part of its application to the F.D.A. In declining to approve Lykos’s application, the agency cited concerns about missing data and problems with the way the company’s study was designed, according to a statement released by Lykos on Friday. The F.D.A. has asked Lykos to conduct an additional clinical trial of its MDMA-assisted therapy, which would have been the first psychedelic medicine to win approval by federal regulators. Lykos has said it would appeal the decision. The journal retraction was first reported by Stat, the health and medical news website. On Sunday, Lykos said that it disagreed with Psychopharmacology’s decision and that it would file an official complaint with the Committee on Publication Ethics, a nonprofit that sets guidelines for academic publications. “The articles remain scientifically sound and present important contributions to the study of potential treatments for PTSD,” the company said in the statement. The incident cited by Psychopharmacology has been well documented. © 2024 The New York Times Company

J. Robin Warren, Who Proved That Bacteria Cause Ulcers, Dies at 87

By Michael S. Rosenwald Dr. J. Robin Warren, an Australian pathologist who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering that most stomach ulcers were caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori — and not, as had been widely believed, stress, alcohol or spicy foods — died on July 23 in Inglewood, Australia. He was 87. His death, at a care home, was announced by the University of Western Australia in Perth, where he was an emeritus professor for many years. His daughter-in-law Gigi Warren said the cause was complications after a recent fall. In 1984, Dr. Warren and his collaborator, the gastroenterologist Barry Marshall, published a paper in the British medical journal The Lancet describing their finding that the spiral-shaped bacterium now commonly called H. pylori festered in the stomachs of patients with ulcers and gastritis. Dr. Warren had first noticed the bacterium on a gastric biopsy sample in 1979. The paper’s conclusion upended centuries of conventional wisdom about the cause of ulcers. (Psychoanalysts had even written of the “peptic ulcer personality.”) Doctors typically prescribed stress reduction, a bland diet and, starting in 1977, drugs like Tagamet and Zantac to tame the burning acids. Severe cases were sometimes treated with surgery. When the study was published, gastroenterologists were skeptical. They expressed concern about whether to trust potentially paradigm-shifting findings made by two unknown researchers in Australia. And the idea that bacteria could even grow in the stomach was considered blasphemy. “For about 100 years, or 1,000 years, the standard teaching in medicine was that the stomach was sterile and nothing grew there because of corrosive gastric juices,” Dr. Warren told The New York Times in 2005 after he and Dr. Marshall won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. “So everybody believed there were no bacteria in the stomach. When I said they were there, no one believed it.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29425 - Posted: 08.11.2024

Psychedelic drugs have great therapeutic benefit – if understood on their own terms

Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugiani Earlier this month, an advisory panel rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, possibly dooming US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the drug commonly called ecstasy. In a public meeting alongside FDA staff, panel members said that the research neither adequately accounted for abuse risks nor proved the drug’s efficacy in combination with psychotherapy. This decision dealt a major blow to Lykos Therapeutics, the for-profit public benefit corporation of the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), which sponsored the trials. More broadly, the rejection has been described as a drastic setback for the psychedelic movement as a whole. For several years now, it seemed that greater acceptance and new legal spaces for psychedelics were a certainty. Then, scientists appeared at the FDA hearing and everything went dark. As practitioners and leaders in the realm of human transformation, and in creating and running organizations that serve individuals experiencing complex psychiatric symptoms, we believe in psychedelics as a force for good. Yet, to us, this FDA decision is the natural and expected outcome of a basic and fatal conceptual error that our brothers and sisters in the movement have adopted. By joining larger trends within the behavioral health milieu that focus on the elimination of distinct symptoms by drugs and by expert-driven techniques, today’s psychedelic movement is teetering on the edge of becoming unpsychedelic. What do we mean by this? Psychedelics free our minds to novelty, liberating us from habitual patterns. The common term for this property is “brain plasticity”, and it may be the core reason these substances can also affect areas of psychological suffering related to habits of the mind – those that experienced psychiatrists label as depression, anxiety, addiction and, yes, PTSD. Psychedelics are pro-imagination, pro-creativity, pro-innovation – qualities that research shows are at the very root of personal growth. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 29424 - Posted: 08.11.2024

