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By Lauren Peace Tampa Bay Times Nina Shand couldn’t stay awake. She had taken afternoon naps since she was a teenager to accommodate her “work hard, play hard” attitude, but when she was in her mid-20s the sleepiness became more severe. Menial computer tasks put her to sleep, and a 20-minute drive across her city, St. Petersburg, Florida, brought on a drowsiness so intense that her eyelids would flutter, forcing her to pull over. She knew something was really wrong when she no longer felt safe behind the wheel. In 2021, she received a diagnosis: narcolepsy, a rare disorder that causes excessive daytime sleepiness. Her doctor prescribed her Adderall, the brand-name version of the amphetamine-powered medication commonly known for treating attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. It worked. For the first time in years, Shand, now 28, felt energized. She was no longer struggling at work, sneaking naps, or downing coffees to trick her body into staying awake. She felt hope. But by 2022, a national Adderall shortage meant pharmacies were no longer able to fill her prescription. Shand and countless others across the country were being turned away, left to piece together a new — and often less effective — treatment plan with doctors scrambling to meet their needs. More than a year later, the shortage continues. In October, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives implored the FDA and Drug Enforcement Administration to work with drug manufacturers to ensure better supply. “We cannot allow this to be the continuing reality for Americans,” read their letter, led by Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.). But for now, it is.

Keyword: Sleep; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29102 - Posted: 01.16.2024

Ian Sample Science editor From Cain and Abel and the Brothers Karamazov to Cinderella, the warmth and support provided by siblings has hardly been taken for granted. Now, researchers have found that children who moan about their brothers and sisters may have good reason to complain: the more siblings teenagers have, the more it hits their happiness, they claim. A study of secondary schoolchildren in the US and China found that those from larger families had slightly poorer mental health than those from smaller families. The greatest impact was seen in families with multiple children born less than a year apart. Doug Downey, a professor of sociology at Ohio State University, said previous work in the field had revealed a mixed picture of positives and negatives for children with more siblings, adding that the latest results “were not a given”. The researchers asked 9,100 eighth graders in the US and 9,400 in China, with an average age of 14, a range of questions about their mental health, though the specific questions varied between the countries. In China, the teenagers with no siblings fared best for mental health. In the US, children who had no siblings or only one were found to have similar mental health. Overall, mental health was worse the more siblings the teenagers had, with greater impacts seen for teenagers with older siblings, and when brothers and sisters were closely spaced in age. Writing in the Journal of Family Issues, Downey and his colleagues argue that the findings are in line with the “resource dilution” explanation, the driving force behind the unwritten formula that states that the number of balls dropped rises, sometimes dramatically, with the number of siblings born. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29101 - Posted: 01.16.2024

By Meryl Davids Landau When Brian Meyer received a Stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis three years ago at age 62, he was determined to make the most of his remaining years. He immediately retired from a decades-long career in the grocery business and took every opportunity to hike, camp and — his all-time favorite — fish for salmon. Brian and his wife, Cheryl, regularly visited their two grown children and three grandsons and spent time with their many friends. But it was sometimes hard to keep his mind off his pain and the reality that life was nearing an end. “It tugs at the heart all the time,” Meyer, from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, said in August. A calm person by nature, he found his anxiety skyrocketing. By November, though, despite a new, highly aggressive liver cancer that shrank his prognosis to months or weeks, Meyer felt calm much of the time. The prime reason: a 25-milligram dose of the psychedelic drug psilocybin he had taken several months earlier, due to a Canadian program being watched elsewhere for the emotional benefits it may offer people nearing death. In mid-August, Meyer and nine other people with terminal cancers had gathered in two rooms, and there, lying on plush floor mats with blankets covering their bodies, their eyes covered by sleeping masks and music piped in over headphones, they swallowed the psilocybin capsules. The consciousness-altering drug, administered by the nonprofit Vancouver Island wellness center Roots to Thrive, set Meyer and the others on a six-hour journey of fantastical images and thoughts. The hope was that this “trip” would lead to lasting improvements in mood and lessen their angst around death. It was accompanied by weeks of Zoom group therapy sessions before and after, along with an in-person gathering the evening before for a medical clearance and the opportunity for participants and their spouses to meet in person.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 29100 - Posted: 01.16.2024

