Category Archives: Neuroscience

Neuroscience

Similarity Between Schizophrenia and Dementia Discovered for the First Time – Neuroscience News

Summary: Study reveals striking similarities in both behaviors and neuroanatomical changes between people with schizophrenia and behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia.

Source: Max Planck Institute

Researchers have, for the first time, compared schizophrenia and frontotemporal dementiadisorders that are both located in the frontal and temporal lobe regions of the brain.

The idea can be traced back to Emil Kraepelin, who coined the term dementia praecox in 1899 to describe the progressive mental and emotional decline of young patients. His approach was quickly challenged, as only 25% of those affected showed this form of disease progression.

But now, with the help of imaging and machine learning, scientists have found the first valid indications of neuroanatomical patterns in the brain that resemble the signature of patients with frontotemporal dementia.

It is rare that scientists in basic research go back to seemingly obsolete findings that are more than 120 years old. In the case of Nikolaos Koutsouleris and Matthias Schroeter, who are researchers and physicians, this was even a drive.

Its about Emil Kraepelin, founder of the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry (MPI) as well as the psychiatric hospital of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), and his term dementia praecox, coined in 1899.

This was his definition foryoung adultswho increasingly withdraw from reality and fall into an irreversible, dementia-like state. Kraepelin lived to see his concept refuted.

By the beginning of the 20th century, experts were beginning to use the term schizophrenia for these patients, since the disease does not take such a bad course in all persons concerned.

Kraepelin had the idea of a frontotemporal disease, he assumed that the reason for the sometimes-debilitating course of the patients is located in the frontal and temporal lobe areas of the brain. Thats where personality,social behaviorand empathy are controlled.

But this idea was lost as no pathological evidence for neurodegenerative processes seen in Alzheimers Disease was found in the brains of these patients, says Koutsouleris, who works at Kraepelins places of work, the MPI and LMU.

He continues: Ever since I became a psychiatrist, I wanted to work on this question. Fifteen years later, with sufficientlylarge data sets, imaging techniques andmachine learningalgorithms, the professor had the tools at hand to potentially find answers.

He had found the right partner in Matthias Schroeter, who studies neurodegenerative diseases, specifically frontotemporal dementias, at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.

Similarities between schizophrenia and frontotemporal dementia

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), especially the behavioral variant (bvFTD), is difficult to recognize in its early stages because it is often confused with schizophrenia. Thus, the similarities are obvious: in sufferers of both groups, personality as well as behavioral changes occur.

An often dramatic development for affected persons and relatives sets in. Since both disorders are located in the frontal, temporal and insular regions of the brain, it was obvious to compare them directly as well.

They seem to be on a similar symptom spectrum, so we wanted to look for common signatures or patterns in the brain, Koutsouleris says, describing his plan.

With an international team, Koutsouleris and Schroeter used artificial intelligence to train neuroanatomical classifiers of both disorders, which they applied to brain data from different cohorts.

The result, just published in the journalJAMA Psychiatry, was that 41% of schizophrenia patients met the classifiers criteria for bvFTD.

When we saw this in schizophrenic patients as well, it rang a bellindicating a similarity between the two disorders, Koutsouleris and Schroeter recall.

The research team found that the higher the patients bvFTD score, which measured the similarity between the two disorders, the more likely they were to have a bvFTD-like phenotype and the less likely they were to improve their symptoms over two years.

A 23-year-old patient does not recover

I just wanted to know why my 23-year-old patient with onset symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations, delusions, and cognitive deficits, had not improved at all, even after two years, while another who started out just as bad was continuing his education and had found a girlfriend. Again and again, I saw these young people who did not recover at all, Koutsouleris says.

When the researchers also checked the correlations in high-risk patients such as the 23-year-old, they found confirmation at the neuroanatomical level of what Kraepelin had been the first to decisively describe: no improvement whatsoever in the condition of some patients, quite the opposite.

Similar neuronal structures were affected, in particular the so-called default mode network and the salience network of thebrain, responsible for attention control, empathy and social behavior, showed volume decreases in the gray matter area that houses the neurons. In bvFTD, certain neurons (von Economo neurons) perish; in schizophrenia, these neurons are also altered. This was reflected by the neuroanatomical score: after one year, it had doubled in these severely affected persons.

As a comparison, the scientists had also calculated the Alzheimers score using a specific classifier and did not find these effects there.

This means that the concept of dementia praecox can no longer be completely wiped away; we provide the first valid evidence that Kraepelin was not wrong, at least in some of the patients, Schroeter says.

Today, or in the near future, this means that experts will be able to predict which subgroup patients belong to.

