Nicola Davis Science correspondent Researchers have discovered a genetic variant that appears to influence the speed at which multiple sclerosis (MS) progresses, potentially paving the way for new treatments. According to the MS International Federation, about 2.9 million people worldwide have MS, a condition in which the insulating coating of the nerves in the brain and spinal cord is damaged by the immune system. The nerve fibres themselves can also become damaged. While some people have a relapsing remitting form of the disease, others experience gradual progression that in some can cause severe disability. Researchers say they have identified a genetic variant that appears to increase the severity of the disease. They found that people who inherit the variant from both parents need a walking aid almost four years sooner than those without. “This is a very substantial effect for a single genetic variant,” said Sergio Baranzini, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco and co-senior author of the study. “Furthermore, this variant affects genes that are active in the central nervous system, a clear contrast to variants that confer risk [of MS], which overwhelmingly affect the immune system.” The study, published in the journal Nature, was an international endeavour, involving 70 institutions around the world. To make their discovery, the team analysed genetic data from more than 12,000 people with MS, screening more than 7m genetic variants for associations with the speed of disease progression. The team found that one variant, nestled between two genes called DYSF and ZNF638, was associated with a more rapid increase in disability. © 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 28840 - Posted: 07.01.2023

By Carl Zimmer On a muggy June night in Greenwich Village, more than 800 neuroscientists, philosophers and curious members of the public packed into an auditorium. They came for the first results of an ambitious investigation into a profound question: What is consciousness? To kick things off, two friends — David Chalmers, a philosopher, and Christof Koch, a neuroscientist — took the stage to recall an old bet. In June 1998, they had gone to a conference in Bremen, Germany, and ended up talking late one night at a local bar about the nature of consciousness. For years, Dr. Koch had collaborated with Francis Crick, a biologist who shared a Nobel Prize for uncovering the structure of DNA, on a quest for what they called the “neural correlate of consciousness.” They believed that every conscious experience we have — gazing at a painting, for example — is associated with the activity of certain neurons essential for the awareness that comes with it. Dr. Chalmers liked the concept, but he was skeptical that they could find such a neural marker any time soon. Scientists still had too much to learn about consciousness and the brain, he figured, before they could have a reasonable hope of finding it. Dr. Koch wagered his friend that scientists would find a neural correlate of consciousness within 25 years. Dr. Chalmers took the bet. The prize would be a few bottles of fine wine. Recalling the bet from the auditorium stage, Dr. Koch admitted that it had been fueled by drinks and enthusiasm. “When you’re young, you’ve got to believe things will be simple,” he said. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 28839 - Posted: 07.01.2023

By Claudia Lopez Lloreda There are plenty of reasons to get off your duff and exercise—but is improving your brain one of them? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention touts exercise as a way to “boost brain health,” while the World Health Organization suggests that about 2 hours of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week can help improve thinking and memory skills. But new research reveals a more complex picture. One recent review of the literature suggests the studies tying exercise to brain health may have important limitations, including small sample sizes. Other studies suggest there is no one-size-fits-all approach to exercising as a way to boost cognition or prevent age-related cognitive decline. Still others indicate exercise may actually be harmful in people with certain medical conditions. Here’s the latest on what we know. What is the science linking exercise and improved brain function? Many studies correlate participants’ self-reported exercise with scores on cognitive tests, or track the effects of randomizing participants into groups that either exercise or remain sedentary. They typically find that the more physical activity a person does, the better their cognition. This result holds for healthy people, stroke survivors, and those with other neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease. A study published earlier this year relied on genetic data to explore the effects of exercise. A team led by sports scientist Boris Cheval at the University of Geneva grouped about 350,000 people in the United Kingdom according to genetic variants associated with more or less physical activity. Those with an apparent genetic predisposition to be more active also tended to perform better on a set of cognitive tests, the researchers concluded in Scientific Reports. Other studies have focused on age-related cognitive decline. Research published in February in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry tracked more than 1400 people for 30 years, showing that more physical activity was associated with better cognitive performance at age 69.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Alzheimers
Link ID: 28838 - Posted: 07.01.2023

