By Robert Kolker Barb was the youngest in her large Irish Catholic family — a surprise baby, the ninth child, born 10 years after the eighth. Living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, her family followed the football schedule: high school games on Friday night, college games on Saturday, the Steelers on Sunday. Dad was an engineer, mom was a homemaker and Barb was the family mascot, blond and adorable, watching her brothers and sisters finish school and go on to their careers. Barb was the only child left at home in the 1980s to witness the seams of her parents’ marriage come apart. Her father all but left, and her mother turned inward, sitting quietly in front of the television, always smoking, often with a cocktail. Something had overtaken her, though it wasn’t clear what. Barb observed it all with a measure of detachment; her parents had been older than most, and her sisters and brothers supplied more than enough parental energy to make up the difference. And so in 1990, when Barb was 14 and her mother learned she had breast cancer and died within months at the age of 62, Barb was shattered and bewildered but also protected. Her siblings had already stepped in, three of them living back home. Together they arrived at a shared understanding of the tragedy. Their mother could have lived longer if she had cut back on her drinking sooner or gone to see a doctor or hadn’t smoked. Six years later, Barb was 20 and in college when someone else in the family needed help. Her sister Christy was the second-born, 24 years older than Barb and the star of the family in many ways. She had traveled extensively as a pharmaceutical-company executive while raising two children with her husband in a nice house in a New Jersey suburb. But where once Christy was capable and professionally ambitious and socially conscious, now, at 44, she was alone, her clothes unkempt and ripped, her hair unwashed, her marriage over. Again, the family came together: Susan, the third-born, volunteered to take care of Christy full time, and Jenny, the eighth, searched for a specialist (the family members asked to be identified by their first names to protect their privacy). Depression was the first suspected diagnosis, then schizophrenia, though neither seemed quite right. Christy wasn’t sad or delusional; she wasn’t even upset. It was more as if she were reverting to a childlike state, losing her knack for self-regulation. Her personality was diluting — on its way out, with seemingly nothing to replace it. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 28855 - Posted: 07.22.2023

Geneva Abdul The so-called “brain fog” symptom associated with long Covid is comparable to ageing 10 years, researchers have suggested. In a study by King’s College London, researchers investigated the impact of Covid-19 on memory and found cognitive impairment highest in individuals who had tested positive and had more than three months of symptoms. The study, published on Friday in a clinical journal published by The Lancet, also found the symptoms in affected individuals stretched to almost two years since initial infection. “The fact remains that two years on from their first infection, some people don’t feel fully recovered and their lives continue to be impacted by the long-term effects of the coronavirus,” said Claire Steves, a professor of ageing and health at King’s College. “We need more work to understand why this is the case and what can be done to help.” An estimated two million people living in the UK were experiencing self-reported long Covid – symptoms continuing for more than four weeks since infection – as of January 2023, according to the 2023 government census. Commonly reported symptoms included fatigue, difficulty concentrating, shortness of breath and muscle aches. The study included more than 5,100 participants from the Covid Symptom Study Biobank, recruited through a smartphone app. Through 12 cognitive tests measuring speed and accuracy, researchers examined working memory, attention, reasoning and motor controls between two periods of 2021 and 2022. © 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited or