By Carissa Wong Researchers have identified some of the earliest known cases of sex-chromosome syndromes — in five ancient humans. “It’s quite interesting to think that these people existed throughout human history and how they seem to have been part of their societies,” says Kyriaki Anastasiadou, who studies ancient genomics at the Francis Crick Institute in London and is a co-author of the study, which was published on 11 January in Communications Biology1. People with extra or missing chromosomes often have differences in appearance and behaviour compared with others in the population. By identifying individuals who had these genetic syndromes, the researchers could illuminate how past societies viewed and treated people with differences. Through sequencing ancient DNA, researchers have previously found2 ancient people with an atypical number of chromosomes, including an infant with Down syndrome — caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21 — who lived around 5,000 years ago. Anastasiadou and her colleagues have now discovered the first prehistoric person known to have had Turner syndrome, which occurs in females and is characterized by having only one complete copy of the X chromosome, instead of the two copies usually found in females (males have one X and one Y). The person lived in Somerset, UK, roughly 2,500 years ago, during the Iron Age. People with Turner syndrome tend to be shorter than average and experience fertility problems. The other people the researchers identified with sex-chromosome syndromes were male. Among them was the earliest known person to have an extra Y chromosome, known as Jacob’s syndrome, which is linked to being taller than average. The man lived around 1,100 years ago, during the Early Medieval Period. The team also found three ancient males from different points in time who had an extra X chromosome, a condition known as Klinefelter syndrome, which is linked to growing taller than average and having broader hips and larger breasts. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 29099 - Posted: 01.16.2024

By David Levin It can start small: a peculiar numbness; a subtle facial tic; an inexplicably stiff muscle. But then time goes by — and eventually, the tremors set in. Roughly a million people in the United States (and roughly 10 million people worldwide) live with Parkinson’s disease, a potent neurological disorder that progressively kills neurons in the brain. As it does so, it can trigger a host of crippling symptoms, from violent tremors to excruciating muscle cramps, terrifying nightmares and constant brain fog. While medical treatments can alleviate some of these effects, researchers still don’t know exactly what causes the disease to occur in the first place. A growing number of studies, however, are suggesting that it may be tied to an unlikely culprit: bacteria living inside our guts. Every one of us has hundreds or thousands of microbial species in our stomach, small intestine and colon. These bacteria, collectively called our gut microbiome, are usually considerate guests: Although they survive largely on food that passes through our insides, they also give back, cranking out essential nutrients like niacin (which helps our body convert food into energy) and breaking down otherwise indigestible plant fiber into substances our bodies can use. As Parkinson’s advances in the brain, researchers have reported that the species of bacteria present in the gut also shift dramatically, hinting at a possible cause for the disease. A 2022 paper published in the journal Nature Communications recorded those differences in detail. After sequencing the mixed-together genomes of fecal bacteria from 724 people — a group with Parkinson’s and another without — the authors saw a number of distinct changes in the guts of people who suffered from the disease. The Parkinson’s group had dramatically lower amounts of certain species of Prevotella, a type of bacterium that helps the body break down plant-based fiber (changes like this in gut flora could explain why people with Parkinson’s disease often experience constipation). At the same time, the study found, two harmful species of Enterobacteriaceae, a family of microbes that includes Salmonella, E. coli and other bugs, proliferated. Those bacteria may be involved in a chain of biochemical events that eventually kill brain cells in Parkinson’s patients, says Tim Sampson, a biologist at Emory University School of Medicine and coauthor of the study.

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 29098 - Posted: 01.13.2024

By Christina Jewett and Noah Weiland Marijuana is neither as risky nor as prone to abuse as other tightly controlled substances and has potential medical benefits, and therefore should be removed from the nation’s most restrictive category of drugs, federal scientists have concluded. The recommendations are contained in a 250-page scientific review provided to Matthew Zorn, a Texas lawyer who sued Health and Human Services officials for its release and published it online on Friday night. An H.H.S. official confirmed the authenticity of the document. The records shed light for the first time on the thinking of federal health officials who are pondering a momentous change. The agencies involved have not publicly commented on their debates over what amounts to a reconsideration of marijuana at the federal level. Since 1970, marijuana has been considered a so-called Schedule I drug, a category that also includes heroin. Schedule I drugs have no medical use and a high potential for abuse, and they carry severe criminal penalties under federal trafficking laws. The documents show that scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse have recommended that the Drug Enforcement Administration make marijuana a Schedule III drug, alongside the likes of ketamine and testosterone, which are available by prescription. The review by federal scientists found that even though marijuana is the most frequently abused illicit drug, “it does not produce serious outcomes compared to drugs in Schedules I or II.” Marijuana abuse does lead to physical dependence, the analysis noted, and some people develop a psychological dependence. “But the likelihood of serious outcomes is low,” the review concluded. The review also said there is some “scientific support” for therapeutic uses of marijuana, including treatment of anorexia, pain, and nausea and vomiting related to chemotherapy. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29097 - Posted: 01.13.2024