Then intensive therapeutic support can be initiated at an early stage to exploit any remaining recovery potential, Koutsouleris says.

In addition, new personalized therapies could be developed for this subgroup that promote a proper maturation and connectivity of the affected neurons and prevent their progressive destruction as part of the disease process.

Author: Press OfficeSource: Max Planck InstituteContact: Press Office Max Planck InstituteImage: The image is credited to Koutsouleris

Original Research: Closed access.Exploring Links Between Psychosis and Frontotemporal Dementia Using Multimodal Machine Learning by Nikolaos Koutsouleris et al. JAMA Psychiatry

Abstract

Exploring Links Between Psychosis and Frontotemporal Dementia Using Multimodal Machine Learning

Importance

The behavioral and cognitive symptoms of severe psychotic disorders overlap with those seen in dementia. However, shared brain alterations remain disputed, and their relevance for patients in at-risk disease stages has not been explored so far.

Objective

To use machine learning to compare the expression of structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) patterns of behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), Alzheimer disease (AD), and schizophrenia; estimate predictability in patients with bvFTD and schizophrenia based on sociodemographic, clinical, and biological data; and examine prognostic value, genetic underpinnings, and progression in patients with clinical high-risk (CHR) states for psychosis or recent-onset depression (ROD).

Design, Setting, and Participants

This study included 1870 individuals from 5 cohorts, including (1) patients with bvFTD (n=108), established AD (n=44), mild cognitive impairment or early-stage AD (n=96), schizophrenia (n=157), or major depression (n=102) to derive and compare diagnostic patterns and (2) patients with CHR (n=160) or ROD (n=161) to test patterns prognostic relevance and progression. Healthy individuals (n=1042) were used for age-related and cohort-related data calibration. Data were collected from January 1996 to July 2019 and analyzed between April 2020 and April 2022.

Main Outcomes and Measures

Case assignments based on diagnostic patterns; sociodemographic, clinical, and biological data; 2-year functional outcomes and genetic separability of patients with CHR and ROD with high vs low pattern expression; and pattern progression from baseline to follow-up MRI scans in patients with nonrecovery vs preserved recovery.

Results

Of 1870 included patients, 902 (48.2%) were female, and the mean (SD) age was 38.0 (19.3) years. The bvFTD pattern comprising prefrontal, insular, and limbic volume reductions was more expressed in patients with schizophrenia (65 of 157 [41.2%]) and major depression (22 of 102 [21.6%]) than the temporo-limbic AD patterns (28 of 157 [17.8%] and 3 of 102 [2.9%], respectively). bvFTD expression was predicted by high body mass index, psychomotor slowing, affective disinhibition, and paranoid ideation (R2=0.11). The schizophrenia pattern was expressed in 92 of 108 patients (85.5%) with bvFTD and was linked to theC9orf72variant, oligoclonal banding in the cerebrospinal fluid, cognitive impairment, and younger age (R2=0.29). bvFTD and schizophrenia pattern expressions forecasted 2-year psychosocial impairments in patients with CHR and were predicted by polygenic risk scores for frontotemporal dementia, AD, and schizophrenia. Findings were not associated with AD or accelerated brain aging. Finally, 1-year bvFTD/schizophrenia pattern progression distinguished patients with nonrecovery from those with preserved recovery.

Conclusions and Relevance

Neurobiological links may exist between bvFTD and psychosis focusing on prefrontal and salience system alterations. Further transdiagnostic investigations are needed to identify shared pathophysiological processes underlying the neuroanatomical interface between the 2 disease spectra.

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Similarity Between Schizophrenia and Dementia Discovered for the First Time - Neuroscience News

Neuroscience

MD Anderson and Advanced Biology collaborate to host the virtual Cancer Neuroscience Symposium – News-Medical.Net

The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center will host the virtual Cancer Neuroscience Symposium Sept. 22-23, 2022, in collaboration with the journal Advanced Biology. The symposium is free to attend and gathers leading experts in the field to discuss a variety of topics on the relationship between cancer biology and neuroscience. Registration includes the opportunity to participate in an abstract competition and to view sessions following the event.

The Cancer Neuroscience Symposium will bring together neuroscientists, cancer biologists and clinicians in the developing field of cancer neuroscience to explore how the nervous system impacts tumor development and progression. The planned sessions will cover a broad range of topics including:

Interdisciplinary research is key to making impactful discoveries in cancer neuroscience, so it is critical to assemble scientists with complementary expertise in order to share insights in tumor neurobiology, nervous system tumors, neurotoxicity and symptom research. By hosting this symposium with Advanced Biology, MD Anderson is pleased to foster discussion and collaboration between the disciplines and to stimulate advances in this emerging field that can benefit our patients."

