By Jyoti Madhusoodanan In June 2021, 63-year-old Lisa Daurio was making the two-hour drive from her hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, to a doctor’s appointment in Denver when she settled on a life-changing decision: She would tell her doctor she was ready to stop taking her weekly injections to treat her multiple sclerosis. Daurio was not cured, but her condition had remained stable for more than a decade. As she got older, her doctor had periodically asked if she wanted to consider halting her medication. It’s an unusual question in modern medicine: Clinicians don’t typically ask people with arthritis, high cholesterol, diabetes, or other chronic conditions whether they’d like to stop taking their medication as they get older. But MS is an unusual disease, the result of immune cells attacking a person’s brain, optic nerves and spinal cord. The subsequent nerve injuries trigger burning pain, numbness, loss of balance, and a range of other symptoms. These hallmark immune assaults and symptoms flare up sporadically in younger adults and, for some people, seem to quiet down as they age into their 50s and beyond. Still, Daurio’s decision to stop wasn’t straightforward. Her MS symptoms began when she was in her late 30s, with a sense of overwhelming fatigue, a numbness in her legs, and a “feeling of fire ants” that ran “from the back of my neck around the front of my face,” she said. She was diagnosed with MS in 2003, when her entire left side went numb, and she thought she was having a stroke. The weekly injections had kept all of those symptoms at bay for more than a decade. When her doctor broached the idea of stopping them, Daurio’s reaction was “it’s working, let’s not mess with what’s not broken,” she said. Staying on her medication wasn’t always easy. For about 10 years, every dose made her feel like she had the flu. After each shot, she spent two days on Tylenol and a steroid named prednisone to cope with the side effects. But Daurio stuck with the regimen because the injection seemed to help; she had not had a single relapse since 2009, and periodic MRI scans showed no new signs of immune attacks on her brain.

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 29692 - Posted: 03.05.2025

By Laura Sanders Depression can affect not just the mind, but the body, too. Inner experiences of mental struggles are private. But in this episode, Jon Nelson and another volunteer, Amanda, let listeners in. Woven into their stories is a brief history of deep brain stimulation, the experimental treatment that involves permanent brain implants. You’ll hear how that research — with its ups and downs — carried the experiments to where they are today. Laura Sanders: This episode deals with mental illness, depression, and suicide. Please listen with care. Previously on The Deep End: Support Science Today. Barbara: He would be up in bed with the lights out or watching like endless hours of television and it was very unpredictable and then there’s a whole life going on downstairs. Jon: That isolation, there’s a little bit of lying involved because you just wanna get out of things, right? Mayberg: I think part of why this kind of treatment resistant depression is so painful and so associated with high rates of suicide, is that you’re suffering. You know exactly what you’re trying to get away from and you can’t move. And if you do move, it follows you. There’s no relief. Jon: I’d be the one standing up in front of everybody leading the champagne toast, and then I’d be driving home and wanting to slam my car into a tree. Sanders: Today we’re going to get into some heavy stuff, but there’s light at the end, I promise. We’re going to pull back the curtain on what depression can do to the body and to the brain. Maybe you know that feeling firsthand. If you don’t, you probably know somebody who does. You’ll also hear the backstory of some people who volunteered for the experiment and the backstory of the science itself. I’m Laura Sanders. Welcome to The Deep End. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29676 - Posted: 02.19.2025

By Laura Sanders Meet Jon Nelson. He’s a dad, a husband, a coach and a professional who works in marketing. But underneath it all, he suffered – for years – from severe depression. His suffering was so great that he volunteered for an experimental treatment called deep brain stimulation, in which electrodes are permanently implanted in his brain. In this episode, you’ll hear from Jon about his life before the surgery, and you’ll be introduced to the neuroscience designed to save him. Laura Sanders: This podcast touches on mental illness, depression, and suicide. There are moments of darkness. There are moments of lightness, too. Please keep that in mind before you listen. Jon Nelson is a guy who’s probably a lot like a guy you know. He lives in Newtown, a picturesque small town northeast of Philadelphia. He has three kids, a loving wife, a dog, a cat, and a bearded dragon named Lizzie. He works in marketing. He coaches his kids in softball and hockey, and he’s a ride-or-die Steelers fan. The Nelsons are, in fact, so perfect that they’re almost a caricature, like a sitcom family with a zany dad who’s fond of the phrase, “I’m going to give you some life advice.” Jon Nelson: You know, we try to do the standard sit down and cook together and have meals together. We’re the messy house in the neighborhood with basketballs outside and, you know, we’re constantly playing and doing stuff like that. But, you know, truly we like to spend time together. Sanders: But the view from the outside was a lot different than what Jon felt on the inside. On the outside, Jon lived a charmed life, but inside, he had been fighting with everything he had to stay alive for years. Jon: I would literally read a newspaper article about a plane wreck and I would have instantaneous, like, “Oh, like why couldn’t I have been on that?” Right? Or, you know, you, somebody died in a car wreck, like, “Why couldn’t that have been me?” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29668 - Posted: 02.12.2025