By Elissa Welle Many of the physicians who worked on the current diagnostic and treatment guidelines for psychiatric conditions in the United States have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies, according to a study published today in The BMJ. Nearly 60 percent of the 92 U.S.-based physicians who shepherded the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition, text revision (DSM-5-TR) accepted industry payments totaling $14.2 million during the three years prior to working on the manual, the study shows. The results raise questions about systemic “economies of influence” over a document used by public health officials, health insurance plans and drug regulators, says lead investigator Lisa Cosgrove, professor of counseling and school psychology and a faculty fellow at the Applied Ethics Center at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. “Financial conflicts of interest, industry ties don’t point to wrongdoing — we’re not saying that people did anything wrong consciously,” Cosgrove says. “It’s just implicit bias.” DSM-5-TR decision-makers were not allowed to receive more than $5,000 from industry, according to a statement to The Transmitter by a spokesperson for the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which published the DSM-5-TR in March 2022. And an independent committee reviewed financial and non-financial disclosures for all other contributors to the revision. The text revision centered on literature searches to incorporate new scientific findings since the publication of the DSM-5 in 2013, the spokesperson wrote. “Any rare, minor instances of content that connected a diagnosis to a therapy were omitted from DSM-5-TR,” the spokesperson wrote. “No content was found in the submitted text that related to a specific treatment for which industry funding may have been provided for related research.” © 2023 Simons Foundation.

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29096 - Posted: 01.13.2024

Diana Fleischman Because of the flaming culture wars, feminists and others who disagree about the nature of sex or sex differences often ascribe significant harms to researchers who claim that sex is binary or who acknowledge biological sex differences. These perceived harms include oppression, inequality, and even murder and suicide. As a result, many influential voices in the sex difference debate rarely engage in dialogue. This context made “The Big Conversation”—an October conference that brought together a diverse group of feminists, evolutionary psychologists, biologists, and neuroscientists—such a remarkable event. The rarity of such a meeting was highlighted by the cancellation of a panel on sex differences at an annual anthropological conference just a few days before. People who had sniped at each other for years through academic papers and social media not only shared stages and panels, they broke bread together. Attendees on all sides of the issue held my baby, whom I brought along. The fear of meeting ideological opponents often leads to the expectation of hostility in person, but what’s worse is that you often will come to like them! The Big Conversation took years to come together. It was organized by sex difference expert Marco Del Giudice and Paul Golding of the Santa Fe Boys Foundation. This foundation is dedicated to exploring how to help boys and young men and was the event’s sponsor. The conference featured 16 talks and 5 discussion sections. The entire conference is available for viewing (for free!) on the Santa Fe Boys Foundation website. A central questions in sex difference research concerns the origins of differences between men and women. Are these differences primarily the result of socialization, culture, and stereotype effects, or are these differences largely innate or biological? We can call these perspectives, as Carole Hooven did during her talk, the strong socialization view and the strong biology view, respectively. Many of the conference attendees, like Gina Rippon, Cordelia Fine and Daphna Joel, endorse the strong socialization view of sex differences, arguing that men and women are innately psychologically similar but are driven into different roles by cultural forces and socialization. This perspective sparks controversy surrounding discussions on biological sex differences because its proponents argue that legitimizing and publicizing sex differences creates them where they did not exist before. © 2024 Colin Wright