Juana Summers On a recent crisp June night, as the Chicago Cubs prepare to take on the Pittsburgh Pirates, fans dressed in blue pack Wrigley Stadium's famous bleachers. Sitting in his wheelchair, 42-year-old Brian Wallach looks out over the park, rooting for a very particular outcome that has nothing to do with baseball. He has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — sometimes referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease, named for the baseball legend once dubbed the "iron horse" because of his durability, before the disease took his life. At the gates of the stadium, ballpark staff hand out bright blue T-shirts with the Cubs logo and the words, "End ALS for Lou." The night is part of a growing movement to highlight ALS and spread awareness of the toll it has wrought on people. Wallach and his wife Sandra Abrevaya watch a Cubs game at Wrigley Field in June. Jamie Kelter Davis for NPR For Wallach, a former assistant U.S. attorney who once worked for Barack Obama, his specialty is turning that goodwill into action in the ALS community, the halls of Congress and the Oval Office. And he has used his connections to change the face of medical advocacy in this country. Wallach was diagnosed six years ago, on the day that he and his wife, Sandra Abrevaya, brought the newborn second daughter home from the hospital. "Sandra and I cried and we held our family tight. We did so because being diagnosed with ALS today is a death sentence. There is no cure. I will not see my daughters grow up," Wallach told Congress during testimony he gave in 2019. © 2023 npr

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 28837 - Posted: 07.01.2023

By John Horgan A neuroscientist clad in gold and red and a philosopher sheathed in black took the stage before a packed, murmuring auditorium at New York University on Friday night. The two men were grinning, especially the philosopher. They were here to settle a bet made in the late 1990s on one of science’s biggest questions: How does a brain, a lump of matter, generate subjective conscious states such as the blend of anticipation and nostalgia I felt watching these guys? Before I reveal their bet’s resolution, let me take you through its twisty backstory, which reveals why consciousness remains a topic of such fascination and frustration to anyone with even the slightest intellectual leaning. I first saw Christof Koch, the neuroscientist, and David Chalmers, the philosopher, butt heads in 1994 at a now legendary conference in Tucson, Ariz., called Toward a Scientific Basis for Consciousness. Koch was a star of the meeting. Together with biophysicist Francis Crick, he had been proclaiming in Scientific American and elsewhere that consciousness, which philosophers have wrestled with for millennia, was scientifically tractable. Just as Crick and geneticist James Watson solved heredity by decoding DNA’s double helix, scientists would crack consciousness by discovering its neural underpinnings, or “correlates.” Or so Crick and Koch claimed. They even identified a possible basis for consciousness: brain cells firing in synchrony 40 times per second. Advertisement Not everyone in Tucson was convinced. Chalmers, younger and then far less well known than Koch, argued that neither 40-hertz oscillations nor any other strictly physical process could account for why perceptions are accompanied by conscious sensations, such as the crushing boredom evoked by a jargony lecture. I have a vivid memory of the audience perking up when Chalmers called consciousness “the hard problem.” That was the first time I heard that now famous phrase.

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 28836 - Posted: 06.28.2023

By McKenzie Prillaman When speaking to young kids, humans often use squeaky, high-pitched baby talk. It turns out that some dolphins do, too. Bottlenose dolphin moms modify their individually distinctive whistles when their babies are nearby, researchers report June 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This “parentese” might enhance attention, bonding and vocal learning in calves, as it seems to do in humans. During the first few months of life, each common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) develops a unique tune, or signature whistle, akin to a name (SN: 7/22/13). The dolphins shout out their own “names” in the water “likely as a way to keep track of each other,” says marine biologist Laela Sayigh of the Woods Hole But dolphin moms seem to tweak that tune in the presence of their calves, which tend to stick by mom’s side for three to six years. It’s a change that Sayigh first noticed in a 2009 study published by her student. But “it was just one little piece of this much larger study,” she says. To follow up on that observation, Sayigh and colleagues analyzed signature whistles from 19 female dolphins both with and without their babies close by. Audio recordings were captured from a wild population that lives near Sarasota Bay, Fla., during catch-and-release health assessments that occurred from 1984 to 2018. The researchers examined 40 instances of each dolphin’s signature whistle, verified by the unique way each vocalization’s frequencies change over time. Half of each dolphin’s whistles were voiced in the presence of her baby. When youngsters were around, the moms’ whistles contained, on average, a higher maximum and slightly lower minimum pitch compared with those uttered in the absence of calves, contributing to an overall widened pitch range. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 28835 - Posted: 06.28.2023