By Laura Sanders Brain implants for depression: It sounds like science fiction but it’s real. The Deep End, a new podcast from Science News, will give you a glimpse of what it’s like to live with electrodes in your brain. It might change how you think about mental health, the brain and what makes you you. Transcript Laura Sanders: Inside your brain, there are billions of nerve cells that form trillions of connections. These connections make your thoughts, movements, emotions, and memories. Your first kiss, your favorite song, your dreams. Our brains make us who we are. But sometimes they can betray us. Support Science Today. Thank you for being a subscriber to Science News! Interested in more ways to support STEM? Consider making a gift to our nonprofit publisher, the Society for Science, an organization dedicated to expanding scientific literacy and ensuring that every young person can strive to become an engineer or scientist. Donate Now This is a story about four people whose brains turned against them, plunging their lives into the darkness of severe depression. This is also a story about an experiment designed to pull them back out. Amanda: My initial response was a little bit of skepticism, like, “OK, we’re gonna put a box in you, we’re gonna hook it up to some wires, we’re gonna shove them down in your brain and then electrocute you, and it’s gonna make you feel great.” Like, this doesn’t seem like a, like a safe thing to be doing. Sanders: This experiment sounds like science fiction, but it’s real. This is the Deep End, a new podcast from Science News. I’m Laura Sanders. On this podcast, you’ll hear what led people to sign up for this unconventional experiment and what it was like for them. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–202

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29655 - Posted: 02.05.2025

Nicola Davis Science correspondent Standing patiently on a small fluffy rug, Calisto the flat-coated retriever is being fitted with some hi-tech headwear. But this is not a new craze in canine fashion: she is about to have her brainwaves recorded. Calisto is one of about 40 pet dogs – from newfoundlands to Tibetan terriers – taking part in a study to explore whether their brainwaves synchronise with those of their owners when the pair interact, a phenomenon previously seen when two humans engage with each other. The researchers behind the work say such synchronisation would suggest person and pet are paying attention to the same things, and in certain circumstances interpreting moments in a similar way. In other words, owner and dog really are on the same wavelength. Dr Valdas Noreika of Queen Mary, University of London said he got the idea for the study after working on similar experiments with mothers and their babies, where such synchronisation has also been seen. “Owners modulate their language in a similar way as parents modulate when they speak to children,” he said. “There are lots of similarities. That could be one of the reasons why we get so attached to dogs – because we already have these cognitive functions and capacities to attach with someone who is smaller or requires help or attention.” Hints of an emotional bond between humans and their dogs stretch into the distant past: researchers have previously discovered the 14,000-year-old remains of a puppy buried in Germany alongside a man and a woman: the analysis suggested the young dog had been nursed through several periods of illness, despite having no particular use. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited o