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 29095 - Posted: 01.13.2024

By Conor Feehly A decade ago, when I was starting my first year of university in New Zealand, I attended a stage hypnosis. It was one of a number of events the university offered to incoming students during orientation week. From the stage of a campus auditorium, the hypnotist-for-hire asked an audience of some 200 students to close their eyes and listen to his voice. Then he directed us to clasp our hands tightly together, and to imagine an invisible thread wrapping around them—over and under, over and under—until it was impossible to pull them apart. After a few minutes of this, he told us to try to separate our hands. Those who could not, he said, should come on down to the stage. I instantly pulled my hands apart, but to my surprise, a close friend sitting next to me made his way to the front of the auditorium with roughly 20 others from the audience. Once on stage, the hypnotist tried to bring them deeper into a hypnotic trance, directing them to focus on his calm, authoritative voice. He then asked a few of them to role-play scenarios for our entertainment: a supermarket checkout clerk ringing up shopping items, a lifeguard scanning for lives to save. After a short time, I saw the hypnotist whisper something into the ear of my friend. He sheepishly made his way back to the seat next to me. “What did he say to you?” I asked. He replied, “I can tell you’re acting, mate, get off the stage.” In the more than 200 years since the practice of contemporary hypnosis was described by German physician Franz Mesmer, public perception of it has see-sawed between skepticism and credulity. Today hypnotherapy is used to provide therapeutic remedy for depression, pain, substance use disorders, and certain traumas, uses that are supported to a certain extent by research evidence. But many still consider hypnosis more of a cheap magician’s trick than legitimate clinical medicine. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 29094 - Posted: 01.13.2024

By Carl Zimmer Multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that affects 2.9 million people, presents a biological puzzle. Many researchers suspect that the disease is triggered by a virus, known as Epstein-Barr, which causes the immune system to attack the nerves and can leave patients struggling to walk or talk. But the virus can’t be the whole story, since nearly everyone is infected with it at some point in life. A new study found a possible solution to this paradox in the skeletal remains of a lost tribe of nomads who herded cattle across the steppes of western Asia 5,000 years ago. It turns out that the nomads carried genetic mutations that most likely protected them from pathogens carried by their animals, but that also made their immune systems more sensitive. These genes, the study suggests, made the nomads’ descendants prone to a runaway immune response. The finding is part of a larger, unprecedented effort to understand how the evolutionary past has shaped the health of living people. Researchers are analyzing thousands of genomes of people who lived between Portugal and Siberia and between Norway and Iran roughly 3,000 to 11,000 years ago. They hope to trace the genetic roots of not only multiple sclerosis, but also diabetes, schizophrenia and many other modern illnesses. “We are taking ancient human genomics to a whole new level,” said Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen who led the effort. The researchers published the multiple sclerosis study as well as three other papers on the genetics and health of ancient peoples on Wednesday in the journal Nature. For more than a decade, Dr. Willerslev and other researchers have been pulling DNA from ancient human bones. By comparing the surviving genetic material with that of living people, the scientists have been able to track some of the most significant migrations of people across the world. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Evolution
Link ID: 29093 - Posted: 01.11.2024

By Viviane Callier Aging can seem like an unregulated process: As time marches along, our cells and bodies inevitably accumulate dings and dents that cause dysfunctions, failures and ultimately death. However, in 1993 a discovery upended that interpretation of events. Researchers found a mutation in a single gene that doubled a worm’s life span; subsequent work showed that related genes, all involved in the response to insulin, are key regulators of aging in a host of animals, from worms and flies to humans. The discovery suggested that aging is not a random process — indeed, specific genes regulate it — and opened the door to further research into how aging proceeds at a molecular level. Recently, a set of papers documented a new biochemical pathway that regulates aging, one based on signals passed between mitochondria, the organelles best known as the powerhouse of the cell. Working with worms, the researchers found that damage to mitochondria in brain cells triggered a repair response that was then amplified, setting off similar reactions in mitochondria throughout the worm’s body. The effect of this repair activity was to extend the organism’s life span: The worms with repaired mitochondrial damage lived 50% longer. What’s more, cells in the germline — the cells that produce eggs and sperm — were central to this anti-aging communication system. It’s a finding that adds new dimensions to the fertility concerns implied when people talk about aging and their “biological clock.” Some of the findings were reported in Science Advances and others were posted on the scientific preprint server biorxiv.org in the fall. All Rights Reserved © 2024

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29092 - Posted: 01.11.2024

By Tim Vernimmen It is increasingly well understood that the countless microbes in our guts help us to digest our food, to absorb and produce essential nutrients, and to prevent harmful organisms from settling in. Less intuitive — perhaps even outlandish — is the idea that those microbes may also affect our mood, our mental health and how we perform on cognitive tests. But there is mounting evidence that they do. For nearly two decades, neuroscientist John Cryan of University College Cork in Ireland has been uncovering ways in which intestinal microbes affect the brain and behavior of humans and other animals. To his surprise, many of the effects he’s seen in rodents appear to be mirrored in our own species. Most remarkably, research by Cryan and others has shown that transplanting microbes from the guts of people with psychiatric disorders like depression to the guts of rodents can cause comparable symptoms in the animals. These effects may occur in several ways — through the vagus nerve connecting the gut to the brain, through the influence of gut bacteria on our immune systems, or by microbes synthesizing molecules that our nerve cells use to communicate. Cryan and coauthors summarize the science in a set of articles including “Man and the Microbiome: A New Theory of Everything?,” published in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology. Cryan told Knowable Magazine that even though it will take much more research to pin down the mechanisms and figure out how to apply the insights, there are some things we can do already. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Keyword: Depression; Stress
Link ID: 29091 - Posted: 01.11.2024