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 28854 - Posted: 07.22.2023

Max Kozlov Dead in California but alive in New Jersey: that was the status of 13-year-old Jahi McMath after physicians in Oakland, California, declared her brain dead in 2013, after complications from a tonsillectomy. Unhappy with the care that their daughter received and unwilling to remove life support, McMath’s family moved with her to New Jersey, where the law allowed them to lodge a religious objection to the declaration of brain death and keep McMath connected to life-support systems for another four and a half years. Prompted by such legal discrepancies and a growing number of lawsuits around the United States, a group of neurologists, physicians, lawyers and bioethicists is attempting to harmonize state laws surrounding the determination of death. They say that imprecise language in existing laws — as well as research done since the laws were passed — threatens to undermine public confidence in how death is defined worldwide. “It doesn’t really make a lot of sense,” says Ariane Lewis, a neurocritical care clinician at NYU Langone Health in New York City. “Death is something that should be a set, finite thing. It shouldn’t be something that’s left up to interpretation.” Since 2021, a committee in the Uniform Law Commission (ULC), a non-profit organization in Chicago, Illinois, that drafts model legislation for states to adopt, has been revising its recommendation for the legal determination of death. The drafting committee hopes to clarify the definition of brain death, determine whether consent is required to test for it, specify how to handle family objections and provide guidance on how to incorporate future changes to medical standards. The broader membership of the ULC will offer feedback on the first draft of the revised law at a meeting on 26 July. After members vote on it, the text could be ready for state legislatures to consider by the middle of next year. But as the ULC revision process has progressed, clinicians who were once eager to address these issues have become increasingly worried. © 2023 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 28853 - Posted: 07.22.2023

By Pam Belluck Treating Alzheimer’s patients as early as possible — when symptoms and brain pathology are mildest — provides a better chance of slowing cognitive decline, a large study of an experimental Alzheimer’s drug presented Monday suggests. The study of 1,736 patients reported that the drug, donanemab, made by Eli Lilly, can modestly slow the progression of memory and thinking problems in early stages of Alzheimer’s, and that the slowing was greatest for early-stage patients when they had less of a protein that creates tangles in the brain. For people at that earlier stage, donanemab appeared to slow decline in memory and thinking by about four and a half to seven and a half months over an 18-month period compared with those taking a placebo, according to the study, published in the journal JAMA. Among people with less of the protein, called tau, slowing was most pronounced in those younger than 75 and those who did not yet have Alzheimer’s but had a pre-Alzheimer’s condition called mild cognitive impairment, according to data presented Monday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Amsterdam. “The earlier you can get in there, the more you can impact it before they’ve already declined and they’re on this fast slope,” Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, Eli Lilly’s chief medical and scientific officer, said in an interview. “No matter how you cut the data — earlier, younger, milder, less pathology — every time, it just looks like early diagnosis and early intervention are the key to managing this disease,” he added. The findings and the recent approval of another drug that modestly slows decline in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, Leqembi, signal a potentially promising turn in the long, rocky path toward finding effective medications for Alzheimer’s, a brutal disease that plagues more than six million Americans. Donanemab is currently being considered for approval by the Food and Drug Administration. © 2023 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 28852 - Posted: 07.19.2023

Nicola Davis Science correspondent Taking part in activities such as chess, writing a journal, or educational classes in older age may help to reduce the risk of dementia, a study has suggested. According to the World Health Organization, more than 55 million people have the disease worldwide, most of them older people. However experts have long emphasised that dementia is not an inevitable part of ageing, with being active, eating well and avoiding smoking among the lifestyle choices that can reduce risk. Now researchers have revealed fresh evidence that challenging the brain could also be beneficial. Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, researchers in the US and Australia report how they used data from the Australian Aspree Longitudinal Study of Older Persons covering the period from 1 March 2010 to 30 November 2020. Participants in the study were over the age of 70, did not have a major cognitive impairment or cardiovascular disease when recruited between 2010 and 2014, and were assessed for dementia through regular study visits. In the first year, participants were asked about their social networks. They were also questioned on whether they undertook certain leisure activities or trips out to venues such as galleries or restaurants, and how frequently: never, rarely, sometimes, often or always. The team analysed data from 10,318 participants, taking into account factors such as age, sex, smoking status, education, socioeconomic status, and whether participants had other diseases such as diabetes. The results reveal that for activities such as writing letters or journals, taking educational classes or using a computer, increasing the frequency of participation by one category, for example from “sometimes” to “often”, was associated with an 11% drop in the risk of developing dementia over a 10-year period. Similarly, increased frequency of activities such as card games, chess or puzzle-solving was associated with a 9% reduction in dementia risk. © 2023 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Alzheimers; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 28851 - Posted: 07.19.2023