Keyword: Brain imaging; Attention
Link ID: 29613 - Posted: 01.04.2025

' By Sofia Quaglia Flip open any neuroscience textbook and the depiction of a neuron will be roughly the same: a blobby, amoebalike cell body shooting out a long, thick strand. That strand is the axon, which conducts electrical signals to terminals where the cell communicates with other neurons. Axons have long been depicted as smooth and cylindrical, but a new study of mouse neurons challenges that view. Instead, it suggests their natural shape is more like a string of pearls. Even more provocatively, the authors propose those pearly bumps serve as control knobs, influencing how quickly and precisely the cell fires its signals. The study, published today in Nature Neuroscience, should “100%” change how we’ve been thinking about neurons and their signals, says senior author Shigeki Watanabe, a molecular neuroscientist at John Hopkins University. Some outsiders agree. The findings are “highly significant and I think have been overlooked for quite some time,” says evolutionary biologist Pawel Burkhardt of the University of Bergen, who recently spotted similar pearl structures in neurons from tiny marine invertebrates known as comb jellies. Yet several experts in the field contest the findings. Some cite potential confounding effects of the preparation and freezing method used to preserve cells before imaging. And some doubt the work totally upends what’s known about the true shape of the axon. “I think it’s true that [the axon is] not a perfect tube, but it’s not also just this kind of accordion that they show,” says neuroscientist Christophe Leterrier from Aix-Marseille University, who calls the study “a controversial addition to the literature.” Since the mid-1960s, microscopists have seen that axons can scrunch up to form beads when they are diseased or under other stress. Leterrier has called these temporary beads “stress balls for the brain” and found evidence that they prevent cellular damage from spreading. Other studies suggest even normal axons bulge temporarily when cargo traveling to and from the cell nucleus forms a traffic jam, like the elephant bulging inside the body of a boa in the children’s book The Little Prince.

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29586 - Posted: 12.04.2024

Does a whiff of pollen trigger a sneeze or a cough? Scientists have discovered nerve cells that cause one response versus another: ‘sneeze neurons’ in the nasal passages relay sneeze signals to the brain, and separate neurons send cough messages, according to a study1 performed in mice. The findings could lead to new and improved treatments for conditions such as allergies and chronic coughs. That’s welcome news because these conditions can be “incredibly frustrating” and the side effects of current treatments can be “incredibly problematic”, says pulmonologist Matthew Drake at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, who was not involved in the work. The study was published today in Cell. Previous work2 categorized neurons in the mouse airway on the basis of the proteins complexes, called ion channels, that are carried on the cell surfaces. To work out which nose neurons cause sneezing, researchers exposed mice to various compounds, each known to activate specific types of ion channel. They struck gold when a substance called BAM 8-22 left the mice sneezing. The compound is known to activate an ion channel called MrgprC11, leading the researchers to suspect that neurons carrying MrgprC11 cause sneezing. Indeed, when the researchers deleted MrgprC11 from the suspected sneeze neurons and then gave mice the flu, they found themselves with sick, but sneezeless, mice. Even with the sneeze neurons out of the picture, the sick mice continued to have cough-like reactions to influenza infection. Using methods similar to those that homed in on the sneeze neurons, the researchers tracked the cough response to a set of neurons in the trachea that express a signalling chemical called somatostatin. Viruses “evolve very quickly”, says neuroscientist and study co-author Qin Liu at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. That could explain why there are two separate systems capable of detecting and clearing them from the airways. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 29466 - Posted: 09.07.2024

By Holly Barker Machine-learning models can predict a neuron’s location based on recorded bursts of activity, a new preprint suggests. The findings may provide novel insights into how the brain integrates signals from different regions, the researchers say. The algorithm—trained on electrode recordings of neurons in mice—appeared to learn a cell’s whereabouts from its interspike interval, the sequence of delays between blips of activity. And after deciphering the spike pattern from one mouse, the tool predicted neuronal locations based on recordings from another rodent. That conservation between animals suggests the information serves some useful brain function, or at least doesn’t get in the way, says lead investigator Keith Hengen, assistant professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis. Although more research is needed, the anatomical information embedded in interspike intervals could—in theory—provide contextual information for neuronal computations. For example, the brain might process signals from thalamic neurons differently from those in the hippocampus, says study investigator Aidan Schneider, a graduate student in Hengen’s lab. Schneider and his colleagues trained the model using tens of thousands of Neuropixels probe recordings from 58 awake mice, published by the Allen Institute. When Schneider’s team presented the algorithm with fresh data, it could decipher whether a given neuron resided in the hippocampus, midbrain, thalamus or visual cortex 89 percent of the time, once the team removed noise from the data. (Random guesses would be correct 25 percent of the time.) But the tool was less able to pinpoint specific substructures within those regions. It’s a great example of the kinds of insights that labs poring over huge datasets can produce, says Drew Headley, assistant professor of molecular and behavioral neuroscience at Rutgers University, who was not involved in the study. But the findings may simply echo published reports of variations in spiking activity across different brain regions, he says. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29452 - Posted: 08.28.2024