By Sara Reardon At birth, a human baby’s brain contains the most neurons it will ever have. How this complex brain develops in the womb has been hard to study in humans. But a new and potentially controversial method, growing tiny, brainlike structures called organoids in a dish from human fetal brain tissue, could provide a realistic model and improve the study of developmental disorders or brain cancers. The team that achieved this first, reported yesterday in Cell, has also shown it can genetically engineer the blobs of tissue, which could help the fetal brain organoids (FeBOs) mimic certain diseases. The researchers have “demonstrated some interesting and creative uses,” for the new organoids, says Arnold Kriegstein, a neurologist at the University of California (UC), San Francisco. He thinks FeBOs might help researchers tackle previously unexplored questions about how neurons take on specific identities in the maturing brain, for example. Researchers have already created organoids that mimic multiple parts of the brain and nervous system using stem cells that have the capacity to turn into many or all known cell types with the right stimulation and environment. To study genetic conditions that affect brain development, scientists can also “reprogram” mature cells from affected patients into stem cells to make organoids. Some stem cell–derived brain organoids, which are usually about the size of a grain of rice, have even produced electrical activity reminiscent of that in the brain of a fetus. But although these organoids can be useful representations of the brain, the starting stem cells must be “pushed” into a brainlike state through an introduced cocktail of signaling molecules—a complex process that may not fully replicate normal development, says stem cell biologist Benedetta Artegiani of the Princess Máxima Center for Pediatric Oncology. Using natural fetal brain tissue might reveal more about what the human brain really looks like at this stage of development. (Previous studies have made organoids from human fetal intestine, liver, and lung tissue, but not brain.) © 2024 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29090 - Posted: 01.11.2024

Pam Belluck A research team analyzed records of nearly a million women in Sweden’s national medical registries from 2001 through 2017, comparing 86,551 women who had perinatal depression with 865,510 women who did not. The groups were matched by age and year they gave birth. In two studies, the team found that depression that begins in pregnancy or soon after can have troubling implications for as long as 18 years. One study, published on Tuesday in JAMA Network Open, found that women with perinatal depression had three times the risk of suicidal behavior, defined as attempted or completed suicide, than women who did not experience perinatal depression. Risks were greatest in the year following their diagnosis, but, while they lessened over time, years later the risks were still twice as high compared with women without the disorder. The other study, published on Wednesday in BMJ, found that women with perinatal depression were more than six times at risk of dying by suicide as those without that diagnosis. The number of suicides was small, but it accounted for a large share of the deaths of women diagnosed with perinatal depression: 149 of the 522 deaths in that group, or 28.5 percent. For women without perinatal depression, there were 117 suicides out of 1,568 deaths or 7.5 percent. Suicide was a major reason women with perinatal depression were twice as likely to die from any cause over the 18-year period of the study compared with women without the disorder. The researchers also compared more than 20,000 women with perinatal depression to their biological sisters who gave birth during the same time frame and did not have the disorder. The risk of suicidal behavior for the sisters with perinatal depression was nearly three times that of their sisters without the diagnosis — almost as high as the difference between women with the illness and those without it to whom they were not related. That suggests depression plays a greater role in these outcomes than genetics or childhood environment, the researchers wrote. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 29089 - Posted: 01.11.2024