Bird flu has been invading the brains of mammals. Here’s why

By Erin Garcia de Jesús In spring 2022, a handful of red foxes in Wisconsin were behaving oddly. Veterinary pathologist Betsy Elsmo learned that a local wildlife rehabilitation center was caring for foxes with neurological symptoms like seizures, tremors, uncoordinated movements and lethargy. But tests for common pathogens like canine distemper virus and rabies that typically cause the symptoms came back negative. Then a red fox kit tested positive for influenza A. This group of viruses includes seasonal flus that cause respiratory disease in people and many other strains that commonly circulate among animals such as waterfowl and other birds. “I was surprised,” says Elsmo, of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “And to be honest, at first I kind of wrote it off.” That is, until a veterinary technician at the rehab center sent Elsmo a study describing cases of avian influenza in red foxes in the Netherlands. Examinations of the Wisconsin kit’s tissues under the microscope revealed lesions in the brain, lung and heart that matched what had been seen in the Netherlands animals. “And I thought, I think it is [bird flu],” she recalls. Additional testing confirmed the diagnosis in the kit and the other foxes, Elsmo and colleagues reported in the December 2023 Emerging Infectious Diseases. The animals had contracted a lethal strain of H5N1 avian influenza that emerged in late 2020 in Europe and has since spread around the world. At the time infections were discovered in the Wisconsin red foxes, bird flu was expanding its incursion into North America. Since H5N1 arrived on North American shores in December 2021, it has infected animals as wide-ranging as polar bears, skunks, sea lions, bottlenosed dolphins and cows (SN: 7/8/24). And one unwelcome revelation of the ongoing outbreak is the virus’s propensity to invade the brains of myriad mammals. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Can Psychedelics Improve Mental Health?

By Janna Levin During traumatic periods and their aftermath, our brains can fall into habitual ways of thinking that may be helpful in the short run but become maladaptive years later. For the brain to readjust to new situations later in life, it needs to be restored to the malleable state it was in when the habits first formed. That is exactly what Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist and psychiatric researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, is working toward in her lab. What is her surprising tool? Psychedelics. JANNA LEVIN: Welcome to “The Joy of Why.” This is Janna Levin. On June 4th, an advisory panel for the Federal Drug Administration recommended against approving the use of the psychedelic drug MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Various concerns, some about safety, overshadowed the demonstrable value of the drug in the opinion of the panel. The path to approval for drug therapies is notoriously fraught with profound complexities, a high bar on proof in clinical trials, the medical injunction to “do no harm,” as well as social and political nuances. But, what’s the fundamental neuroscience behind the news story? Why are so many psychiatric researchers enthusiastic about the promise of psychedelics? We happened to take on this subject a few weeks ago with neuroscientist Gül Dölen. Here is that episode. New drug leads can come from practically anywhere. Penicillin’s discovery was spurred from mold spores that accidentally landed in a petri dish. Cancer treatments can be dredged from the bottom of the sea. And synthetic antibodies can now be engineered from scratch. But there’s a class of drugs that mainstream medicine has generally overlooked that could prove life-changing for many people facing addiction, depression, post-traumatic stress — if scientists embrace the potential power of psychedelics. © 2024 the Simons Foundation.

PTSD Has Surged Among College Students

By Ellen Barry Post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses among college students more than doubled between 2017 and 2022, climbing most sharply as the coronavirus pandemic shut down campuses and upended young adults’ lives, according to new research published on Thursday. The prevalence of PTSD rose to 7.5 percent from 3.4 percent during that period, according to the findings. Researchers analyzed responses from more than 390,000 participants in the Healthy Minds Study, an annual web-based survey. “The magnitude of this rise is indeed shocking,” said Yusen Zhai, the paper’s lead author, who heads the community counseling clinic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. His clinic had seen more young people struggling in the aftermath of traumatic events. So he expected an increase, but not such a large one. Dr. Zhai, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Studies, attributed the rise to “broader societal stressors” on college students, such as campus shootings, social unrest and the sudden loss of loved ones from the coronavirus. PTSD is a mental health disorder characterized by intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and heightened sensitivity to reminders of an event, continuing more than a month after it occurs. It is a relatively common disorder, with an estimated 5 percent of adults in the United States experiencing it in any given year, according to the most recent epidemiological survey conducted by the Department of Health and Human Services. Lifetime prevalence is 8 percent in women and 4 percent in men, the survey found. The new research also found a sharp rise in the prevalence of a similar condition, acute stress disorder, which is diagnosed less than a month after a trauma. Diagnoses rose to 0.7 percent among college students in 2022, up from 0.2 percent five years earlier. Use of mental health care increased nationally during the pandemic, as teletherapy made it far easier to see clinicians. Treatment for anxiety disorders increased most steeply, followed by PTSD, bipolar disorder and depression, according to economists who analyzed more than 1.5 million insurance claims for clinician visits between 2020 and 2022. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29350 - Posted: 06.08.2024