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent A UK teenager with severe epilepsy has become the first person in the world to be fitted with a brain implant aimed at bringing seizures under control. Oran Knowlson’s neurostimulator sits under the skull and sends electrical signals deep into the brain, reducing his daytime seizures by 80%. His mother, Justine, said that her son had been happier, chattier and had a much better quality of life since receiving the device. “The future looks hopeful, which I wouldn’t have dreamed of saying six months ago,” she said. Martin Tisdall, a consultant paediatric neurosurgeon who led the surgical team at Great Ormond Street hospital (Gosh) in London, said: “For Oran and his family, epilepsy completely changed their lives and so to see him riding a horse and getting his independence back is absolutely astounding. We couldn’t be happier to be part of their journey.” Oran, who is 13 and lives in Somerset, had the surgery in October as part of a trial at Gosh in partnership with University College London, King’s College hospital and the University of Oxford. Oran has Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, external, a treatment-resistant form of epilepsy which he developed at the age of three. Between then and having the device fitted, he hasn’t had a single day without a seizure and sometimes suffered hundreds in a day. He often lost consciousness and would stop breathing, needing resuscitation. This means Oran needed round-the-clock care, as seizures could happen at any time of day, and he was at a significantly increased risk of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (Sudep). © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Epilepsy; Robotics
Link ID: 29367 - Posted: 06.24.2024

By Shaena Montanari Five years ago, while working to develop a tool to label neurons active during seizures in mice, Quynh Anh Nguyen noticed something she had not seen before. “There was a particular region in the brain that seemed to light up really prominently,” she says. Nguyen, assistant professor of pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, had induced seizures in the animals by injecting kainic acid into the hippocampus—a common strategy to model temporal lobe epilepsy. The condition often involves hyperactivity in the anterior and middle regions of the hippocampus, but Nguyen’s mice also showed the activation in a tiny posterior part of the hippocampus that she was not familiar with. Nguyen brought the data to her then-supervisor Ivan Soltesz, professor of neurosciences and neurosurgery at Stanford University. Together they realized that these neurons were in an area called the fasciola cinereum—a subregion of the hippocampus so understudied, Soltesz says, that when Nguyen first asked him what it was, he had “no idea.” Despite the subregion’s obscurity, it looks to be an important and previously overlooked contributor to epilepsy in people who do not respond to anti-seizure medications or tissue ablation in the hippocampus, Nguyen and her colleagues say. Fasciola cinereum neurons were active during seizures in six people with drug-resistant epilepsy, the team reported in April. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 29360 - Posted: 06.15.2024

Jon Hamilton A flexible film bristling with tiny sensors could make surgery safer for patients with a brain tumor or severe epilepsy. The experimental film, which looks like Saran wrap, rests on the brain’s surface and detects the electrical activity of nerve cells below. It’s designed to help surgeons remove diseased tissue while preserving important functions like language and memory. “This will enable us to do a better job,” says Dr. Ahmed Raslan, a neurosurgeon at Oregon Health and Science University who helped develop the film. The technology is similar in concept to sensor grids already used in brain surgery. But the resolution is 100 times higher, says Shadi Dayeh, an engineer at the University of California, San Diego, who is leading the development effort. In addition to aiding surgery, the film should offer researchers a much clearer view of the neural activity responsible for functions including movement, speech, sensation, and even thought. “We have these complex circuits in our brains,” says John Ngai, who directs the BRAIN Initiative at the National Institutes of Health, which has funded much of the film’s development. “This will give us a better understanding of how they work.” Mapping an ailing brain The film is intended to improve a process called functional brain mapping, which is often used when a person needs surgery to remove a brain tumor or tissue causing severe epileptic seizures. © 2024 npr