Jon Hamilton A new generation of blood tests is poised to change the way doctors determine whether patients with memory loss also have Alzheimer's disease. The tests detect substances in the blood that indicate the presence of sticky amyloid plaques in the brain — a hallmark of Alzheimer's. So these tests have the potential to replace current diagnostic procedures, like costly PET scans and uncomfortable spinal taps. Blood tests also promise to provide doctors with a quick way to identify patients who could benefit from new drugs that remove amyloid from the brain. But the accuracy of the tests still varies widely. "Some of them are really good, and some of them are really bad," says Dr. Suzanne Schindler, a dementia specialist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Blood tests represent the latest advance in efforts to detect the buildup of amyloid plaques and fibrous tangles in the brain. "It used to be that the only way you could definitively diagnose someone with Alzheimer disease is by doing an autopsy," Schindler says. Then, starting in the early 2000s, scientists found ways to detect plaques and tangles using PET scans and tests of spinal fluid. There are now versions of both approaches that are approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But the scans are costly, and spinal taps are unpopular with many doctors and patients. Both also require expertise that is in short supply. So Schindler and her colleagues got a lot of attention in 2019 when they published a paper showing that amyloid plaques could be revealed by a blood test. © 2024 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 29088 - Posted: 01.11.2024

By Christina Jewett and Benjamin Mueller In early 2020, the Food and Drug Administration responded to decades of escalating concerns about a commonly prescribed drug for asthma and allergies by deploying one of its most potent tools: a stark warning on the drug’s label that it could cause aggression, agitation and even suicidal thoughts. The agency’s label, which was primarily aimed at doctors, was supposed to sound an alert about the 25-year-old medication, Singulair, also known by its generic name, montelukast. But it barely dented use: The drug was still prescribed to 12 million people in the United States in 2022. Children face the greatest risks of the drug’s ill effects, and while usage by minors did decline, it was still taken by 1.6 million of them — including Nicole Sims’s son. Ms. Sims had no idea why, at 6, her son started having nightmares and hallucinations of a woman in the window. When he told her that he wanted to die, Ms. Sims went online, desperate for answers. Only then did she learn about the F.D.A. warning. She also found a Facebook support group with 20,000 members for people who had experienced side effects of the drug. Members of the group recounted a haunting toll that they linked to the drug with the help of peers, not their doctors. “It’s a mental health crisis that nobody is recognizing,” said Anna Maria Rosenberg, an administrator of the group. The F.D.A.’s handling of Singulair illustrates systemic gaps in the agency’s approach to addressing troubling side effects from medicines approved long ago — and to warning the public and doctors when serious issues arise. The agency had flagged the 2020 warning label, known as a “boxed warning,” to physicians’ groups, but it had not required that doctors be educated about the drug’s side effects. Federal regulators in 1998 initially dismissed evidence that emerged during the approval process about the drug’s potential to affect the brain and did not revise their assessment until two decades later. The F.D.A. was slow to alert the public as reports of psychiatric problems surfaced, highlighting deficiencies of a drug-monitoring system that puts the onus on drugmakers to report problems. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29087 - Posted: 01.09.2024

By Amber Dance 01.08.2024 We all want to be happy — and for decades, psychologists have tried to figure out how we might achieve that blissful state. The field’s many surveys and experiments have pointed to a variety of approaches, from giving stuff away to quitting Facebook to forcing one’s face into a toothy grin. But psychology has undergone serious upheaval over the last decade, as researchers realized that many studies were unreliable and unrepeatable. That has led to a closer scrutiny of psychological research methods, with the study of happiness no exception. So — what really makes us happy? Under today’s more careful microscope, some routes to happiness seem to hold up, while others appear not to, or have yet to re-prove themselves. Here’s what we know so far, and what remains to be reassessed, according to a new analysis in the Annual Review of Psychology. One long-standing hypothesis is that smiling makes you feel happier. In a classic 1988 study, researchers asked 92 Illinois undergraduates to hold a felt tip pen in their mouth either with their teeth, forcing an unnatural grin, or with their lips, making them pout. The students then looked at four examples of The Far Side comics. On average, those with the forced smiles found the one-panel comics slightly funnier than those with the forced pouts. But when 17 different research labs got together to retest the pen-clench smile’s effects on 1,894 new participants, the finding failed to hold up, the researchers reported in 2016. The repetition study was part of a broader effort to counter psychology’s reproducibility crisis, which in part has been attributed to the variety of ways in which researchers could examine and reanalyze their data until they arrived at publishable results. “It’s kind of like shooting a bunch of arrows at the wall and drawing the bullseye on after,” says Elizabeth Dunn, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and coauthor of the new Annual Review of Psychology paper.