Moran Amit, M.D., Ph.D., symposium organizer, assistant professor of Head and Neck Surgery

The symposium also includes an abstract competition open to all registrants. All submitted abstracts will be published as part of a proceedings supplement in Advanced Biology, and the top three will be selected for a monetary award. Researchers are encouraged to send their submissions to [emailprotected] by Sept. 1. Select early-stage investigators also will be invited to work with an editor to contribute a perspective piece in a future issue of the journal.

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MD Anderson and Advanced Biology collaborate to host the virtual Cancer Neuroscience Symposium - News-Medical.Net

Neuroscience

The Cost of Loneliness – Neuroscience News

Summary: Researchers discuss the detrimental psychological, physical, and economic impact of loneliness.

Source: Particle

They say you cant put a price on friendship, butloneliness costs Australians $2.7 billion a yearaccording to a report by the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre. Its an epidemic thats continued to grow during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since the start of the pandemic, feelings of loneliness have increased all across Australia. Fortunately, Western Australian residents were feeling relatively alright. We had thesecond-highest scorewhen it came to social connectivity, just behind the Australian Capital Territory. In contrast, the states of Queensland and South Australia scored lowest in social connectedness.

The term loneliness itself is only afew hundred years old. The negative connotations attached to being lonely dont appear in literature until theend of the 18th century.

While the word is relatively new, its hard to say when the emotional experience of loneliness became common. In ShakespearesAlls Well That Ends Well, loneliness conflates with lovesickness. InHamlet,Ophelia may have drowned herself due to loneliness.

Loneliness is mentioned in the ancient Dharawal dreaming storyBahnaga and Mundah(The Goanna and the BlackSnake) retold by Sydney botanist Frances Bodkin.

BECAUSE OF HIS BAD TEMPER HE [BAHNAGA] WAS A VERY LONELY MAN, AND A WOMAN NEVER BEFORE SAID SOFT WORDS TO HIM.

So, have we placed modern emotions into ancient tales or did communal cultures suffer from loneliness too?

In Australia, the economic cost of loneliness is greater for women than men.

Curtin Universitys Associate Professor of Economics Astghik Mavisakalyan reports on theeconomic impacts of loneliness. She says its difficult to pinpoint why women feel lonelier than men.

Its likely that there are multiple and complex reasons behind the gender gaps in loneliness, says Astghik.

Data on loneliness is self-reported. It is possible that women simply face less stigma and are more comfortable to report that they are lonely.

BUT IT IS ALSO POSSIBLE THAT WOMEN ARE BROUGHT UP WITH HIGHER EXPECTATIONS FOR SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS. THEY MAY BE MORE PRONE TO FEELING LONELY IF THESE ARE NOT MET.

Astghik says one factor may be that men have more opportunities to socialise through work. This often occurs during the years in which many women stay at home to care for their children.

According to the study, Australian women are most likely to feel lonely at the age of 17. And while reports of loneliness decrease during adulthood, they suddenly increase for women above the age of 65.

As for Australian men, reports of loneliness peak around the age of 50.

When we experience a high level of momentary loneliness, it triggers the body torelease more cortisol. And prolonged feelings of loneliness correlate to higher mean cortisol levels.

Cortisol,known as the stress hormone, prepares your body for a fight-or-flight response. It triggers your body to produce more glucose for extra energy. This increase in stress, and the unpleasant feelings associated with loneliness, may do two things.

For a social species like us, being lonely means being vulnerable to attack. The fight-or-flight response may be priming us for this attack. Secondly, the emotional pain associated with loneliness provides us with a biological hunger to connect with others.

This leads to a phenomenonDr Tim Dean describes as evolutionary mismatch. This mismatch occurs when behaviours that evolution ingrained in us for survival turn unhealthy in modern society. For example, our hunger for carbohydrates has turned into an obesity epidemic.

The2018Australian Loneliness Reportfound 25% of Australians feel lonely, while 30% feel they dont have a group of friends.

So how does this emotional experience impact our physical health? Loneliness correlates with a range of health issues. Its linked to cognitive decline (about 2%decrease in IQ over time) and an increase indementia risk.

In fact, the majority of the estimated $2.7 billion price tag is a result of medical costs associated with decreasing health.

But does chronic disease cause loneliness or does loneliness simply increase the risk of disease?

Professor Tegan Cruwys researches community psychology and mental health at the Australian National University. She says they are separate phenomena, which are often caused by similar social factors.

The overlap in who experiences depression and loneliness speaks to the fact that the social ills that lead to the experience of loneliness exclusion, discrimination and disadvantage are also critical determinants of clinical depression.

Astghiks research suggests loneliness is likely to lead to poor health outcomes and behaviours.

