Aggregator

Agency calls research to identify viral threats “unsafe”

Decline in journal revenues puts scholarships, advocacy, and other activities at risk

Macrophages help male deer build their impressive headgear, new study suggests

A tiny sliver of NIH, it has provided an evidence base for bedside care, shrinking mortality and saving dollars

Brain precapillary sphincters, which are surrounded by contractile pericytes and are located at the junction of penetrating arterioles and first-order capillaries, can increase their diameter by ~ 30% in a few seconds during sensory stimulation, allowing for rapid control of capillary blood flow over a wide dynamic range. We hypothesized that these properties could help precapillary sphincters maintain the capillary blood flow and shield the downstream capillaries during surges in blood...

No abstract

CONCLUSION: Contrary to our hypothesis, older adults displayed more efficient heat-CPM, independent of chronic pain. Similarly, motor unit control was mostly influenced by age but not chronic knee pain. These findings suggest that age-related changes in pain modulation and motor unit behavior may play a greater role in neuromuscular function than the presence of chronic pain itself.

Fewer papers are reporting findings on the border of statistical significance, a potential marker of dodgy research practices

Data gaps come as Arctic sea ice shrinks to near-record lows

In this issue, Chadarevian et al. showed that engraftment of human iPSC-derived microglia (iMG) engineered to express secreted neprilysin (sNEP) under the plaque-responsive CD9 promoter reduces amyloid burden, neuronal damage, and inflammation in an Alzheimer's disease (AD) mouse model.¹ These findings establish a cell-based strategy to treat neurological diseases.

Parkinson's disease (PD), characterized by the selective loss of midbrain dopaminergic neurons (mDANs), is a promising target for cell replacement therapy. Two recent clinical trials¹^(,)² published in Nature report the safety and potential efficacy of human pluripotent stem cell-based approaches, representing a major milestone in regenerative medicine for PD.

N⁶-methyladenosine (m6A) is an abundant internal RNA modification that can impact gene expression at both post-transcriptional and transcriptional levels. However, the landscapes and functions of m6A in human brains and neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), are under-explored. Here, we examined RNA m6A methylome using total RNA-seq and meRIP-seq in middle frontal cortex of post-mortem brains from individuals with or without AD, which revealed m6A alteration on both...

Recent work leveraging artificial intelligence has offered promise to dissect disease heterogeneity by identifying complex intermediate brain phenotypes, called dimensional neuroimaging endophenotypes (DNEs). We advance the argument that these DNEs capture the degree of expression of respective neuroanatomical patterns measured, offering a dimensional neuroanatomical representation for studying disease heterogeneity and similarities of neurologic and neuropsychiatric diseases. We investigate the...

Tracking the envelope of speech in the brain is important for speech comprehension. Recent research suggests that acoustic background noise can enhance neural speech tracking, enabling the auditory system to robustly encode speech even under unfavorable conditions. Aging and hearing loss are associated with internal, neural noise in the auditory system, raising the question whether additional acoustic background noise enhances neural speech tracking in older adults. In the current...

Pathological events often impact tissue regions in a spatially variable manner, making it challenging to identify therapeutic targets. Spatial transcriptomics (ST) is a powerful technology to map spatially variable molecular mechanisms, yet suitable analytical methods have been lacking. We introduce spatially resolved pathology score (SPaSE), an optimal transport-based algorithm to compare ST data from diseased and control tissues. SPaSE computes a "pathology score" for each spot in the diseased...

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Vitamin D supplementation produced no measurable improvement in cognitive outcomes in older adults with mild to moderate vitamin D deficiency. The remote trial methodology provides an innovative approach to large-scale trials.