Keyword: Brain imaging; Epilepsy
Link ID: 29357 - Posted: 06.13.2024

By Yasemin Saplakoglu György Buzsáki first started tinkering with waves when he was in high school. In his childhood home in Hungary, he built a radio receiver, tuned it to various electromagnetic frequencies and used a radio transmitter to chat with strangers from the Faroe Islands to Jordan. He remembers some of these conversations from his “ham radio” days better than others, just as you remember only some experiences from your past. Now, as a professor of neuroscience at New York University, Buzsáki has moved on from radio waves to brain waves to ask: How does the brain decide what to remember? By studying electrical patterns in the brain, Buzsáki seeks to understand how our experiences are represented and saved as memories. New studies from his lab and others have suggested that the brain tags experiences worth remembering by repeatedly sending out sudden and powerful high-frequency brain waves. Known as “sharp wave ripples,” these waves, kicked up by the firing of many thousands of neurons within milliseconds of each other, are “like a fireworks show in the brain,” said Wannan Yang, a doctoral student in Buzsáki’s lab who led the new work, which was published in Science in March. They fire when the mammalian brain is at rest, whether during a break between tasks or during sleep. Sharp wave ripples were already known to be involved in consolidating memories or storing them. The new research shows that they’re also involved in selecting them — pointing to the importance of these waves throughout the process of long-term memory formation. It also provides neurological reasons why rest and sleep are important for retaining information. Resting and waking brains seem to run different programs: If you sleep all the time, you won’t form memories. If you’re awake all the time, you won’t form them either. “If you just run one algorithm, you will never learn anything,” Buzsáki said. “You have to have interruptions.” © 2024 the Simons Foundation.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29322 - Posted: 05.23.2024

Ian Sample Science editor A device that stimulates the spinal nerves with electrical pulses appears to boost how well people recover from major spinal cord injuries, doctors say. An international trial found that patients who had lost some or all use of their hands and arms after a spinal cord injury regained strength, control and sensation when the stimulation was applied during standard rehabilitation exercises. The improvements were small but were described by doctors and patients as life-changing because of the impact they had on the patients’ daily routines and quality of life. “It actually makes it easier for people to move, including people who have complete loss of movement in their hands and arms,” said Prof Chet Moritz, in the department of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The benefits accumulate gradually over time as we pair this spinal stimulation with intensive therapy of the hands and arms, such that there are benefits even when the stimulator is turned off.” Rather than being implanted, the Arc-Ex device is worn externally and uses electrodes that are placed on the skin near the section of the spinal cord responsible for controlling a particular movement or function. The researchers believe that electrical stimulation helps nerves that remain intact after the injury to send signals and ultimately partially restore some communication between the brain and paralysed body part. More than half of patients who suffer spinal cord injuries still have some intact nerves that cross the injury site. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Robotics; Movement Disorders
Link ID: 29315 - Posted: 05.21.2024

By Claudia López Lloreda As animals carry out complex behaviors, multiple brain areas turn on and talk to one another. But neuroscientists have had limited means to measure that neuronal dialogue. Electrical recordings, for example, are typically constrained to one brain area at a time, or require that mice have their head fixed in a specific position. A new technology overcomes those restrictions. The device, called E-Scope, reported in a peer-reviewed preprint in eLife, effectively measures the activity of neurons in two different areas at the same time, even as rodents move freely. The headset captures images of calcium currents, made using a microscope, and recordings of neurons’ electrical activity through electrodes to show how the cerebellum communicates with other brain regions during social interaction in mice. “Everything [is] synchronized together that way,” says Peyman Golshani, assistant professor of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles and a study investigator. This approach holds the potential to illuminate how coordination between brain areas in conditions marked by impaired social interaction, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and autism, is disrupted, Golshani says. By combining technologies, researchers who use the E-Scope “don’t need separate electrophysiology and imaging hardware,” he adds. It’s also much more comfortable for the animals, according to Golshani. A single wire conveys all of the small headset’s data, so mice can move more freely than when wearing other devices. © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 29244 - Posted: 04.06.2024

