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NIH-funded research in siblings finds previously reported connection is likely due to other underlying factors.

What

Acetaminophen exposure during pregnancy is not linked to the risk of developing autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability, according to a new study of data from more than 2 million children in Sweden. The collaborative research effort by Swedish and American investigators, which appears in JAMA, is the largest of its kind and was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

JAMA Network Open commentary focuses on the relationship of pain, depression, and anxiety.

Chronic pain is often accompanied by depression and anxiety. In an invited commentary published in JAMA Network Open, Kurt Kroenke, M.D., of Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine, discusses the relationship between pain, the most common symptom for which individuals visit a physician, and depression and anxiety, the two most prevalent mental health conditions worldwide. He highlights the importance of not neglecting psychological symptoms in patients experiencing pain.

Understanding the Connection.

A collaborative research team has developed a method to connect lab-grown brain tissues, enhancing the understanding of brain development and functions, and paving the way for potential advancements in treating neurological conditions.

The idea of growing a functioning human brain-like tissues in a dish has always sounded pretty far-fetched, even to researchers in the field. Towards the future goal, a Japanese and French research team has developed a technique for connecting lab-grown brain-mimicking tissue in a way that resembles circuits in our brain.

Advancements in Neural Studies.

A new study, published in the British Psychological Society’s British Journal of Psychology, reveals that regular gamers exhibit enhanced performance in tasks assessing cognitive functions, including attention and memory.

The study, which took place at the Lero Esports Science Research Lab at the University of Limerick, involved 88 young adults, half of whom regularly played more than seven hours of action-based video games each week.

Participants were tested with three tasks measuring different aspects of their cognitive performance – a simple reaction time test, a task that involved switching between responding to combinations of numbers and letters to evaluate executive function and working memory, and a maze-based activity to assess visuospatial memory.

For more than 20 years, researchers have known that areas of birds’ brains dedicated to singing show neural patterns during sleep akin to the ones they use while awake and singing.

Physical touch from both humans and animals can reduce pain, feelings of depression, and anxiety in adults and children, according to a systematic review and meta-analysis published in Nature Human Behaviour. Read the paper:

This pre-registered systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis examined the effects of receiving touch for promoting mental and physical well-being, quantifying the efficacy of touch interventions for different ways of administration.

“This study is a first step in uncovering how we can mitigate risks of THC when used in medicine, and also is targeted at making cannabis safer for the general, non-therapeutic consumer,” said Dr. Tory Spindle.

Can cannabis be modified to decrease certain side effects, specifically anxiety, that is caused by tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)? This is what a recent study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence hopes to address as a team of researchers led by the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine investigated whether adding d-limonene, which is a known cannabis oil, to THC could help alleviate common feelings of anxiety or paranoia that cannabis users traditionally experience. This study holds the potential to help improve medicinal cannabis while decreasing risks to users of recreational cannabis, as well.

For the study, the researchers enlisted 20 healthy adult participants with an average age of 26 years old who completed 10 six-hour sessions involving them using vaporized THC alone (15 mg or 30 mg), vaporized d-limonene alone (1 mg or 5 mg), both together, and finally a placebo. The sessions were double-blinded, meaning both the researchers and participants were unaware who was vaporizing which sample.

Continue reading “Potential advancement in medicinal use of THC and reduction of risks in recreational use” »

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative movement disorder that progresses relentlessly. It gradually impairs a person’s ability to function until they ultimately become immobile and often develop dementia. In the U.S. alone, over a million people are afflicted with Parkinson’s, and new cases and overall numbers are steadily increasing.

There is currently no treatment to slow or halt Parkinson’s disease. Available drugs don’t slow disease progression and can treat only certain symptoms. Medications that work early in the disease, however, such as Levodopa, generally become ineffective over the years, necessitating increased doses that can lead to disabling side effects.

Continue reading “Breakthrough Parkinson’s Gene Discovery Sheds Light on Evolutionary Origin” »

In conventional functional MRI (fMRI), researchers monitor changes in blood flow to different brain regions to estimate activity. But this response lags by at least one second behind the activity of neurons, which send messages in milliseconds.

Park and his co-authors said that DIANA could measure neuronal activity directly, which is an “extraordinary claim”, says Ben Inglis, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

The DIANA technique works by applying minor electric shocks every 200 milliseconds to an anaesthetized animal. Between shocks, an MRI scanner collects data from one tiny piece of the brain every 5 milliseconds. After the next shock, another spot is scanned. The software stitches together data from all the spots, to visualize changes in an entire slice of brain over a 200-millisecond period. The process is similar to filming an action pixel by pixel, where the action would need to be repeated to record every pixel, and those recordings stitched together, to create a full video.