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 29086 - Posted: 01.09.2024

By Mark Johnson In the first study of its kind in humans, researchers have discovered that it is safe to use sound waves fired into specific areas of the brain to open a protective barrier and clear the way for Alzheimer’s medications. The study, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, involved just three patients, but it raises hope about the long-term potential of the treatment strategy known as focused ultrasound. “We want to be very cautious. This is the first three people in the world that have had this [treatment]. What we’ve learned from this, I think, can help us,” said Ali Rezai, lead author of the study and executive chair and director of the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute at West Virginia University. Rezai stressed that the goal of the research is not to replace pharmaceutical treatments but to improve their benefits by helping more of the drug penetrate the brain. Nature has provided humans with a barrier made of tightly packed cells that blocks harmful toxins, such as viruses, bacteria and fungi, from reaching the brain. Known as the blood-brain barrier, this shield has for decades presented a major challenge to scientists trying to treat neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, which afflict at least 7 million Americans. The barrier is a locked door that stops about 98 percent of treatments from reaching the brain. With focused ultrasound, Rezai explained, “what we want to do is push individuals toward the milder stages of Alzheimer’s with less plaques to give them a fighting chance.” Two men and a woman suffering from mild loss of memory, learning, concentration and decision-making skills due to Alzheimer’s took part in the study. The patients, who ranged in age from 59 to 77, were given six monthly doses of the federally approved — if somewhat controversial — lab-made antibody aducanumab, sold under the brand name Aduhelm. The antibody, which is administered directly into a patient’s vein, reduces a sticky substance in the brain called amyloid beta, which clumps between neurons and disrupts their function.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Brain imaging
Link ID: 29085 - Posted: 01.09.2024

By Bill Sullivan Schizophrenia can produce persistent delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thinking. The precise cause is unknown but seems to involve a combination of genetics and environmental risk factors. One environmental factor may be an infectious agent, such as the common parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which causes toxoplasmosis. Since cats can transmit Toxoplasma to humans, scientists have been investigating whether there is a link between cat ownership and schizophrenia. Many studies have tried to answer this question over the past 50 years; some studies show an association, but others do not. Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia recently reanalyzed all these studies to determine the current consensus. What Is Toxoplasma? Toxoplasma is a single-celled parasite that infects all warm-blooded animals, including up to one-third of the human population. Cats are the only animals that support the sexual stage of the parasite’s life cycle, which culminates in the expulsion of infectious parasites in the feces. These fecal parasites are housed in sturdy containers called oocysts, which are stable in the environment for years and can spread the infection to a new individual if inhaled or ingested. In addition to litter boxes, people can pick up oocysts wherever a cat may have defecated, for example in the yard, sandbox, or garden (including unwashed fruits and vegetables). Oocysts have also made their way into streams and seawater, where they can infect people though shellfish. Up to 40 million people in the U.S. are infected with Toxoplasma. While a healthy immune system can control the parasite’s growth, it cannot get rid of the infection entirely. Toxoplasma parasites remain in the brain and other tissues as latent cysts, which can resume growth if the immune system is weakened.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29084 - Posted: 01.09.2024

By Aimee Cunningham Ask thousands of teens whether frequent use of certain substances brings a high risk of harm, and they mostly nail it: a majority say yes for cigarettes, alcohol, cocaine and heroin. But there’s one substance that many skip over — cannabis. Only 35 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds perceive a “great risk of harm” from smoking marijuana once or twice a week, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. It’s a sentiment that some of their parents may share. Parents often don’t understand that the products used today “are not what they knew when they were in high school,” says Kelly Young-Wolff, a licensed clinical psychologist and research scientist at Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research in Oakland. If their children are using cannabis, parents may think, “‘it’s not that bad, at least they’re not using this other drug that’s worse.’” But the cannabis products available now are leaps and bounds more potent — which may increase the risks for addiction and psychosis — than in the past. Marijuana plants have been bred to contain more delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive chemical. In 1995, the total percent of THC by weight of marijuana plant material was around 4 percent; now marijuana with a THC potency of 20 percent or more is available. Trouncing that are concentrated cannabis products, including wax, budder and shatter, which can have a THC potency as high as 95 percent. Cannabis is legal for adults to use recreationally in 24 states and Washington, D.C., and is allowed for medical use in 38 states and D.C. The widespread availability of cannabis “promotes the idea that it’s safe,” says pediatrician Beth Ebel of the University of Washington School of Medicine and Seattle Children’s Hospital. But that “is an incorrect assumption.” THC can impact brain chemistry “in a way that wasn’t intended,” Ebel says. “Some of the worst effects can have lifelong health consequences, especially for a young person.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29083 - Posted: 01.06.2024