By Javier C. Hernández The pianist Alice Sara Ott, barefoot and wearing a silver bracelet, was smiling and singing to herself the other day as she practiced a jazzy passage of Ravel at Steinway Hall in Midtown Manhattan. A Nintendo Switch, which she uses to warm up her hands, was by her side (another favored tool is a Rubik’s Cube). A shot of espresso sat untouched on the floor. “I feel I have finally found my voice,” Ott said during a break. “I feel I can finally be myself.” Ott, 35, who makes her New York Philharmonic debut this week, has built a global career, recording more than a dozen albums and appearing with top ensembles. She has become a force for change in classical music, embracing new approaches (playing Chopin on beat-up pianos in Iceland) and railing against stuffy concert culture (she performs without shoes, finding it more comfortable). And Ott, who lives in Munich and has roots in Germany and Japan, has done so while grappling with illness. In 2019, when she was 30, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She says she has not shown any symptoms since starting treatment, but the disorder has made her reflect on the music industry’s grueling work culture. “I learned to accept that there is a limit and to not go beyond that,” she said. “Everybody knows how to ignore their body and just go on. But there’s always a payback.” Ott has used her platform to help dispel myths about multiple sclerosis, a disorder of the central nervous system that can cause a wide range of symptoms, including muscle spasms, numbness and vision problems. She has taken to social media to detail her struggles and to challenge those who have suggested that the illness has affected her playing. She said she felt she had no choice but to be transparent, saying it was important to show that people with multiple sclerosis could lead full lives. “I don’t consider it as a weakness,” she said. “It’s a fact. I live with it. And I don’t want to make a big drama out of it.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 29237 - Posted: 04.04.2024

by Alex Blasdel Patient One was 24 years old and pregnant with her third child when she was taken off life support. It was 2014. A couple of years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a disorder that caused an irregular heartbeat, and during her two previous pregnancies she had suffered seizures and faintings. Four weeks into her third pregnancy, she collapsed on the floor of her home. Her mother, who was with her, called 911. By the time an ambulance arrived, Patient One had been unconscious for more than 10 minutes. Paramedics found that her heart had stopped. After being driven to a hospital where she couldn’t be treated, Patient One was taken to the emergency department at the University of Michigan. There, medical staff had to shock her chest three times with a defibrillator before they could restart her heart. She was placed on an external ventilator and pacemaker, and transferred to the neurointensive care unit, where doctors monitored her brain activity. She was unresponsive to external stimuli, and had a massive swelling in her brain. After she lay in a deep coma for three days, her family decided it was best to take her off life support. It was at that point – after her oxygen was turned off and nurses pulled the breathing tube from her throat – that Patient One became one of the most intriguing scientific subjects in recent history. For several years, Jimo Borjigin, a professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, had been troubled by the question of what happens to us when we die. She had read about the near-death experiences of certain cardiac-arrest survivors who had undergone extraordinary psychic journeys before being resuscitated. Sometimes, these people reported travelling outside of their bodies towards overwhelming sources of light where they were greeted by dead relatives. Others spoke of coming to a new understanding of their lives, or encountering beings of profound goodness. Borjigin didn’t believe the content of those stories was true – she didn’t think the souls of dying people actually travelled to an afterworld – but she suspected something very real was happening in those patients’ brains. In her own laboratory, she had discovered that rats undergo a dramatic storm of many neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, after their hearts stop and their brains lose oxygen. She wondered if humans’ near-death experiences might spring from a similar phenomenon, and if it was occurring even in people who couldn’t be revived. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 29236 - Posted: 04.02.2024

Andrew Gregory Health editor Previous evidence has suggested a link between high body mass index (BMI) in adolescence and an increased risk of MS. But most of these studies were retrospective in design and used self-reported data. Researchers involved with the new study sought to prospectively evaluate the risk of developing MS in a large cohort of obese children compared with the general population. Academics analysed data from the Swedish Childhood Obesity Treatment Register. The database, known as Boris, is one of the world’s largest registries for treatment of childhood obesity. The research team looked at data on children aged two to 19 who joined the registry between 1995 and 2020, and compared their information with that of children in the general population. The study included data on more than 21,600 children with obesity, who started treatment for obesity when they were an average age of 11, and more than 100,000 children without obesity. Children involved in the study were tracked for an average of six years. During the follow-up period, MS was diagnosed in 28 of those with obesity (0.13% of the group) and 58 in the group without obesity (0.06%). © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limite

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Obesity
Link ID: 29224 - Posted: 03.30.2024

