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Advancing Geroscience & Gerotherapeutics — Dr. Nir Barzilai, MD, Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Dr. Nir Barzilai, MD (https://www.einsteinmed.edu/faculty/484/nir-barzilai/) is the Director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Human Aging Research and of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Nathan Shock Centers of Excellence in the Basic Biology of Aging. He is the Ingeborg and Ira Leon Rennert Chair of Aging Research, professor in the Departments of Medicine and Genetics, and member of the Diabetes Research Center and of the Divisions of Endocrinology & Diabetes and Geriatrics.

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Researchers at Eötvös Loránd University have investigated whether the perception of time changes with age, and if so, how, and why we perceive the passage of time differently. Their study was published in Scientific Reports.

Time can play tricks on us. Many of us experienced the illusion that those long summers during childhood felt so much longer than the same 3 months feel like now as an adult. While we can argue why one summer may appear longer than the other and how the perception of time can compress and dilate durations depending on various factors, we can easily set up an experiment to gain more insights.

The researchers just did that. They asked how eventfulness affects our duration estimates when probing at different milestones during our cognitive development. They set aside three age groups, 4–5, 9–10, and 18 years and older, and made them watch two videos, 1 minute each. The two videos were extracted from a popular animated series, balanced in visual and acoustic features, except for one feature: eventfulness.

Summary: Using advanced neuroimaging techniques, researchers discovered distant brain regions oscillate together in time.

Source: champalimaud centre for the unknown.

It’s been over 20 years since neuroimaging studies – using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a widely-used technology to capture live videos of brain activity – have been detecting brain-wide complex patterns of correlated brain activity that appear disrupted in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders.

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐦 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐭𝐰𝐨 𝐝𝐨𝐳𝐞𝐧 𝐩𝐚𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐝

An autism researcher lost two dozen papers to retraction in January, eight years after the publisher was made aware of potentially troubling editorial practices. Elsevier, the publisher, cited undisclosed conflicts of interest, duplicated methodology and a “compromised” peer-review process as reasons for the retractions.

The papers were published in Research in Developmental Disabilities and Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders between 2013 and 2014 — a period when Johnny Matson, then professor of psychology at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge and an author on all of the papers, was editor-in-chief of both journals.

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Rejuvenating an older person’s blood may now be within reach, based on recent findings from Passegué’s lab published in Nature Cell Biology(link is external and opens in a new window).

Passegué, with her graduate student Carl Mitchell, found that an anti-inflammatory drug, already approved for use in rheumatoid arthritis, can turn back time in mice and reverse some of the effects of age on the hematopoietic system.

Nature article:

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A 1967 publication titled “Mortality of Bereavement” discovered that bereaved relatives had a 7-fold increased risk of dying within the following year. Despite that the cause of death was undetermined, this is the first scientific evidence indicating that extreme sadness kills.

Coined in 1991, Takotsubo cardiomyopathy — or broken heart syndrome — mimic aspects of a heart attack such as shortness of breath, fainting, and chest pain. But, oddly, they have no blocked arteries. Instead, some parts of the heart stopped moving and other heart muscles try to compensate for this. This turns the heart into an irregular shape, like that of an octopus pot — hence, the name “Takotsubo” (‘Tako’ means octopus and ‘tsubo’ means pot in Japanese). This condition is reversible but can be fatal at times. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is triggered by intense emotions or stressful life events such as the death of a loved one and losing (or even winning) a lot of money. This is why “heartbroken” from sadness is a legitimate phenomenon.

Research advances further confirm that sadness, or more accurately emotional stress, destroy the heart in many ways. The mind-heart connection extends to far more than just the broken heart syndrome. Convincing epidemiological evidence ascertains that emotional pains can lead to heart diseases, the major killer worldwide, and this linkage is underpinned by biology.

The team behind the work suggest that eventually doctors might be able to grow blobs of brain tissue from a patient’s own cells in the lab and use them to repair brain injuries caused by stroke or trauma.

“This is incredibly exciting to me as a physician,” said Isaac Chen, a physician and assistant professor of neurosurgery at the University of Pennsylvania.

The study is the latest in the rapidly growing and ethically complex field of brain organoids. Scientists have shown that when cultivated in the right conditions, neurons begin to form tiny brain-like structures, allowing scientists to investigate developmental conditions such as autism and a wide range of basic neuroscience questions.

In 2023, the US healthcare industry is again facing several significant challenges, including ongoing high inflation rates, labor shortages, and the persistent impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite continued difficulties, leaders in the space are working to find innovative solutions to improve the current system while looking ahead at the promising future of medicine that appears to have already arrived.

From artificial intelligence-based medicine to breakthroughs in precision neuroscience, we outline key trends expected to shape the healthcare landscape in 2023 and beyond.

The 2023 Trend Report: Impactful Healthcare Innovations to Watch.

𝐏𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐳𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐜𝐮𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐜𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐠. 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐭 𝐬𝐚𝐟𝐞?

In 2021, Craig Gibbons was diagnosed with Lyme disease. His doctor prescribed him antibiotics, but the medication failed to eliminate one of his most debilitating symptoms: a lasting brain fog that made it difficult for him to focus or recall information.

So he went with a different approach: at-home brain stimulation.

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