by Holly Barker By bloating brain samples and imaging them with a powerful microscope, researchers can reconstruct neurons across the entire mouse brain, according to a new preprint. The technique could help scientists uncover the neural circuits responsible for complex behaviors, as well as the pathways that are altered in neurological conditions. Tracking axons can help scientists understand how individual neurons and brain areas communicate over long distances. But tracing their path through the brain is tricky, says study investigator Adam Glaser, senior scientist at the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics in Seattle, Washington. Axons, which are capable of spanning the entire brain, can be less than a micrometer in diameter, so mapping their route requires detailed imaging, he says. One existing approach involves a microscope that slices off an ultra-thin section of the brain and then scans it, repeating the process about 20,000 times to capture the entire mouse brain. Scientists then blend the images together to form a 3D reconstruction of neuronal pathways. But the process takes several days and is therefore more prone to complications — bubbles forming on the lens, say — than faster techniques, Glaser says. And slicing can distort the edges of the image, making it “challenging or impossible” to stitch them back together, says Paul Tillberg, principal scientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, who was not involved in the study. “This is particularly an issue when reconstructing brain-wide axonal projections, where a single point of confusion can misalign an entire axonal arbor to the wrong neuron,” he says. © 2023 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 28850 - Posted: 07.19.2023

By Alejandra Manjarrez Rafael Jiménez Medina learned how to hunt elusive Iberian moles in the fields of southern Spain in the 1980s, when he was a young PhD student in genetics at the University of Granada. A local hunter of the moles (Talpa occidentalis) taught him how to capture these solitary, aggressive and territorial animals. The moles dig subterranean galleries and labyrinths in the meadows of the Iberian Peninsula, especially those with soft soils rich in earthworms, their favorite food. Such activity can benefit the soil — by aerating or mixing it — but the moles’ presence and constant movement in cultivated land raise the ire of farmers, who pay hunters to get rid of them. Jiménez Medina had a different motivation for hunting these subterranean mammals. His doctoral project was to visualize and analyze their chromosomes, which meant collecting, preparing and examining samples from the testes of males. His lab analyses led to a curious finding: Some of the moles he had identified as males were in fact genetically females — that is, their sex chromosomes were XX (female) and not XY (male). The confusion, we now know, stems from the unusual composition of the reproductive organs of female moles. In contrast to most female mammals, which have only ovaries, female Iberian moles also have testicular tissue. This tissue anatomically resembles male testicles but differs in that it produces testosterone but no sperm. The female mole’s organs are composed of both an ovarian and a testicular portion and are known as ovotestes. In addition, female moles have a clitoris covered with a foreskin and with an elongated appearance that resembles a penis; they urinate through this structure. Another unique anatomical feature is that during these females’ juvenile stage, the vaginal orifice remains closed. © 2023 Annual Reviews

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 28849 - Posted: 07.19.2023

By David Ovalle The evolving overdose crisis in the United States is making another lethal turn, federal disease trackers reported Wednesday: Increasingly, people dying from opioids are also using stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine. An analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that between 2011 and 2021, the age-adjusted rate of overdose deaths involving opioids and cocaine nearly quintupled, far outpacing the rate of deaths involving only cocaine. In 2021 alone, nearly 80 percent of the 24,486 cocaine overdose deaths recorded in the United States also involved an opioid. Experts say it represents the latest wave of the nation’s drug epidemic. For many users injecting or smoking fentanyl for some time, “adding a stimulant makes the drug feel like it did in the beginning,” said Daniel Ciccarone, a professor of addiction medicine at the University of California at San Francisco who has been studying the simultaneous use of stimulants and opioids. The federal analysis adds clarity to the staggering number of drug poisonings, largely driven by fentanyl, which can be up to 50 times more powerful than heroin. The CDC estimates that in 2022, more than 110,000 people succumbed to overdoses, edging past the previous year but representing a plateau from earlier spikes. Preliminary CDC data also suggest a slight increase in deaths in 2022 involving opioids taken with cocaine and psychostimulants such as meth. “These aren’t mutually exclusive categories. Someone can die of more than one drug,” said CDC researcher Merianne Rose Spencer, who led the analysis. The international cocaine market has thrived despite shutdowns associated with the coronavirus pandemic, according to the U.N.’s Global Report on Cocaine 2023, with record production in Latin America, new trafficking hubs in Africa and increased seizures.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 28848 - Posted: 07.19.2023