Alaina Demopoulos It was in 1975, when Carl Resnikoff and his girlfriend, Judith Gipson, took a bucolic ferry ride to Sausalito, a city located on the north end of Golden Gate Bridge, that a revolution in youth culture, music, emotion and imagination would take place. It was on that ride that the two undergraduates took capsules filled with MDMA powder for the very first time. Resnikoff, a biophysics major at Berkeley, had synthesized the drug himself. As the boat cut through the water of the San Francisco Bay, Gipson began to feel “a floating sense of euphoria … like some guy could come walking up to us asking for help and his guts are spilling out, and we’d be grooving on how beautiful it was.’” According to Rachel Nuwer’s book I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World, Resnikoff and his girlfriend’s romp was the first-ever documented instance of people taking MDMA recreationally. Nuwer is a science journalist who covered clinical trials for MDMA use in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). While cannabis and psilocybin have undergone rebrands of late, going from countercultural tokens to the mainstream, she believes that the public is starting to open up to MDMA, too. “MDMA deserves its own story,” Nuwer said. “I wanted to bring together the history, culture, politics and science of the drug all in one place. This book is for anyone who’s interested in the drug, whether it’s someone who’s taken it 500 times on the dancefloor or who’s using it therapeutically for the first time.” Nuwer believes that MDMA will “follow the path of cannabis”, becoming legal medicinally first, then decriminalized, and perhaps fully legalized for all types of use. That cycle may have already started: three clinical trials have found that MDMA, which is also called ecstasy, can speed the recovery of PTSD. FDA approval for therapeutic use could come as early as next year. © 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28834 - Posted: 06.28.2023

Will Stone Intermittent fasting has taken off in popularity in recent years as an alternative to more traditional weight loss advice, including counting calories, which can be cumbersome and hard to sustain for some people. Intermittent fasting can take different forms. One approach — called time-restricted eating — limits when people eat to a specific window of time, often around six to eight hours. Some research suggests this can be successful for weight loss in the short term because people end up eating less, but it has been less clear how well it works over a longer stretch of time. A study published Monday may have an answer. "We really wanted to see if people can lose weight with this over a year. Can they maintain the weight loss?" says Krista Varady, a professor of nutrition at the University of Illinois Chicago, who has studied intermittent fasting for the past two decades and led the new study. Varady's research finds that intermittent fasting can indeed help people lose weight and keep it off over the course of a year, with effects similar to tracking calories. The results of the clinical trial were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Sponsor Message The amount of weight loss wasn't dramatic — equivalent to about 5% of body weight — but the findings are encouraging to researchers in the field, in part because they underscore that people could keep this habit up over a long stretch of time. "That is pretty exciting," says Courtney Peterson, a professor of nutrition at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who wasn't involved in the research. "This study has the most compelling results suggesting that people can stick with it, that it's not a fad diet in the sense that people can do it for three months and they fall off the wagon for a year." © 2023 npr

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 28833 - Posted: 06.28.2023

By Charlotte Stoddart Charlotte Stoddart: Can a sugar pill make you feel better? What about the rituals surrounding a visit to the doctor? Can the care of a doctor or your trust in them reduce the amount of pain you feel? I’m Charlotte Stoddart and this is Knowable. This episode is all about the placebo effect. We’re going to look in detail at one key paper to learn how the placebo effect has been used in medicine and how it’s been understood and misunderstood. The paper is called “The Powerful Placebo.” It was written by Henry Beecher and published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, in 1955. I chose this paper because it’s often referred to as a classic, and it’s still one of the most frequently cited papers on the placebo effect. I’ve enlisted the help of Ted Kaptchuk, who knows the paper well. Ted Kaptchuk: I enjoyed rereading it, actually. It’s a remarkable paper. I’ve read it probably 15 times in my life. Charlotte Stoddart: Ted is director of the Program in Placebo Studies at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, where Henry Beecher also held a professorship. Beecher also worked at Massachusetts General Hospital. Charlotte Stoddart: During the Second World War, Beecher served in the US Army, and there’s a story about how that experience got him interested in the placebo effect. It goes like this: Beecher was working at a military hospital. One day, a badly injured soldier needed surgery, but the hospital had run out of morphine. So Beecher injected the soldier with saline solution instead. The soldier relaxed and Beecher carried out the operation without any real anesthetic. This, so the story goes, is when Beecher realized the power of the mind over the body. There are several different versions of this story, but Ted says it’s likely some version of it is true. © 2023 Annual Reviews