By Elizabeth Landau Electroconvulsive therapy has a public relations problem. The treatment, which sends electric currents through the brain to induce a brief seizure, has barbaric, inhumane connotations — for example, it was portrayed as a sadistic punishment in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But for patients with depression that does not improve with medications, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can be highly effective. Studies have found that some 50% to 70% of patients with major depressive disorder see their symptoms improve after a course of ECT. In comparison, medications aimed at altering brain chemistry help only 10% to 40% of depression patients. Still, even after many decades of use, scientists don’t know how ECT alters the brain’s underlying biology. Bradley Voytek, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, said a psychiatrist once told him that the therapy “reboots the brain” — an explanation he found “really unsatisfying.” Recently, Voytek and his collaborators paired their research into the brain’s electrical patterns with patient data to explore why inducing seizures has antidepressant effects. In two studies published last fall, the researchers observed that ECT and a related seizure therapy increased the unstructured background noise hiding behind well-defined brain waves. Neuroscientists call this background noise “aperiodic activity.” The authors suggested that induced seizures might help restore the brain’s balance of excitation and inhibition, which could have an overall antidepressant effect. “Every time that I talk to someone who’s not in this field about this work they’re like, ‘They still do that? They still use electroshock? I thought that was just in horror movies,’” said Sydney Smith, a graduate student in neuroscience in Voytek’s lab and the first author of the new studies. “Dealing with the stigma around it has become even more of a motivation to figure out how it works.” © 2024 Simons Foundation.

Keyword: Depression; Attention
Link ID: 29199 - Posted: 03.19.2024

By Tina Hesman Saey One particular retrovirus — embedded in the DNA of jawed vertebrates — helps turn on production of a protein needed to insulate nerve fibers, researchers report February 15 in Cell. Such insulation, called myelin, may have helped make speedy thoughts and complex brains possible. The retrovirus trick was so handy, in fact, that it showed up many times in the evolution of vertebrates with jaws, the team found. Retroviruses — also known as jumping genes or retrotransposons — are RNA viruses that make DNA copies of themselves to embed in a host’s DNA. Scientists once thought of remnants of ancient viruses as genetic garbage, but that impression is changing, says neuroscientist Jason Shepherd, who was not involved in the study. “We’re finding more and more that these retrotransposons and retroviruses have influenced the evolution of life on the planet,” says Shepherd, of the University of Utah Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine in Salt Lake City. Remains of retroviruses were already known to have aided the evolution of the placenta, the immune system and other important milestones in human evolution (SN: 5/16/17). Now, they’re implicated in helping to produce myelin. Myelin is a coating of fat and protein that encases long nerve fibers known as axons. The coating works a bit like the insulation around an electrical wire: Nerves sheathed in myelin can send electrical signals faster than uninsulated nerves can. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Glia; Evolution
Link ID: 29154 - Posted: 02.20.2024

By Jyoti Madhusoodanan On July 12, 2015, Elena Daly was packing for a family vacation when she walked into her 16-year-old son’s room and found him unconscious. Her son, Max, had overdosed on opioids, aspirated vomit, and fallen into a coma. By that point, Max had struggled with addiction for about three years. He had tried medication, therapy, and residential treatment programs in France, where the family lives, as well as in the United States and the United Kingdom. In fact, his July relapse occurred just days after returning home from a six-month stint in an in-patient rehab program. The coma lasted three days and worsened a pre-existing movement disorder to a degree where Max was unable to attend high school. “I couldn’t hold a pen without throwing it across the room or hold a cup of coffee without spilling it on myself,” he recently recalled. Max’s struggles with opioid use are not unusual: An estimated 40 to 60 percent of people who have an addiction experience relapse after treatment. Some researchers have suggested that a substantial portion of those who relapse suffer from what might be considered a “treatment-resistant” form of the disorder, though that condition is not formally recognized as a medical diagnosis. In recent years, scientists have explored treating these intractable cases of opioid dependence with deep brain stimulation, an intervention that entails surgically implanting an electrode into a precisely determined region of the brain, where it delivers regular pulses to control problematic electric signals. The surgery has proven effective for neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor, a disorder that can cause a person’s limbs, head, trunk, and voice to quake. But for researchers attempting to study its efficacy for addiction, the procedure’s invasiveness and cost — typically in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — have raised steep hurdles. Work in the field has largely been limited to one-off treatments and small studies with one or a few participants, making it tough to ascertain how many people globally have received the treatment or how successful it has been for them.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29121 - Posted: 01.31.2024