Lilly Tozer Injecting ageing monkeys with a ‘longevity factor’ protein can improve their cognitive function, a study reveals. The findings, published on 3 July in Nature Aging1, could lead to new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases. It is the first time that restoring levels of klotho — a naturally occurring protein that declines in our bodies with age — has been shown to improve cognition in a primate. Previous research on mice had shown that injections of klotho can extend the animals’ lives and increases synaptic plasticity2 — the capacity to control communication between neurons, at junctions called synapses. “Given the close genetic and physiological parallels between primates and humans, this could suggest potential applications for treating human cognitive disorders,” says Marc Busche, a neurologist at the UK Dementia Research Institute group at University College London. The protein is named after the Greek goddess Clotho, one of the Fates, who spins the thread of life. The study involved testing the cognitive abilities of old rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta), aged around 22 years on average, before and after a single injection of klotho. To do this, researchers used a behavioural experiment to test for spatial memory: the monkeys had to remember the location of an edible treat, placed in one of several wells by the investigator, after it was hidden from them. Study co-author Dena Dubal, a physician-researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, compares the test to recalling where you left your car in a car park, or remembering a sequence of numbers a couple of minutes after hearing it. Such tasks become harder with age. The monkeys performed significantly better in these tests after receiving klotho — before the injections they identified the correct wells around 45% of the time, compared with around 60% of the time after injection. The improvement was sustained for at least two weeks. Unlike in previous studies involving mice, relatively low doses of klotho were effective. This adds an element of complexity to the findings, which suggests a more nuanced mode of actions than was previously thought, Busche says. © 2023 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 28847 - Posted: 07.06.2023

Jon Hamilton Dr. Josef Parvizi remembers meeting a man with epilepsy whose seizures were causing some very unusual symptoms. "He came to my clinic and said, 'My sense of self is changing,'" says Parvizi, a professor of neurology at Stanford University. The man told Parvizi that he felt "like an observer to conversations that are happening in my mind" and that "I just feel like I'm floating in space." Parvizi and a team of researchers would eventually trace the man's symptoms to a "sausage-looking piece of brain" called the anterior precuneus. This area, nestled between the brain's two hemispheres, appears critical to a person's sense of inhabiting their own body, or bodily self, the team recently reported in the journal Neuron. The finding could help researchers develop forms of anesthesia that use electrical stimulation instead of drugs. It could also help explain the antidepressant effects of mind-altering drugs like ketamine. It took Parvizi's team years of research to discover the importance of this obscure bit of brain tissue. In 2019, when the man first came to Stanford's Comprehensive Epilepsy Program, Parvizi thought his symptoms were caused by seizures in the posteromedial cortex, an area toward the back of the brain. This area includes a brain network involved in the narrative self, a sort of internal autobiography that helps us define who we are. Parvizi's team figured that the same network must be responsible for the bodily self too. "Everybody thought, 'Well, maybe all kinds of selves are being decoded by the same system,'" he says. © 2023 npr