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 28832 - Posted: 06.28.2023

By Yasemin Saplakoglu Enough pints of beer can have you falling off your bar stool or loudly reciting lyrics to early 2000s jams to total strangers, because alcohol can get past one of the strongest defenses in the body. If you’ve ever been drunk, high or drowsy from allergy medication, you’ve experienced what happens when some molecules defeat the defense system called the blood-brain barrier and make it into the brain. Embedded in the walls of the hundreds of miles of capillaries that wind through the brain, the barrier keeps most molecules in the blood from ever reaching sensitive neurons. Much as the skull protects the brain from external physical threats, the blood-brain barrier protects it from chemical and pathogenic ones. While it’s a fantastic feat of evolution, the barrier is very much a nuisance for drug developers, who have spent decades trying to selectively overcome it to deliver therapeutics to the brain. Biomedical researchers want to understand the barrier better because its failures seem to be the key to some diseases and because manipulating the barrier could help improve the treatment of certain conditions. It’s really there to control the environment for proper brain function. “We’ve learned a lot over the last decade,” said Elizabeth Rhea, a research biologist at the University of Washington Medicine Memory and Brain Wellness Center. But “we’re definitely still facing challenges in getting substrates and therapeutics across.” Protection, but Not a Fortress Like the rest of the body, the brain needs circulating blood to deliver essential nutrients and oxygen and to carry away waste. But blood chemistry constantly fluctuates, and brain tissue is extremely sensitive to its chemical environment. Neurons rely on precise releases of ions to communicate — if ions could flow freely out of the blood, that precision would be lost. Other types of biologically active molecules can also twang the delicate neurons, interfering with thoughts, memories and behaviors. All Rights Reserved © 2023

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28831 - Posted: 06.21.2023

By Dani Blum Until she started taking the weight loss drug Wegovy, Staci Klemmer’s days revolved around food. When she woke up, she plotted out what she would eat; as soon as she had lunch, she thought about dinner. After leaving work as a high school teacher in Bucks County, Pa., she would often drive to Taco Bell or McDonald’s to quell what she called a “24/7 chatter” in the back of her mind. Even when she was full, she wanted to eat. Almost immediately after Ms. Klemmer’s first dose of medication in February, she was hit with side effects: acid reflux, constipation, queasiness, fatigue. But, she said, it was like a switch flipped in her brain — the “food noise” went silent. “I don’t think about tacos all the time anymore,” Ms. Klemmer, 57, said. “I don’t have cravings anymore. At all. It’s the weirdest thing.” Dr. Andrew Kraftson, a clinical associate professor at Michigan Medicine, said that over his 13 years as an obesity medicine specialist, people he treated would often say they couldn’t stop thinking about food. So when he started prescribing Wegovy and Ozempic, a diabetes medication that contains the same compound, and patients began to use the term food noise, saying it had disappeared, he knew exactly what they meant. As interest has intensified around Ozempic and other injectable diabetes medications like Mounjaro, which works in similar ways, that term has gained traction. Videos related to the subject “food noise explained” have been viewed 1.8 billion times on TikTok. And some of the people who have managed to get their hands on these medications — despite persistent shortages and list prices that can near or surpass a thousand dollars — have shared stories on social media about their experiences. When food noise fades Wendy Gantt, 56, said she first heard the term food noise on TikTok, where she had also learned about Mounjaro. She found a telehealth platform and received a prescription within a few hours. She can remember the first day she started taking it last summer. “It was like a sense of freedom from that loop of, ‘What am I going to eat? I’m never full; there’s not enough. What can I snack on?’” she said. “It’s like someone took an eraser to it.” © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 28830 - Posted: 06.21.2023

Nicola Davis Taking a short nap during the day may help to protect the brain’s health as it ages, researchers have suggested after finding that the practice appears to be associated with larger brain volume. While previous research has suggested long naps could be an early symptom of Alzheimer’s disease, other work has revealed that a brief doze can improve people’s ability to learn. Now researchers say they have found evidence to suggest napping may help to protect against brain shrinkage. That is of interest, the team say, as brain shrinkage, a process that occurs with age, is accelerated in people with cognitive problems and neurodegenerative diseases, with some research suggesting this may be related to sleep problems. “In line with these studies, we found an association between habitual daytime napping and larger total brain volume, which could suggest that napping regularly provides some protection against neurodegeneration through compensating for poor sleep,” the researchers note. Writing in the journal Sleep Health, researchers at UCL and the University of the Republic in Uruguay report how they drew on data from the UK Biobank study that has collated genetic, lifestyle and health information from 500,000 people aged 40 to 69 at recruitment. The team used data from 35,080 Biobank participants to look at whether a combination of genetic variants that have previously been associated with self-reported habitual daytime napping are also linked to brain volume, cognition and other aspects of brain health. © 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 28829 - Posted: 06.21.2023