More than half of women and men aged 65 who feel lonely most of the time report poor health, says Astghik.

[This is] around twice the rate of those who do not feel lonely.

Chronic loneliness triggersbehavioural changesand kickstarts theimmune systems inflammation response. Chronic inflammation contributes to arange of diseasesincluding Alzheimers, diabetes, cancer, arthritis andheart disease.

Both Tegan and Astghik say the best way to combat loneliness is to participate in a community. If individualism helped create the loneliness epidemic,rediscovering our communitiesmay stop it.

Author: Thomas CrowSource: ParticleContact: Thomas Crow ParticleImage: The image is in the public domain

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Neuroscience

Your Brain Is a Prediction Machine That Is Always Active – Neuroscience News

Summary: The brain constantly acts as a prediction machine, continuously comparing sensory information with internal predictions.

Source: Max Planck Institute

This is in line with a recent theory on how our brain works: it is a prediction machine, which continuously compares sensory information that we pick up (such as images, sounds and language) with internal predictions.

This theoretical idea is extremely popular in neuroscience, but the existing evidence for it is often indirect and restricted to artificial situations, says lead author Micha Heilbron.

I would really like to understand precisely how this works and test it in different situations.

Brain research into this phenomenon is usually done in an artificial setting, Heilbron reveals. To evoke predictions, participants are asked to stare at a single pattern of moving dots for half an hour, or listen to simple patterns in sounds like beep beep boop, beep beep boop.

Studies of this kind do in fact reveal that our brain can make predictions, but not that this always happens in the complexity of everyday life as well. We are trying to take it out of the lab setting. We are studying the same type of phenomenon, how the brain deals with unexpected information, but then in natural situations that are much less predictable.

Hemingway and Holmes

The researchers analyzed the brain activity of people listening to stories by Hemingway or about Sherlock Holmes. At the same time, they analyzed the texts of the books using computer models, so called deep neural networks. This way, they were able to calculate for each word how unpredictable it was.

For each word or sound, the brain makes detailed statistical expectations and turns out to be extremely sensitive to the degree of unpredictability: the brain response is stronger whenever a word is unexpected in the context.

By itself, this is not very surprising: after all, everyone knows that you can sometimes predict upcoming language. For example, your brain sometimes automatically fills in the blank and mentally finishes someone elses sentences, for instance if they start to speak very slowly, stutter or are unable to think of a word. But what we have shown here is that this happens continuously. Our brain is constantly guessing at words; the predictive machinery is always turned on.

More than software

In fact, ourbraindoes something comparable tospeech recognition software. Speech recognisers usingartificial intelligenceare also constantly making predictions and are allowing themselves to be guided by their expectations, just like the autocomplete function on your phone.

Nevertheless, we observed a big difference: brains predict not only words, but make predictions on many different levels, from abstract meaning and grammar to specific sounds.

There is good reason for the ongoing interest fromtech companieswho would like to use new insights of this kind to build better language and image recognition software, for example. But these sorts of applications are not the main aim for Heilbron.

I would really like to understand how our predictive machinery works at a fundamental level. Im now working with the same research setup, but for visual and auditive perceptions, like music.

Author: Press OfficeSource: Max Planck InstituteContact: Press Office Max Planck InstituteImage: The image is credited to DALL-E, OpenAi Micha Heilbron

Original Research: Closed access.A hierarchy of linguistic predictions during natural language comprehension by Micha Heilbron et al. PNAS

Abstract

A hierarchy of linguistic predictions during natural language comprehension

Understanding spoken language requires transforming ambiguous acoustic streams into a hierarchy of representations, from phonemes to meaning. It has been suggested that the brain uses prediction to guide the interpretation of incoming input.

However, the role of prediction in language processing remains disputed, with disagreement about both the ubiquity and representational nature of predictions.

Here, we address both issues by analyzing brain recordings of participants listening to audiobooks, and using a deep neural network (GPT-2) to precisely quantify contextual predictions.

First, we establish that brain responses to words are modulated by ubiquitous predictions. Next, we disentangle model-based predictions into distinct dimensions, revealing dissociable neural signatures of predictions about syntactic category (parts of speech), phonemes, and semantics.

Finally, we show that high-level (word) predictions inform low-level (phoneme) predictions, supporting hierarchical predictive processing.

Together, these results underscore the ubiquity of prediction in language processing, showing that the brain spontaneously predicts upcoming language at multiple levels of abstraction.

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Neuroscience

Is Everything We Think We Know About Alzheimers Wrong? – Neuroscience News

Summary: Recent scandals in Alzheimers research and problems with medications designed to help those with Alzheimers but failing to deliver sufficient results have researchers questioning the overwhelming focus on amyloid-beta in Alzheimers research.