Keyword: Attention; Consciousness
Link ID: 28846 - Posted: 07.06.2023

By Anil Seth In 1870, Alfred Russell Wallace wagered £500—a huge sum in those days—that he could prove the flat-Earther John Hampden wrong. Wallace duly did so, but the aggrieved Hampden never paid up. Since then, a lively history of scientific wagers has ensued—many of them instigated by Stephen Hawking. Just last month in New York, the most famous recent wager was settled: a 25-year-old bet over one of the last great mysteries in science and philosophy. The bettors were neuroscientist Christof Koch and philosopher David Chalmers, both known for their pioneering work on the nature of consciousness. Chalmers won. Koch paid up. Back in the late 1990s, consciousness science was full of renewed promise. Koch—a natural optimist—believed that 25 years was more than enough time for scientists to uncover the neural correlates of consciousness: those patterns of brain activity that underlie each and every one of our conscious experiences. Chalmers, a philosopher and therefore something of a pessimist by profession, demurred. In 1998, the pair staked a crate of fine wine on the outcome. The bet was finally called at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in New York a couple of weeks ago. Koch graciously handed Chalmers a bottle of Madeira on the conference stage. While much more is known about consciousness today than in the ’90s, its true neural correlates—and indeed a consensus theory of consciousness—still elude us. What helped resolve the wager was the outcome, or rather the lack of a decisive outcome, of an “adversarial collaboration” organized by a consortium called COGITATE. Adversarial collaborations encourage researchers from different theoretical camps to jointly design experiments that can distinguish between their theories. In this case, the theories in question were integrated information theory (IIT), the brainchild of Giulio Tononi, and the neuronal global workspace theory (GWT), championed by Stanislas Dehaene. The two scientists made predictions, based on their respective theories, about what kinds of brain activity would be recorded in an experiment in which participants looked at a series of images—but neither predicted outcome fully played out. © 2023 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 28845 - Posted: 07.06.2023

By Tammy Worth In two decades as a pediatrician, Jason Reynolds has had no success treating patients with opioid use disorder by sending them to rehab. But five years ago, when his Massachusetts practice, Wareham Pediatric Associates PC, became the first in the state to offer medication therapy to adolescent patients, he saw dramatic results. The first patient he treated with medication, a young man named Nate, had overdosed on opioids twice in the 24-hour period before seeing Reynolds. But that patient has had no opioid relapses since starting drug therapy. Reynolds’ success received a lot of media attention, and one interviewer, he recalls, asked Nate if any of his friends would also consider starting the treatment. Reynolds is among a small minority of pediatricians using medication to treat opioid use disorder in adolescents. Fewer than 2 percent of all physicians prescribing the medications are pediatricians, and many youth rehabilitation facilities don’t offer them at all. Medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) uses buprenorphine or methadone to reduce cravings and withdrawal symptoms, or naltrexone to block the high that users would otherwise get if they decided to use opioids. Though MOUD is often used to treat adults, several barriers have prevented it from being adopted more widely for youth. Reynolds and a handful of other practitioners across the country are now working to provide education and training to other health care providers, hoping to increase use of this life-saving treatment. Opioid use among US youth is on the rise nationally, with diagnoses increasing from 0.26 per 100,000 person-years in 2001 to 1.51 in 2014. Overdose deaths have also spiked, more than doubling among youth ages 14 to 18, from 492 in 2019 to 1,146 in 2021. © 2023 Annual Reviews

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 28844 - Posted: 07.06.2023

By Stephanie Pappas Have you felt butterflies in your stomach or hunger pangs? Those “gut feelings” happen thanks to the vagus nerve, which is a superhighway that connects the brain and the gut. In recent years the vagus nerve has become an intriguing target for researchers looking to cure disorders of both the brain and the body. Vagus nerve stimulation—usually achieved with an electrode implanted in the neck to deliver electrical pulses directly to the nerve—is an approved treatment for epilepsy and some forms of depression. Scientists are now studying vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) for disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis and the inflammatory bowel disease Crohn’s. What gives this nerve such widespread impact? The vagus nerve is the longest of the cranial nerves, which emerge directly from the brain rather than traveling through the spinal cord. It begins at an opening at the base of the skull and runs down the neck and into the abdomen, where it collects signals from the viscera and helps regulate the automatic processes of the body, from digestion to sleep to inflammation. About 80 percent of its signals are sensory ones that travel from the inner organs up to the brain, while the other 20 percent travel from the brain to the body and regulate things such as intestinal contractions and heart rate. The vagus nerve is the key player in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the “rest and digest” system that calms the body during times of low stress. “If you are relaxed, if you are sleeping, if you are in a restorative phase, it’s the vagus nerve dominating,” says Gregor Hasler, a psychiatrist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who has written about the gut-brain connection.

