Scientists have made remarkable progress in understanding the underlying changes that make cancer grow and have applied this knowledge to develop and guide targeted treatment approaches to vastly improve outcomes for people with many cancer types. And yet treatment progress for people with brain tumors known as gliomas—including the most aggressive glioblastomas—has remained slow. One reason is that doctors lack tests that reliably predict which among many therapeutic options will work best for a given tumor.

Now an NIH-funded team has developed a miniature device with the potential to change this for the approximately 25,000 people diagnosed with brain cancers in the U.S. each year [1]. When implanted into cancerous brain tissue during surgery, the rice-sized drug-releasing device can simultaneously conduct experiments to measure a tumor’s response to more than a dozen drugs or drug combinations. What’s more, a small clinical trial reported in Science Translational Medicine offers the first evidence in people with gliomas that these devices can safely offer unprecedented insight into tumor-specific drug responses [2].

These latest findings come from a Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, team led by Pierpaolo Peruzzi and Oliver Jonas. They recognized that drug-screening studies conducted in cells or tissue samples in the lab too often failed to match what happens in people with gliomas undergoing cancer treatment. Wide variation within individual brain tumors also makes it hard to predict a tumor’s likely response to various treatment options.

For those with stubbornly resistant forms of severe depression, ketamine was looking more and more like a solution. Years of research has hinted at the dissociative anesthetic’s treatment potential where other medications failed, promising the benefits of electroshock therapy with far fewer risks.

For all of the excitement, separating the hope from the hype has been challenged by the drug’s strong psychoactive effects. How can you conduct a blind test for a drug that so overtly detaches the mind from the body?

By taking advantage of the unconscious state of patients under general anesthesia, researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine in the US put ketamine to the ultimate, gold standard test.

Having more pixels could advance everything from biomedical imaging to astronomical observations.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have built a superconducting camera containing 400,000 pixels — 400 times more than any other device of its type.

Superconducting cameras allow scientists to capture very weak light signals, whether from distant objects in space or parts of the human brain. Having more pixels could open up many new applications in science and biomedical research.

A meta-analysis showed improvement of neuropsychiatric symptoms with acetylcholinesterase inhibitors in Alzheimer disease and Parkinson disease, although effect sizes were small.

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Neuropsychiatric symptoms are challenging to treat in patients with neurodegenerative conditions. In this meta-analysis, researchers investigated the effect of cholinesterase inhibitors (ChEI) on neuropsychiatric symptoms in those with Alzheimer disease (AD) or Parkinson disease (PD). Studies in the analysis included placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials that included at least one ChEI — i.e., donepezil, rivastigmine, or galantamine — and applied at least one validated neuropsychiatric measure, with the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) being the most used measure studied. The primary outcomes were hallucinations and delusions. Secondary outcomes included all other neuropsychiatric outcomes.

Original participant data for 6,649 individuals with AD or PD from 17 trials were available for analysis out of 34 eligible trials. In patients with AD, ChEI use was associated with significantly fewer delusions (effect size, −0.08) and hallucinations (−0.09) compared with placebo. In the PD subgroup, ChEIs also were associated with significantly fewer delusions (−0.14) and hallucinations (−0.08). These effects did not differ among ChEI types. ChEIs were associated with lower appetite scores in the AD group and with significantly improved total neuropsychiatric scores in the PD group (−0.18). Increases in baseline neuropsychiatric scores were associated with greater effect size favoring ChEIs in those with PD. Lower baseline cognitive score was associated with increased effect size favoring ChEIs in both AD and PD.

Based on this meta-analysis, ChEIs could be considered in appropriate patients, since ChEIs may reduce hallucinations and delusions in people with AD or PD. Greater effects may be possible if neuropsychiatric symptoms or lower cognitive scores are present at the time of initiation. ChEIs decreased appetite scores in AD, which should be considered in those who are underweight. Whether ChEIs also improve neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia with Lewy bodies requires further study, since data were insufficient to assess that population in this analysis.

Neurologists at the biggest Alzheimer’s research meeting in the US experienced something this week they hadn’t in years: optimism.