Lifeboat Foundation

Psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia and depression, affect nearly one in five adults in the United States and nearly half of patients diagnosed with a psychiatric illness also meet the criteria for a second. With so much overlap, researchers have begun to suspect that there may be one neurobiological explanation for a variety of psychiatric illnesses. A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, investigated four pre-existing, publicly available neurological and psychiatric datasets, and pinpointed a network of brain areas underlying psychiatric illnesses. Their results are published in Nature Human Behavior.

“Traditionally, neurology and psychiatry have different diagnostic strategies,” said corresponding author Joseph J. Taylor, MD, Ph.D., Medical Director of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation at the Brigham’s Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics and an associate psychiatrist in the Brigham’s Department of Psychiatry. “Neurology asks: ‘Where is the lesion?’ and psychiatry asks: ‘What are the symptoms?’ We now have tools to explore the ‘where’ question for psychiatry disorders. In this study, we examined whether psychiatric disorders share a common brain network.”

The researchers began by analyzing a set of structural brain data from over 15,000 healthy controls as well as patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or anxiety. They found gray matter decreases in anterior cingulate and insula, two brain regions commonly associated with psychiatric illness. However, only a third of studies showed gray matter decreases in these brain regions. Additionally, neurodegenerative diseases also showed gray matter decreases in these same regions.

Emotional maltreatment, also known as psychological violence, is difficult to recognize and record both in research and in practice. That is why researchers at the Leipzig University Faculty of Medicine carried out a highly elaborate study on the psychological effects that abuse, neglect and emotional maltreatment have on children and adolescents. Examples of emotional abuse include when parents subject their children to extreme humiliation, threaten to put them in a home, or blame them for their own psychological distress or suicidal thoughts.

Physical violence between parents observed by children also plays a crucial role. “Our study findings clearly show that emotional maltreatment is not only a very common form of maltreatment, but also one with psychiatric consequences that are similar to or even more severe than other forms of maltreatment,” explains study leader and last author Dr. Lars White, research group leader at the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at Leipzig University Hospital.

In their study of 778 children, the Leipzig researchers, together with researchers from other German universities, found that 80 percent of the children and adolescents who reported having been maltreated had also experienced emotional maltreatment. This makes emotional maltreatment the most common form of child abuse.

An international study 13 years in the making demonstrates for the first time that degradation in the way DNA is organized and regulated — known as epigenetics — can drive aging in an organism, independently of changes to the genetic code itself.

Rats and mice have been the backbone of biomedical research for decades—including research to understand cancer and pioneer new treatments.

New drug compounds are tested for safety and effectiveness in animal models before being approved for clinical trials in humans.

But scientists at research institutions like Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center’s Sloan Kettering Institute are working to develop nonmammalian alternatives that could reduce the number of rodents used in biomedical research —a positive result in its own right, and one that could also lower costs and accelerate results.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biology Tübingen address the long-standing question of how benign gut microbes evade the immune system. In doing so, they also reshape our understanding of how immune receptors interact with the bacterial motility protein flagellin.

The scientists identified a new type of flagellin in the human gut, termed “silent flagellin,” that binds to the immune receptor Toll-like receptor 5 without inducing a pro-inflammatory response. The findings provide a mechanism for the immune system to tolerate beneficial microbes while remaining responsive to pathogens.

The human gut is the habitat of benign, beneficial, and sometimes harmful bacteria. In order to fight off these last-mentioned pathogens, the immune system first recognizes the presence of microbial products via various receptors. One of these is Toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5): it binds flagellin, the protein that makes up the bacterial flagellum, which bacteria use to swim. Once bound to flagellin, TLR5 induces a pro-inflammatory immune response.

Microsoft’s new voice-cloning AI can simulate a speaker’s voice with remarkable accuracy — and all it needs to get started is a three-second sample of them talking.

Voice cloning 101: Voice cloning isn’t new. Google the term, and you’ll get a long list of links to websites and apps offering to train an AI to produce audio that sounds just like you. You can then use the clone to hear yourself “read” any text you like.

For a writer, this can be useful for creating an author-narrated audio version of their book without spending days in a recording studio. A voice actor, meanwhile, might clone their voice so that they can rent out the AI for projects they don’t have time to tackle themselves.

A data set funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative shows how research software and tools are used across disciplines — and helps developers gain credit for their work.

I had similar symptoms, and I thought it was a covid infection. I need to get myself tested for ADEM. If your child or family member has a strange rash on the back or legs, take them to the hospital to see if it is ADEM before they have seizures like I did.

The objective of this study was to provide an overview of acute disseminating encephalomyelitis, a potential and serious complication of COVID-19.

Blood investigations and CSF analysis were done in 17 patients. Raised inflammatory markers were most commonly seen in nine (ferritin raised in four, C-reactive protein in five, and D-dimer in five), and lymphopenia was seen in four patients.

Continue reading “COVID-19-Associated Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis: A Systematic Review” »

A recent study published in Viruses reviewed the characteristics of neuraminidase (NA) with emphasis on the development of NA-based universal influenza vaccines.

Influenza causes significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. The influenza virus harbors two glycoproteins on the surface – hemagglutinin (HA) and NA. Infection-or vaccine-induced immune responses are targeted toward HA. Besides, NA-specific antibodies confer protection and can reduce infection severity.

Existing seasonal influenza vaccines confer narrow immune responses specific to the strain, and their efficacy depends on how well the vaccine strains match those in circulation. Thus, universal influenza vaccines with high breadth and potency are required. In the present study, the authors discussed the characteristics of NA, anti-NA antibodies, and recent progress in developing NA-based vaccines.