F.D.A. Panel Rejects MDMA-Aided Therapy for PTSD

By Andrew Jacobs An independent advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration rejected the use of MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder on Tuesday, highlighting the unparalleled regulatory challenges of a novel therapy using the drug commonly known as Ecstasy. Before the vote, members of the panel raised concerns about the designs of the two studies submitted by the drug’s sponsor, Lykos Therapeutics. Many questions focused on the fact that study participants were by and large able to correctly guess whether they had been given MDMA, also known by the names of Ecstasy or molly. The panel voted 9-2 on whether the MDMA-assisted therapy was effective, and voted 10-1 on whether the proposed treatment’s benefits outweighed its risks. Other panelists expressed concerns over the drug’s potential cardiovascular effects, and possible bias among the therapists and facilitators who guided the sessions and may have positively influenced patient outcomes. A case of misconduct involving a patient and therapist in the study also weighed on some panelists’ minds. Many of the committee members said they were especially worried about the failure of Lykos to collect detailed data from participants on the potential for abuse of a drug that generates feelings of bliss and well-being. “I absolutely agree that we need new and better treatments for PTSD,” said Paul Holtzheimer, deputy director for research at the National Center for PTSD, a panelist who voted no on the question of whether the benefits of MDMA-therapy outweighed the risks. “However, I also note that premature introduction of a treatment can actually stifle development, stifle implementation and lead to premature adoption of treatments that are either not completely known to be safe, not fully effective or not being used at their optimal efficacy,” he added. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29343 - Posted: 06.06.2024

Exercise Helps Your Brain as Much as Your Body

By J. David Creswell Let’s start thinking differently about exercise. Decades of exercise science research show that when people or animals are given a new exercise routine, they get healthier. But when thinking about the benefits of exercise, most people hold a strong body bias; they focus on how regular exercise builds more lean body mass, helps increase their strength and balance, or improves heart health. Exercise matters even more for our brains, it turns out, in ways that are often overlooked. Here’s how we know. Animal exercise studies typically run rats for weeks on running wheels. The animals gleefully run every night, sprinting several miles over the course of an evening. There are wonderful health benefits in these studies of voluntary running—improved muscle tone and cardiovascular health, and many brain benefits too. But in some studies, there’s an additional experimental condition where some rats exercise with one crucial difference: it’s no longer voluntary exercise. Instead of a freestanding running wheel, rats run on a mechanized wheel that spins, forcing the animals to cover the same distance as the voluntary runners. What happens? When the rats are forced to exercise on a daily basis for several weeks, their bodies become more physically fit, but their brains suffer. Animals regularly forced to exercise have the equivalent of an anxiety disorder, behaving on new tasks in highly anxious and avoidant ways. These animals are more anxious not only compared to the voluntary runners, but also to animals that are not given an opportunity to exercise at all. Yes, forced exercise might be worse than no exercise at all. This work suggests something important about the health benefits of exercise: it is not just about making our muscles work, but what exercise does to our brains. When exercise gives us a sense of control, mastery and joy, our brains become less anxious. If we take that away, by forcing exercise, we can shift it from helpful to harmful. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 29284 - Posted: 05.02.2024

New look at lampreys rewrites textbooks on origins of sympathetic nervous system

By Shaena Montanari The sympathetic nervous system may have originated in jawless fish—not tens of millions of years later as previously thought, according to a study published today in Nature. Anatomical work dating back to the 19th century suggested that the sympathetic nervous system was present only in jawed vertebrates. Yet the sea lamprey, the new findings reveal, sports clusters of sympathetic neurons along its trunk and expresses several genes involved in the “fight-or-flight” system, the response that kicks into gear when an animal perceives a threat. “Whenever new research causes troves of textbooks to need corrections, that’s always surprising,” says Tyler Square, assistant professor of molecular genetics at the University of Florida, who was not involved in the study. The team behind the new work decided to re-examine conventional wisdom after a postdoctoral researcher in the lab produced microscopy images of lamprey embryos stained for neurons in the animals’ gut. The stain highlighted some “small sort of concentrations of cells” that looked a lot like sympathetic neurons, recalls lead investigator Marianne Bronner, professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology. “I said, ‘Oh, those shouldn’t be there.’ So then we decided to delve deeper into it.” The unexpected neurons express several key genes—specifically ASCL1, PHOX2 and HAND—involved in the sympathoadrenal system, the team discovered using a suite of techniques, including immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridization chain reaction and RNA sequencing. These are “all transcription factors that are known to be important in sympathetic neuron differentiation in mammals,” Bronner says. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29270 - Posted: 04.26.2024