Jon Hamilton Diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's are caused by toxic clumps of proteins that spread through the brain like a forest fire. Now scientists say they've figured out how the fire starts in at least one of these diseases. They've also shown how it can be extinguished. The finding involves Huntington's disease, a rare, inherited brain disorder that cut short the life of songwriter Woody Guthrie. But the study has implications for other degenerative brain diseases, including Alzheimer's. It "opens the path" to finding the initial event that leads to diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, says Corinne Lasmézas, who studies neurodegenerative diseases at the Wertheim UF Scripps Institute in Jupiter, Florida. She was not involved in the study. People with Huntington's "begin to lose control of their body movements, they have mental impediments over time, and eventually they die," says Randal Halfmann, an author of the study and a researcher at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Mo. Like other neurodegenerative diseases, Huntington's occurs when proteins in the brain fold into an abnormal shape and begin to stick together. Then these clumps of abnormal protein begin to cause nearby proteins to misfold and clump too. "As the disease progresses you're effectively watching a sort of a forest fire," Halfmann says. "And you're trying to figure out what started it." In essence, Halfmann's team wanted to find the molecular matchstick responsible for the lethal blaze. To do that, they needed to chronicle an event that is fleeting and usually invisible. It's called nucleation, the moment when a misfolded protein begins to aggregate and proliferate. © 2023 npr

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 28828 - Posted: 06.21.2023

By Ken Belson and Benjamin Mueller When Jeffrey Vlk played running back in high school in the 1990s and then safety in college, he took and delivered countless tackles during full-contact football practices. Hitting was a mainstay, as were injuries, including concussions. When he became a coach at Buffalo Grove High School outside Chicago in 2005, Vlk did what he had been taught: He had his players hit and tackle in practices to “toughen them up.” By the time he became head coach in 2016, though, he saw that many of his players were so banged up from a week of hitting in practice that they missed games or were more susceptible to being injured in those games. So, starting in 2019, Vlk eliminated full-contact practices. Players wore shoulder pads once a week, on Wednesday, which he called contact day. That’s when they hit tackle bags and crash pads, and wrapped up teammates but did not throw them to the ground. Vlk said no starting player had been injured at his practices in four years. “Those types of injuries can stay with you for a long time,” he said, “and knowing that I’m keeping the kids safe, not just in our program, but beyond the program, is reason enough to go this route.” Vlk’s approach to limiting the number of hits players take has been spreading slowly in the football world, where much of the effort has focused on avoiding and treating concussions, which often have observable symptoms and are tracked by sports leagues. But researchers have for years posited that the more hits to the head a player receives — even subconcussive ones, which are usually not tracked — the more likely he is to develop cognitive and neurological problems later in life. A new study published on Tuesday in the scientific journal Nature Communications added a critical wrinkle: A football player’s chances of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., are related to the number of head impacts absorbed, but also to the cumulative impact of all those hits. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 28827 - Posted: 06.21.2023

By Harrison Smith As a young boy in small-town Mississippi, Donald Triplett was oddly distant, with no apparent interest in his parents or anyone else who tried to make conversation. He was obsessed with spinning round objects and had an unusual way of speaking, substituting “you” for “I” and repeating words like “business” and “chrysanthemum.” He also showed a savant-like brilliance, naming notes as they were played on the piano and performing mental calculations with ease. When a visitor asked “87 times 23,” he didn’t hesitate before answering — correctly — “2,001.” Mr. Triplett would make medical history as “Case 1,” the first person formally diagnosed with autism. His upbringing and behavior were described at length in a 1943 scientific article by Austrian American psychiatrist Leo Kanner, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact,” which outlined the developmental disability now known as autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. The article went on to describe 10 other autistic children, most of whom were locked away in state schools and hospitals while experiencing communication and behavior challenges. Checking in with his former subjects almost 30 years later, Kanner would write that institutionalization was “tantamount to a life sentence … a total retreat to near-nothingness.” Mr. Triplett, by contrast, gained acceptance and admiration while remaining a part of his community. With support from his family, which could afford to send him to Kanner and which later set up a trust fund to look after him, he graduated from college, got a job as a bank teller and found companionship in a morning coffee club at City Hall. He played golf, sang in a choir and traveled the world, visiting at least three-dozen countries and making it to Hawaii 17 times. By choice, he traveled alone, surprising relatives when he would announce at Sunday dinner that he had recently returned from seeing a golf tournament in California or, in search of an oyster dinner, driven his Cadillac to New Orleans.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 28826 - Posted: 06.21.2023