Source: University of Michigan

If youve followed the news about Alzheimers disease research in the past few months, you might find yourself wondering what else could go wrong.

First, a much-anticipated new drug called Aduhelm got approval from the Food & Drug Administrationbut its actual effect on patients was so small that insurance wont cover it for most patients.

Then, several otherpromising drugsin development bypharmaceutical companiesgot sidelined or showed less-than-impressive results in clinical trials.

And then a scandal broke: New evidence came to light inSciencethat researchers had faked images in a paper published 16 years agoa paper that other researchers had trusted and relied on as they did their own work.

And what do all of these developments have to do with one another?

Theyre all tied to the molecule beta-amyloid, the plaque-forming sludge that gunks up the outside of brain cells. The molecule that decades of research has focused on as an important factor in the disease and potential treatments to reverse it.

But in fact, scientists at the Michigan Alzheimers Disease Center and elsewhere have spent years looking beyond amyloid for answers to the roots of dementia and ways to prevent or treat it.

Its true that amyloid plays a role in the brain and dementia, but Alzheimers disease is complicated and theres much more to it than one molecule, says Henry Paulson, M.D., Ph.D., who directs the center and has devoted his own laboratorys research at Michigan Medicine and his clinical care to dementia and otherneurodegenerative diseasesfor decades.

The paper at the center of the scandal has to do with a specific form of amyloid, AB*56, that was put forth as an important toxic oligomer encouraging plaque formation.

But Paulson says he and many of his colleagues have not paid much attention to it for many years, because researchers havent been so successful at achieving the same results that the original researchers claimed.

Im more worried about what this news might do to the publics perception of science than to our ability to make progress against this disease, he says. The long delay in uncovering the alleged fakery isnt ideal, and shows the importance of scientists speaking up and publishing results even when their experiments fail to prove another teams claim.

This kind of publishing of negative resultspapers that dont give good news about a potentially promising ideais not always encouraged, because scientists have more reason to leave those results on the shelf and spend time writing papers about things that do work.

But if no one knows that an effort to reproduce a scientific discovery has failed, then other scientists could spin their wheels driving down a blind alley.

Paulson notes that it is still important to study the protein that gets cut up, or cleaved, in order to make different forms of beta-amyloid, and the consequences of that process.

But hes not necessarily surprised by the failure of Aduhelm, the much-talked-about drug that got approval last year, to produce a sizable effect even in the patients it was tested in.

The drug is not available at the clinics or hospitals of Michigan Medicine, and Medicare will only cover its high cost for people taking part in clinical trials. Other drugs in the pipeline at drug companies that focus on beta-amyloid should be scrutinized carefully before getting any approval, he adds.

We believe much more attention needs to be paid to other factors and proteins underlying various dementias, ranging from environmental factors, to theimmune system, to specific molecules like tau, which is the other hallmark protein of Alzheimers disease, he explains. In my view, the Aduhelm story underscores the importance of continuing to look for other therapeutic targets in Alzheimers disease and related dementia.

Targeting amyloid for treatments may be like trying to saddle up a horse that has already left the barn, he saystoo much has happened in the disease process by the time the plaques begin to form for a treatment to make a difference.

Working upstream in the process, and doing more with modern tools to understand the process by studying people in the early stages of memory loss, could prove more important.

Thats why the Michigan Alzheimers Disease Center is always seeking people to take part in studies involving everything from brain scans to surveys. Anyone who wants to get involved can start the process by making an initial inquiry.

Alzheimers and other forms of dementia are complicated diseases, and likely result from multiple things going wrong in the brain over time, not one rogue molecule, Paulson explains. So it may end up that we need to treat patients with multiple treatments at once, targeting several aspects of their diseasejust like cancer or HIV-positive patients receive today.

But in the meantime, research has already shown another important upstream effect that many people may not realize, Paulson says.

Theres plenty of evidence that middle-aged andolder adultswho want to reduce their risk of dementia, or slow its onset, should focus on healthy habits like sleep, nutrition, exercise, social engagement, and controlling blood pressure and cholesterol. The role of lifelong education and learningwhether informal or formalis also clear

If youre 70 years old, I cant tell you to go back in time and eat healthier or get more years of school, but I can tell you to do more to get a good nights sleep as often as possible, and connect socially with other people, says Paulson, a professor of neurology.

For the millions of families dealing with a loved ones dementia today, the hope of new treatments may seem like a faint light on the horizon thats fading as their loved one gets further into their disease.

Thats why its also important to focus on supporting caregivers and understanding their needs through research that could impact public policy and insurance coverageanother focus of the centers programs and research.