Why loneliness is bad for your health

By Saima May Sidik In 2010, Theresa Chaklos was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia — the first in a series of ailments that she has had to deal with since. She’d always been an independent person, living alone and supporting herself as a family-law facilitator in the Washington DC court system. But after illness hit, her independence turned into loneliness. Loneliness, in turn, exacerbated Chaklos’s physical condition. “I dropped 15 pounds in less than a week because I wasn’t eating,” she says. “I was so miserable, I just would not get up.” Fortunately a co-worker convinced her to ask her friends to help out, and her mood began to lift. “It’s a great feeling” to know that other people are willing to show up, she says. Many people can’t break out of a bout of loneliness so easily. And when acute loneliness becomes chronic, the health effects can be far-reaching. Chronic loneliness can be as detrimental as obesity, physical inactivity and smoking according to a report by Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general. Depression, dementia, cardiovascular disease1 and even early death2 have all been linked to the condition. Worldwide, around one-quarter of adults feel very or fairly lonely, according to a 2023 poll conducted by the social-media firm Meta, the polling company Gallup and a group of academic advisers (see go.nature.com/48xhu3p). That same year, the World Health Organization launched a campaign to address loneliness, which it called a “pressing health threat”. But why does feeling alone lead to poor health? Over the past few years, scientists have begun to reveal the neural mechanisms that cause the human body to unravel when social needs go unmet. The field “seems to be expanding quite significantly”, says cognitive neuroscientist Nathan Spreng at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. And although the picture is far from complete, early results suggest that loneliness might alter many aspects of the brain, from its volume to the connections between neurons.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 29245 - Posted: 04.06.2024

Experiencing racism may physically change your brain

Jon Hamilton Scientists know that Black people are at a greater risk for health problems like heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's disease than white people. A growing body of research shows that racism in health care and in daily life contributes to these long-standing health disparities for Black communities. Now, some researchers are asking whether part of the explanation involves how racism, across individual interactions and systems, may physically alter the brain. "That could be behaviors like, let's say, a woman clutching her purse as a black man is walking next to her. Or they could be verbal, like someone saying, like... 'I didn't expect you to be so articulate,'" says Negar Fani, a clinical neuroscientist at Emory University who studies people experiencing Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Recently, Fani has collaborated with Nate Harnett, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, to study how the brain responds to traumatic events and extreme stress, including the events and stress related to racism. So how does one go about measuring the impact of zoomed out, societal-scale issues on the individual? Harnett is the first to admit, it's not the simplest task. "It's very difficult for neuroimaging to look specifically at redlining," notes Harnett. But he can—indirectly. For example, Harnett has used inequities in neighborhood resources as a way of tracking or measuring structural racism. "We're able to look at these sort of proxy measures in these outcomes of structural racism and then correlate those with both brain and behavioral responses to stress or trauma and see how they tie with different psychiatric disorders like PTSD," Harnett says. In other research, Harnett and Fani have looked at correlations between racial discrimination and the response to threat in Black women who had experienced trauma. Fani says patients who experience PTSD tend to be more vigilant or show hyperarousal and be startled easily. Fani says their bodies are in a constant state of fight or flight—even when they're in a safe situation. But in patients who've also experienced racial discrimination, Fani says she sees the opposite effect: They show an increased activation in areas related to emotion regulation. In some ways, Fani says this activation can be adaptive. For example, people may experience microaggressions or discrimination at work and need to regulate their emotional response in order to get through the moment. But when people have to utilize this strategy over long periods of time, Fani and Harnett think it may contribute to the degradation they've seen in other areas in the brain. © 2024 npr