Sara Reardon Psychedelic drugs are promising treatments for many mental-health conditions, but researchers don’t fully understand why they have such powerful therapeutic effects. Now, a study in mice suggests that psychedelics all work in the same way: they reset the brain to a youthful state in which it can easily absorb new information and form crucial connections between neurons1. The findings raise the prospect that psychedelic drugs could allow long-term changes in many types of behavioural, learning and sensory system that are disrupted in mental-health conditions. But scientists caution that more research needs to be done to establish how the drugs remodel brain connections. The study was published on 14 June in Nature. Psychedelics such as MDMA (also known as ecstasy), ketamine and psilocybin — the active ingredient in magic mushrooms — are known for producing mind-altering effects, including hallucinations in some cases. But each compound affects a different biochemical pathway in the brain during the short-term ‘trip’, leaving scientists to wonder why so many of these drugs share the ability to relieve depression2, addiction and other difficult-to-treat conditions in the long term. Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and her colleagues sought answers by studying how psychedelics affect social behaviour in mice. Mice can learn to associate socializing with positive feelings, but only during an adolescent ‘critical period’, which closes as they become adults. The scientists trained mice to associate one ‘bedroom’ in their enclosure with mousy friends and another room with solitude. They could then examine how psychedelics affected the rodents’ room choices — a proxy for whether the drug affects the critical period. © 2023 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28825 - Posted: 06.17.2023

By Claudia Lopez Lloreda A baby born through the vaginal canal picks up critical microbes along the way that help it stay healthy later in life. But babies delivered via cesarean section miss out on those useful, gut-colonizing bacteria, which may put them at greater risk of developing certain health conditions and developmental disorders. Now, researchers at Southern Medical University say that by exposing C-section babies to the microbes they’ve missed—an intervention called vaginal seeding—doctors can partially restore these missing gut bacteria. The procedure may even aid in their early development. Newborns delivered via C-section who received their mother’s vaginal microbes had more advanced motor and communication skills than other C-section babies months later, the team reports today in Cell Host & Microbe. But some clinicians argue these benefits for infants have not yet been proved, nor has the procedure’s safety. “This study establishes a link showing that there is a possible benefit in a select group of infants and mothers,” says Mehreen Zaigham, an obstetrician at Lund University who was not involved in the study. “But it has to be proven with larger longitudinal studies.” The microbiomes of C-section babies look a lot different from those of babies born vaginally. In particular, they have lower numbers of Lactobacillus, Escherichia, and Bacteroides bacteria in their guts. These microbes are believed to be critical for growth and are thought to help protect against asthma, allergies, obesity, and autoimmune disorders—all conditions that are more common among C-section babies. A few highly controversial studies have suggested some babies delivered by C-section may be at a greater risk of developing neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism spectrum disorder, which some researchers attribute to their disrupted microbiome. Other researchers have roundly criticized that suggestion, however. To restore the microbiomes of infants delivered by C-section, researchers have come up with a simple solution: Swab them with bacteria from their mother’s vagina shortly after they are born. This method, called vaginal seeding, was first clinically tested 7 years ago by Jose Clemente, a geneticist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Maria Gloria Dominguez Bello, a microbial ecologist at Rutgers University, who found the procedure indeed restored microbes that C-section babies lacked. However, these results were based on a small group of just 11 babies.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 28824 - Posted: 06.17.2023

