Copenhagen University Hospital’s VIRTU Research Group reports that an immersive virtual reality-assisted therapy called Challenge-VRT yielded a statistically significant, short-term reduction in auditory verbal hallucination severity among Danish adults with schizophrenia spectrum disorders.
Auditory verbal hallucinations rank among the most frequent and distressing features of schizophrenia, affecting roughly 75% of patients and resisting medication in about one-third. Approximately 13% of patients experience worsening hallucinations during their first decade of illness.
Current cognitive behavioral and relational psychotherapies show modest effects, leaving a clear unmet need for innovative treatment approaches.
Why do so many people relapse after quitting cocaine? A new study from The Hebrew University reveals that a specific “anti-reward” brain circuit becomes hyperactive during withdrawal—driving discomfort and pushing users back toward the drug. Surprisingly, this circuit may also serve as a built-in protective mechanism, offering new hope for addiction treatment.
Cocaine addiction has long been understood as a tug-of-war between reward and restraint. The rush of dopamine keeps users hooked, while withdrawal triggers anxiety, depression, and despair. But a new study by researchers at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem reveals that it’s not just the craving for pleasure—but the brain’s aversion to pain—that plays a powerful role in relapse.
Led by Prof. Yonatan M. Kupchik and Ph.D. student Liran Levi from the Faculty of Medicine, the study, appearing in Science Advances, identifies a specific “anti-reward” network deep in the brain that undergoes lasting changes during cocaine use, withdrawal, and re-exposure. This glutamatergic network, located in the ventral pallidum, is emerging as a key player in addiction—and a promising target for future therapies.
A new study of children in schooled and unschooled environments, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, raises questions about some of the assumptions underlying the way psychologists and scholars of cognitive science think about these processes.
Instead of defining an innate, basic feature of human cognition, the executive functions supposedly captured in the assessments are likelier to depend on the influence of formal schooling.
The study, “The cultural construction of ‘executive function,’” tested children in the Kunene region of Africa, which spans the countries of Namibia and Angola, as well as children in the U.K. and Bolivia. Children in rural areas of Kunene who received limited or no formal schooling differed profoundly in so-called executive function testing from their schooled peers, or a “typical” Western schooled sample.
According to new research, communication between the gut and the brain is sophisticated enough to be classed as a new and distinct sense – one capable of affecting our appetite and even our mood.
This two-way link has previously been associated with a variety of health issues, though the physical processes at work have never been clearly identified.
Building on what we already know about our digestive and neurological systems, a team from Duke University in the US traced a series of biochemical actions from the digestive tracts of mice to their brains.
Remote, scalable cognitive behavioral therapy–based chronic pain programs are effective for treating individuals with high-impact chronic pain.
Importance Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) skills training interventions are recommended first-line nonpharmacologic treatment for chronic pain, yet they are not widely accessible.
Objective To examine effectiveness of remote, scalable CBT-based chronic pain (CBT-CP) treatments (telehealth and self-completed online) for individuals with high-impact chronic pain, compared with usual care.
Design, Setting, and Participants This comparative effectiveness, 3-group, phase 3 randomized clinical trial enrolled 2,331 eligible patients with high-impact chronic musculoskeletal pain from 4 geographically diverse health care systems in the US from January 2021 through February 2023. Follow-up concluded in April 2024.
An over-the-counter cough medicine may be the key to slowing the progression of Parkinson’s disease.
Called Ambroxol, the drug is commonly used to break up phlegm, but early studies have shown it can also prevent the build-up of misfolded clumps of protein in the brain, known as Lewy bodies – a hallmark of Parkinson’s and other types of dementia.
Robarts scientist Dr. Stephen Pasternak is leading a phase 2 clinical trial to further study Ambroxol’s potential as a disease-modifying drug.
“Current treatments for Parkinson’s target the symptoms of the disease, such as movement, but don’t change the long-term progression of pathology in the brain,” he explained. “We hope Ambroxol will be a disease-changing drug.”