Research takes time, which todays patients may not have a lot of. But with help from patients and families willing to volunteer for research studies, including tests of new drugs, it can move as quickly as possible, with safeguards in place to make sure its happening safely and honestly.

Author: Kara GavinSource: University of MichiganContact: Kara Gavin University of MichiganImage: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Open access.Blots on a field? by Charles Piller. Science

Abstract

Blots on a field?

In August 2021, Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist and physician at Vanderbilt University, got a call that would plunge him into a maelstrom of possible scientific misconduct. A colleague wanted to connect him with an attorney investigating an experimental drug for Alzheimers disease called Simufilam.

The drugs developer,Cassava Sciences, claimed it improved cognition, partly by repairing a protein that can block sticky brain deposits of the protein amyloid beta (A), a hallmark of Alzheimers.

The attorneys clientstwo prominent neuroscientists who are also short sellers who profit if the companys stock fallsbelieved some research related to Simufilam may have been fraudulent, according toa petition later filed on their behalfwith the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

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Is Everything We Think We Know About Alzheimers Wrong? - Neuroscience News

Neuroscience

Smells Experienced in Nature Evoke Positive Well-being – Neuroscience News

Summary: The smell of fresh cut grass or blooming flowers appears to have a positive effect on a persons overall well-being, a new study reveals. Researchers say the smells of nature can help boost psychological well-being.

Source: University of Kent

Smells experienced in nature can make us feel relaxed, joyful, and healthy, according to new research led by the University of Kents Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE).

Smells were found to play an important role in delivering well-being benefits from interacting with nature, often with a strong link to peoples personal memories, and specific ecological characteristics and processes (e.g. fallen leaves rotting in the winter).

Nature is known to play an integral role in promotinghuman healthand well-being, shown especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, previous research has been limited in investigating which attributes of nature (e.g. smells, sounds, colors) affect human well-being and why.

This study published byAmbioexamines the role of smell in influencing well-being through nature.

Researchers found that smells affected multiple types of human well-being, with physical well-being noted most frequently, particularly in relation to relaxation, comfort and rejuvenation.

Absence of smell was also perceived to improve physical well-being, providing a cleansing environment due to the removal of pollution and unwanted smells associated withurban areas, and therefore enabling relaxation.

Relaxation reduces stress and lowerscortisol levels, which is often linked to a multitude of diseases, and so these findings could be particularly significant to public health professionals.

The research, carried out in woodland settings across four seasons, also found that smells evoked memories related to childhood activities. Many participants created meaningful connections with particular smells, rather than the woodland itself, and associated this with a memorable event. This, in turn, appeared to influence well-being by provoking emotional reactions to the memory.

The study was co-led by Dr. Jessica Fisher, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at DICE. She says that nature is a multisensory experience and our research demonstrates the potential significance of smell for well-being.

The study provides findings that can inform the work of practitioners, public health specialists,policy-makersand landscape planners looking to improve well-being outcomes through nature. Small interventions could lead to public health benefits.

Author: Press OfficeSource: University of KentContact: Press Office University of KentImage: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Open access.Nature, smells, and human wellbeing by Phoebe R. Bentley et al. AMBIO

Abstract

Nature, smells, and human wellbeing

The link between nature and human wellbeing is well established. However, few studies go beyond considering the visual and auditory underpinnings of this relationship, even though engaging with nature is a multisensory experience.

While research linking smell to wellbeing exists, it focuses predominantly on smells as a source of nuisance/offence. Smells clearly have a prominent influence, but a significant knowledge gap remains in the nexus of nature, smell, and wellbeing.

Here, we examine how smells experienced in woodlands contribute to wellbeing across four seasons. We show that smells are associated with multiple wellbeing domains, both positively and negatively.

They are linked to memories, and specific ecological characteristics and processes over space/time. By making the link between the spatiotemporal variability in biodiversity and wellbeing explicit, we unearth a new line of enquiry.

Overall, the multisensory experience must be considered by researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and planners looking to improve wellbeing through nature.

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Smells Experienced in Nature Evoke Positive Well-being - Neuroscience News

Neuroscience

Brain Fingerprinting of Adolescents Might Be Able to Predict Mental Health Problems Down the Line – Neuroscience News

Summary: The unique features of an individual adolescents brain can help predict their risks of developing mental health problems later in life.

Source: The Conversation

Despite the best efforts of clinicians and researchers for decades, we still do not fully know why some people develop mental disorders and others do not. However, changes in the brain are very likely our best clues to future mental health outcomes.

The adolescent brain is particularly important in this pursuit as changes during this period are rapid anddynamic, sculpting our individual uniqueness. Furthermore, most mental disordersemergeduring adolescence, with more than half occurring by 14 years of age, and three quarters by age 25.