Katharine Sanderson An influential team of researchers has updated the scientific consensus on how concussions in sports should be defined, treated and monitored. But critics say that the statement, which is revised every 4 to 5 years, excludes evidence that links head injuries in sport with long-term brain conditions such as CTE — a high-profile issue in games such as American football and soccer. The consensus statement, compiled by 114 co-authors after the International Conference on Concussion in Sport in Amsterdam last October, summarizes the latest evidence on sports-related concussions to help clinicians manage the trauma. The latest version introduces details including a description of brain-chemistry events that happen after a concussion. It was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine on 14 June1. Why sports concussions are worse for women But some researchers have criticized the authors’ work. “Their refusal to acknowledge a causal relationship between contact-sports participation and CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy] is a danger to the public,” says Chris Nowinski, a neuroscientist and chief executive of the Concussion Legacy Foundation in Middletown, Delaware, which supports athletes and veterans affected by concussions and CTE. Many studies have linked repeated sports-related head injuries with CTE — a degenerative brain disease that can develop into dementia. But the consensus authors say that these studies use data from brain banks — where former athletes donate their tissue to be studied after death — that they say is not rigorous enough to be included in their review. “The CTE literature is almost exclusively case series studies,” says clinician Bob Cantu, a co-author of the consensus report at the Boston University School of Medicine in Massachusetts. “And that literature did not meet the inclusion criteria for the systematic review.” © 2023 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 28823 - Posted: 06.17.2023

Kerri Smith In a dimly lit laboratory in London, a brown mouse explores a circular tabletop, sniffing as it ambles about. Suddenly, silently, a shadow appears. In a split second, the mouse’s brain whirs with activity. Neurons in its midbrain start to fire, sensing the threat of a potential predator, and a cascade of activity in an adjacent region orders its body to choose a response — freeze to the spot in the hope of going undetected, or run for shelter, in this case a red acetate box stationed nearby. From the mouse’s perspective, this is life or death. But the shadow wasn’t cast by a predator. Instead, it is the work of neuroscientists in Tiago Branco’s lab, who have rigged up a plastic disc on a lever to provoke, and thereby study, the mouse’s escape behaviour. This is a rapid decision-making process that draws on sensory information, previous experience and instinct. Branco, a neuroscientist at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at University College London, has wondered about installing a taxidermied owl on a zip wire to create a more realistic experience. And his colleagues have more ideas — cutting the disc into a wingspan shape, for instance. “Having drones — that would also be very nice,” says Dario Campagner, a researcher in Branco’s lab. A mouse detects a looming threat and runs for cover. The shadow has been darkened. The set-up is part of a growing movement to step away from some of the lab experiments that neuroscientists have used for decades to understand the brain and behaviour. Such exercises — training an animal to use a lever or joystick to get a reward, for example, or watching it swim through a water maze — have established important principles of brain activity and organization. But they take days to months of training an animal to complete specific, idiosyncratic tasks. The end result, Branco says, is like studying a “professional athlete”; the brain might work differently in the messy, unpredictable real world. Mice didn’t evolve to operate a joystick. Meanwhile, many behaviours that come naturally — such as escaping a predator, or finding scarce food or a receptive mate — are extremely important for the animal, says Ann Kennedy, a theoretical neuroscientist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. They are “critical to survival, and under selective pressure”, she says. By studying these natural actions, scientists are hoping to glean lessons about the brain and behaviour that are more holistic and more relevant to everyday activity than ever before.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 28822 - Posted: 06.14.2023

By Gina Kolata Eileen Isotalo was always able to lose weight, but always gained it back. Now 66, her first diet was with Weight Watchers at age 14. She went on to try one diet after another and bought so many books on weight loss that she thinks she has more than the public library. In desperation, she finally went to a weight management clinic at the University of Michigan. She had sleep apnea and aching knees, but could not curb her appetite. “It’s just this drive to eat,” said Ms. Isoltalo, a retired interior design coordinator. “It’s almost like this panic feeling when you start craving food.” “My mental shame was profound,” she said. Now, though, since she started taking Wegovy, one of a new class of drugs for obesity that was prescribed by her doctor at the clinic, those cravings are gone. She has lost 50 pounds and jettisoned the dark clothes she wore to hide her body. Her obesity-related medical problems have vanished along with much of the stigma that caused her to retreat from family and friends. But like others at the clinic, she still struggles with the fear others will judge her for receiving injections to treat her obesity rather than finding the willpower to lose weight and keep it off. Yet the drug, she said, “changed my life.” Wegovy and drugs like it make this “a very exciting time in the field,” said Dr. Susan Yanovski, co-director of the office of obesity research at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. About 100 million Americans, or 42 percent of the adult population, have obesity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For the first time, people with obesity, who faced a lifetime of medical jeopardy, can escape the ruthless trap of fruitless dieting and see their obesity-related health problems mitigated, along with the weight loss. But there is still the taint. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 28821 - Posted: 06.14.2023