Dr. Stephen Pasternak is leading a phase 2 clinical trial to study Ambroxol, an over-the-counter cough medicine, with the goal of slowing or stopping the progression of Parkinson’s Disease Dementia.
In a new study, Northwestern University neurobiologists have found that the brain’s internal GPS changes each time we navigate a familiar, static environment.
This means that if someone walks the same path every day—and the path and surrounding conditions remain identical—each walk still activates different “map-making” brain cells (neurons). Not only does this discovery shed light on the fundamental mystery of how the brain processes and stores spatial memories, but it could also have profound implications for scientists’ understanding of memory, learning and even aging.
The study appears in Nature.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted orphan drug designation to a new gene therapy for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) developed at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and licensed to the U.S. company Klotho Neurosciences, Inc.
The drug uses a viral vector of the AAV (adeno-associated virus) type that expresses the secreted isoform of Klotho (s-KL) protein, with neuroregenerating, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. In order to reach the neuromuscular junctions affected by the ALS disease, the vector acts under the control of a DNA sequence that regulates the expression of the protein specifically in the muscle (a muscle-specific promoter), so that therapeutic activity is directed towards the neuromuscular junctions. This innovative approach has shown very promising results in the most widely used mouse model for the preclinical study of ALS, delaying the onset of the disease, preserving neuromuscular function and extending survival.
The technological development was led by UAB researchers, with the involvement of the CIBER, ICREA and Vall d’Hebron Research Institute, co-owners of the intellectual property relating to the use of the Klotho protein and licensed to Klotho Neurosciences –a start-up company based on knowledge generated at UAB and listed on Nasdaq in 2023 (NASDAQ: KLTO)-. The technology was developed by the research groups of Assumpció Bosch and Miquel Chillón, both from the UAB Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the UAB Institut de Neurociències (INc-UAB). The research project also included the collaboration of the group led by Professor Xavier Navarro, researcher at the Institut de Neurociències and the UAB Department of Cellular Biology, Physiology and Immunology, and expert in neuroregeneration and motor neuron diseases.
“The orphan drug designation for the therapy we have developed acknowledges the relevance of treatments targeting muscle and neuromuscular junction as a strategy for ALS”, says Assumpció Bosch, principal investigator of the study. “To date, we have been able to demonstrate efficacy in a leading animal model for this pathology. We are now testing it in other ALS models to confirm that this therapeutic solution can be applied to the widest possible number of patients”, adds Sergi Verdés, postdoctoral researcher on the research team.
Receiving the orphan drug designation by the FDA underscores the potential of the treatment for the rare and severely disabling disease ALS, which affects around 65,000 people in Europe and for which there is no effective treatment. This recognition offers advantages such as seven years of exclusivity for the drug in the U.S. market, fee waivers and tax incentives for clinical trials.
“Historically, this has been a very challenging problem. People don’t know where to start,” said senior author Megan Dennis, associate director of genomics at the UC Davis Genome Center and associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Medicine and MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis.
In 2022, Dennis was a co-author on a paper describing the first sequence of a complete human genome, known as the ‘telomere to telomere’ reference genome. This reference genome includes the difficult regions that had been left out of the first draft published in 2001 and is now being used to make new discoveries.
Dennis and colleagues used the telomere-to-telomere human genome to identify duplicated genes. Then, they sorted those for genes that are: expressed in the brain; found in all humans, based on sequences from the 1,000 Genomes Project; and conserved, meaning that they did not show much variation among individuals.
They came out with about 250 candidate gene families. Of these, they picked some for further study in an animal model, the zebrafish. By both deleting genes and introducing human-duplicated genes into zebrafish, they showed that at least two of these genes might contribute to features of the human brain: one called GPR89B led to slightly bigger brain size, and another, FRMPD2B, led to altered synapse signaling.
“It’s pretty cool to think that you can use fish to test a human brain trait,” Dennis said.
The dataset in the Cell paper is intended to be a resource for the scientific community, Dennis said. It should make it easier to screen duplicated regions for mutations, for example related to language deficits or autism, that have been missed in previous genome-wide screening.
“It opens up new areas,” Dennis said.