By monitoring and tracking brain changes as they happen, we can tackle emerging mental health problems in adolescence and target early treatment. The challenge is accurately predicting the likelihood of a person developing a mental disorder, well before it happens.

We are researchers with the world-first Longitudinal Adolescent Brain Study (LABS). We have been tracking adolescent brain development, using MRI scans, for several years. Our recentpaperis the first to show the uniqueness of an adolescents brain (or their brain fingerprint) can predict mental health outcomes.

Brain fingerprinting could be the future of mental disorder prevention, allowing us to identify signs of concern in teenagers through brain imaging, and intervene early before illness develops.

Just as fingerprints are unique, each human brain has a unique profile of signals between brain regions thatbecome more individual and specialisedas people age.

To date, our study involves 125 participants, from 12 years of age, with over 500 brain scans among them. Our research captures brain and mental health development in adolescents over five years. It uses four-monthly brain imaging (MRIandEEG), and psychological and cognitive assessments.

We looked at each individualsfunctional connectome their brains system of neural pathways in action. We discovered that how unique these characteristics are is significantly associated with newpsychological distressreported at the time of subsequent scans four months later. In other words, the level of uniqueness seems to be predictive of a mental health outcome.

The MRI scans were undertaken during aresting state, as opposed to task-based functional MRI. It still tells us a lot about brain activity, such as how the brain keeps connections running or gets ready to do something. You could compare this to a mechanic, listening to a engine idling before its taken for a drive.

In the 12-year-olds we studied, we found unique functional whole-brain connectomes do exist. But a more specific network involved in controllinggoal-directed behaviour is less unique in early adolescence. In other words, this network is still quite similar across different people.

We found the extent of its uniqueness can predict anxiety and depression symptoms that emerge later. So those with less unique brains had higher levels of distress down the line.

We suspect the level of maturation in this brain network the part that involves executive control or goal-directed behaviours may provide a biological explanation for why some teens are at increased vulnerability of mental distress. It may be that delays in the fine tuning of such executive function networks lead to increased mental health issues.

By doing brains scans and other assessments at regular intervals up to 15 times for each participant LABS not only provides fine-grained information about adolescent brain development, but it can also better pinpoint the emergence and onset of mental ill health.

Our approach allows us to better establish the occurrence and sequence of changes in the brain (and in behaviours, lifestyle factors, thinking) and mental health risks and problems.

In addition to unique brain signatures to predict psychological distress, we expect there will be other ways (usingmachine learning) we can interpret information about a persons brain. This will get us closer to accurately predicting their mental health and wellbeing outcomes. Data rich, studies over a long time period are the key to finding this holy grail of neuroscience.

Identifying mental health risk in teenagers means we may be able to intervene before adulthood, when many mental health disorders become embedded and more difficult to resolve.

This vision for the future of mental health care offers hope in the wake of recent statistics from the 202021National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing. They revealed two in five Australians aged 16 to 24 had a mental disorder within the previous year, the highest rate of any age group. This is a jump of 50% since the last national survey in 2007.

WithA$11 billion spenton mental health-related services in Australia every year, better prevention via early detection should be an urgent priority.

Author: Daniel Hermens, Jim Lagopoulos, and Zach ShanSource: The ConversationContact: Daniel Hermens, Jim Lagopoulos, and Zach Shan The ConversationImage: The image is in the public domain

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Brain Fingerprinting of Adolescents Might Be Able to Predict Mental Health Problems Down the Line - Neuroscience News

Neuroscience

Sharing Memories With Toddlers Helps Their Well-Being Into Adulthood – Neuroscience News

Summary: How a mother interacts and shared memories with her toddler has an impact on their offsprings well-being in adulthood.

Source: University of Otago

How mothers share memories with their children during toddlerhood impacts mental health and well-being in early adulthood, a University of Otago study has shown.

Researchers found 21-year-olds told more coherent stories about turning points in their lives if their mothers were taught new conversational techniques two decades earlier.

These adults also reported fewer symptoms of depression and greater self-esteem compared to adults in the study whose mothers interacted with them as usual.

The study, published inJournal of Research in Personality, is a long-term follow-up of a reminiscing intervention in which 115 mothers of toddlers were assigned to either acontrol groupor taught to use elaborative reminiscing for a year.

Elaborative reminiscing involves open, enriched, and responsive conversations with children about shared experiences of everyday events. This is the first study to show long-term benefits of mother-child reminiscing for emerging adult development.

Lead author Sean Marshall, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology, says understanding ways to improve themental healthof 18- to 25-year-olds is important because of their unique stage of life.