Potent psychedelic drug banishes PTSD, small study finds

By Max Kozlov Shredded iboga root, the main ingredient in the psychedelic drug ibogaine, is prepared for use in a traditional ceremony in Gabon.Credit: Rachel Nuwer Psychedelic drugs such as MDMA and psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms, have promised to revolutionize psychiatric treatments. Now, a small trial in military veterans suggests that a lesser-known, potent psychedelic drug called ibogaine could be used to treat traumatic brain injury (TBI). One month after ibogaine treatment, the veterans reported that TBI symptoms such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression had decreased by more than 80%, on average1. “The drug seems to have a broad, dramatic and consistent effect,” says Nolan Williams, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California and a co-author of the study. The results of the trial, which did not include a control group, are published today in Nature Medicine. These data support launching rigorous trials to test the drug, says Alan Davis, a clinical psychologist at the Ohio State University in Columbus. However, they note that MDMA and psilocybin, which are already in late-stage trials, will be “much better candidates for meeting the needs of this community”. Ibogaine will require years of study to determine its efficacy and safety, Davis says. Warfare’s lasting effects Ibogaine is made from the bark of a shrub (Tabernanthe iboga) native to Central Africa, where it is used for ceremonial purposes. Researchers have tended to shy away from exploring the use of ibogaine for the treatment of conditions other than opioid dependence and withdrawal2, because it is tightly regulated in many countries and can cause fatal heartbeat irregularities, says Maria Steenkamp, a clinical psychologist who studies PTSD in veterans at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City. But the available therapies for PTSD and other conditions don’t help everybody, Steenkamp says. “We are desperately in need of new interventions.” © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

New Era of Psychedelics in Oregon

By Mike Baker In a carpeted office suite, Alex Beck settled onto a mattress and, under the watch of a trained guide, began chomping through a handful of “Pumpkin Hillbilly” mushrooms. A Marine Corps veteran who was sexually assaulted during his time in the armed forces, Mr. Beck had long been searching unsuccessfully for a way to put those nightmarish years behind him. Now he was ready for a different kind of journey, a psychedelic trip through the nether regions of his own mind. As he felt his thoughts starting to spin, his “facilitator,” Josh Goldstein, urged him to surrender and let the mushrooms guide him. “It’s like the idea of planting a seed and then letting it go,” he said. Stigmatized in law and medicine for the past half-century, psychedelics are in the midst of a sudden revival, with a growing body of research suggesting that the mind-altering compounds could upend psychiatric care. Governments in several places have cautiously started to open access, and as Oregon voters approved a broad drug decriminalization plan in 2020, they also backed an initiative to allow the use of mushrooms as therapy. This summer, the state debuted a first-of-its-kind legal market for psilocybin mushrooms, more widely known as magic mushrooms. Far from the days of illicit consumption in basements and vans, the program allows people to embark on a therapeutic trip, purchasing mushrooms produced by a state-approved grower and consuming them in a licensed facility under the guidance of a certified facilitator. Mr. Beck, 30, was one of the first clients at a facility in the central Oregon city of Bend that began conducting sessions this summer in a building that on other days of the week offers chiropractic services. In his youth, Mr. Beck had experimented with psychedelics for recreation. But as he struggled with his lingering post-traumatic stress in adulthood, he learned about what seemed to be promising new research into plant-based psychedelics for mental health issues that did not respond to other treatments. He wondered if they could help him clear his head from the horrors of the past. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Can MDMA Therapy Ease the World’s Traumas? Critics Aren’t Sure.

By Jonathan Moens When the war in Ukraine broke out, many countries and agencies around the world lent their support in the form of financial aid, weapons, and food. But Olga Chernoloz, a Ukrainian neuroscientist based in Canada, wanted to provide a different kind of assistance: a combination of therapy and the psychedelic drug MDMA. Such therapy, she said, could help countless people on the ground who are suffering from psychological trauma. “I thought that the most efficacious way I could be of help,” she told Undark, “would be to bring psychedelic-assisted therapy to Ukraine.” Chernoloz’s confidence stems in part from the results of clinical trials on MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in vulnerable populations, which suggest that such treatments may improve symptoms, or do away with them altogether. But the approach is experimental and has not yet cleared major regulatory hurdles in Canada, Europe, or the United States. Still, Chernoloz, who is a professor at the University of Ottawa, plans on carrying out clinical trials with Ukrainian refugees in a psychedelic center in the Netherlands in early 2024. This month, Chernoloz and her colleagues organized an education session for 20 Ukrainian therapists to learn about MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, one of the most influential organizations dedicated to education and promotion of psychedelic drugs.

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