Keyword: Depression; Epilepsy
Link ID: 28843 - Posted: 07.06.2023

By Darren Incorvaia When Ambika Kamath was a graduate student in evolutionary biology at Harvard University, she knew one thing for sure: She wasn’t going to research anoles, the lizards that her adviser, Jonathan Losos, specialized in. “I started out as one of those rebellious renegades,” Kamath says, determined to pursue her own research subject. So she went to India for a couple of years to study the poorly understood fan-throated lizards. But when she tried to map out their territories, she found chaos. “All of the lizards were moving everywhere,” she says. Losos encouraged her to work with anoles after all, because it was well established that males hold individual territories that they protect from other males, and females only mate with the male whose territory they reside in. That would make it more straightforward for Kamath to study how anole territoriality differed across habitat types, like forests and parks. So Kamath went to Florida, where she identified individual anoles and tracked their movements day in, day out. Kamath studied the anoles “in a larger area, in a longer period of time than anyone else had ever done,” says Losos, who is now at Washington University in St. Louis. But instead of revealing territorial differences, this massive dataset showed that the anoles weren’t actually territorial in the first place. Kamath looked into the historical record to see where the idea of anole territoriality originated. It started with a 1933 paper that described frequent sexual behavior between male lizards in the lab. The authors had concluded that this lab behavior must be “prevented by something” in the wild, Kamath says, which they inferred was the males protecting territories. “The very first conclusion,” she says, “was based on a homophobic response to observing male-male copulation.” That shaky conclusion caught on, and later researchers assumed it to be true. Introducing a feminist perspective © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 28842 - Posted: 07.06.2023

By Sujata Gupta Teenagers in the United States are in crisis. That news got hammered home earlier this year following the release of a nationally representative survey showing that over half of high school girls reported persistent feelings of “sadness or hopelessness” — common words used to screen for depression. Almost a third of teenage boys reported those same feelings. “No one is doing well,” says psychologist Kathleen Ethier. She heads the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, which has overseen this biennial Youth Risk Behavior Survey since 1991. During the latest round of data collection, in fall 2021, over 17,000 students from 31 states responded to roughly 100 questions related to mental health, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, sexual behavior, substance use and experiences of violence. One chart in particular garnered considerable media attention. From 2011 to 2021, persistent sadness or hopelessness in boys went up 8 percentage points, from 21 to 29 percent. In girls, it rose a whopping 21 percentage points, from 36 to 57 percent. Some of that disparity may arise from the fact that girls in the United States face unique stressors, researchers say. Compared with boys, girls seem more prone to experiencing mental distress from social media use, are more likely to experience sexual violence and are dealing with a political climate that is often hostile to women’s rights (SN: 7/16/22 & 7/30/22, p. 6). But the gap between boys and girls might not be as wide as the numbers indicate. Depression manifests differently in boys and men than in girls and women, mounting evidence suggests. Girls are more likely to internalize feelings, while boys are more likely to externalize them. Rather than crying when feeling down, for instance, boys may act irritated or lash out. Or they may engage in risky, impulsive or even violent acts. Inward-directed terms like “sadness” and “hopelessness” miss those more typically male tendencies. And masculine norms that equate sadness with weakness may make males who are experiencing those emotions less willing to admit it, even on an anonymous survey. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023

Keyword: Depression; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 28841 - Posted: 07.01.2023

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