Emergingadultsface a volley of challenges as they leave home and enter university or the workforce.

We wanted to understand how well tamariki cope with new challenges as they enter adulthood and find ways to ease thepsychological stressthat typically accompanies these transitions, he says.

Project lead Professor Elaine Reese, of the Department of Psychology, says the soft-touch intervention inearly childhoodproved to have enduring benefits for psychological well-being and mental health.

This study is the first of its kind and is informing new interventions at home and in schools with parents and teachers of young children, she says.

Author: Press OfficeSource: University of OtagoContact: Press Office University of OtagoImage: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Closed access.Growing Memories: Benefits of an early childhood maternal reminiscing intervention for emerging adults turning point narratives and well-being by Sean Marshall et al. Journal of Research in Personality

Abstract

Growing Memories: Benefits of an early childhood maternal reminiscing intervention for emerging adults turning point narratives and well-being

The current study is an emerging adult follow-up of a longitudinal intervention study of maternal reminiscing (Growing Memories;N=115).

Mothers in the intervention condition were taught elaborative reminiscing skills when their children were 1.52.5years old. We tested long-term effects of the intervention for emerging adults turning-point narratives and well-being at age 21 (n=94; 82%).

Emerging adults in the intervention condition displayed greater causal coherence (connections between past and present self) in their turning-point narratives and reported higher self-esteem and fewer depression symptoms than those in the control condition, even after accounting forpersonality traitsand early childhood covariates.

These findings suggest that maternal reminiscing has a long-term impact on their offsprings narrative identity and well-being.

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Sharing Memories With Toddlers Helps Their Well-Being Into Adulthood - Neuroscience News

Neuroscience

Cumulative Loneliness Associated With Accelerated Memory Aging in Older Adults – Neuroscience News

Summary: Feeling lonely for extended periods of time was associated with more rapid memory decline in those aged over 65.

Source: University of Michigan

Prolonged loneliness in adults over 65 may be an important risk factor for accelerated memory aging, according to a new study led by University of Michigan School of Public Health researchers.

We found that feeling lonely for a longer duration of time was associated with more rapid memory decline, suggesting that it is never too late in life to work on reducing feelings oflonelinessto support healthy aging, said Lindsay Kobayashi, assistant professor of epidemiology and senior author of the study published in the journalAlzheimers & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimers Association.

Kobayashi and colleagues analyzed interview data from more than 9,000 adults over age 50 from the U.S. Health and Retirement Study from 1996 to 2016. They evaluated participants cumulative durations of loneliness from 1996 to 2004 in relation to changes in memory function over the following 12 years from 2004 to 2016.

Xuexin Yu, a doctoral candidate in epidemiology and lead author of the study, said the association between loneliness and memory aging was strongest in individuals aged 65 and over, with women experiencing stronger and faster memory declines than men.

Women tend to have larger social networks than men, which may make women less likely to feel lonely than men, but more vulnerable once experiencing long-term loneliness, Yu said. Social stigma and the reluctance to admit loneliness may also be a factor in this observed gender-specific association.

Loneliness and objectivesocial isolationare important factors in the health ofolder adults, and researchers say that reducing loneliness in mid-to-late life may help maintainmemory functionfor a longer duration.

In addition to Yu and Kobayashi, Ashly Westrick, postdoctoral fellow at U-Ms Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health, is a co-author of the study.

Author: Press OfficeSource: University of MichiganContact: Press Office University of MichiganImage: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Open access.Cumulative loneliness and subsequent memory function and rate of decline among adults aged 50 in the United States, 1996 to 2016 by Xuexin Yu et al. Alzheimers & Dementia

Abstract

Cumulative loneliness and subsequent memory function and rate of decline among adults aged 50 in the United States, 1996 to 2016

The study objective was to investigate the association between loneliness duration and memory function over a 20-year period.

Data were from 9032 adults aged 50 in the Health and Retirement Study. Loneliness status (yes vs. no) was assessed biennially from 1996 to 2004 and its duration was categorized as never, 1 time point, 2 time points, and 3 time points. Episodic memory was assessed from 2004 to 2016 as a composite of immediate and delayed recall trials combined with proxy-reported memory. Mixed-effects linear regression models were fitted.

A longer duration of loneliness was associated with lower memory scores (P< 0.001) and a faster rate of decline (P< 0.001). The association was stronger among adults aged 65 than those aged <65 (three-way interactionP= 0.013) and was stronger among women than men (three-way interactionP= 0.002).

Cumulative loneliness may be a salient risk factor for accelerated memory aging, especially among women aged 65.

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Cumulative Loneliness Associated With Accelerated Memory Aging in Older Adults - Neuroscience News