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May 2024: A Month in Review of Neuroscience News Articles Referring to Original Research

Updated: Jun 20


Over the last month, many online news articles have drawn my attention to neuroscience-related topics and research. If it exists, I prefer to refer to the original research to interpret the real significance and claims of such news articles. The overlapping theme appears to be a complex interaction of polygenic variants and epigenetics (environmental factors influencing genetic expression) contributing to brain disorders.


This article mentions the interaction between diet and cognitive functioning. The original research by Zhang et al. (2024) used a extensive database of patients and their health information in the UK and employed principle component analysis to cosegregate dietary preferences, biomarkers, genes, brain regions, and their volume, and cognition (i.e., attention, memory, and reasoning abilities). Those individuals who had a more varied and balanced diet tended to have better mental health (fewer symptoms of mental illness such as depression and anxiety disorders) and physical health. Diet also influenced brain gray matter volume as measured by MRI at various brain regions. By nature, this is correlational research. So, there is no clear causation. It might be that people who eat better and care about their physical health can do so because they have better mental health, or it could even be a bidirectional relationship. This remains unclear. What I find most interesting is the polygenic risk score analysis showing significance across brain disorders and illnesses (i.e., AD, BP. DP, CVD, PD, SI, SZ) with subtypes of food preferences.


In this brief news article and accompanying video, a team of Harvard researchers led by neuroscientist Dr. Jeff Lichtman, in conjunction with Google (supercomputing resources), has created a comprehensive and detailed three-dimensional map of human brain tissue. It began with tissue from surgical resections of brain tissue, for instance, from those with intractable epilepsy. The tissue used was normal and not involved in the kindling. This revealed the high degree of complexity within brain tissue. The hope is that this may lead to a better understanding of the underlying disease processes in brain disorders like AD and PD. Here is a link to an article about this research in Dr. Lichtman's lab (Shapson-Coe et al., 2024) on the journal website and the full PDF from Dr. Lichtman's lab website at Harvard.


This article is about an upcoming CNN documentary (The Last Alzheimer’s Patient, airing on June 18, 2024) about how two individuals have reversed their symptoms of AD through lifestyle changes such as diet and exercise. If such changes can help significantly, this could be life-changing for those with genetic predisposition or known markers, such as this author. What I have learned from preparing and teaching of my Issues in Aging course on gerontology...(I will not be citing studies here as they are all mentioned in my course. Feel free to take the course!)...is there are many types of dementia. Genes and environment are both critical in the development of dementia. Cognitive resources and brain resources also have an impact on the timing and severity of symptomatology. By the time someone shows the symptoms of dementia, they often have brain biomarkers of two or three separate types of dementia. Disentangling this into one specific type of dementia based on symptoms and biomarkers/brain pathologies is complex due to the overlap of these things and is often unrealistic. This suggests that our separation of types of dementia is based on this narrow nosological framework of disease classification and our need to place a specific name on diseases. It brings me back to the understanding that brain pathologies don't neatly fit into narrow little boxes as we like to think with particular diagnoses, which was the reason for the whole RDoC initiative by NIMH to let the real-world data tell us what is there instead of our recipe list classifications of pathologies (Insel et al., 2010), and the fact that having a combination of genetic variants (risk alleles) can lead to any number of brain disorders (Wang et al., 2017).


"The Last Alzheimer’s Patient” premieres on “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper” on CNN on Sunday, May 19, at 8 p.m. ET and streams on MAX on June 18.


I know that neuronal pruning throughout development is thought to increase brain and cognitive efficiency. Neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., ADHD, ASD) are often associated with atypical and delayed frontal lobe development, which could be related to neuronal pruning inefficiency. This study demonstrated that this might be an issue using neuroimaging of various populations. What is most interesting about this news article is that it mentions that "many disparate conditions share a common cause," titled the "p-factor" or "neuropsychopathological (NP) factor." Again, this relates to my brief review of the previous article, where I mentioned the RDoC and the same polygenic interactions leading to various pathologies. Please don't misunderstand me. When I say a brain disorder is polygenic, I mean several genetic variants that are risk factors, where the genes interact with one another. Their expression is mediated by environmental factors interacting with them via epigenetics. The article reports, "The same set of gene variants predispose people to multiple conditions." I cannot find the original study article, as the link in the news article simply brings one to a researcher's website at the University of Cambridge. Looking through her publications, I cannot find one that matches this topic.


This article claims that neuroscience has only recently discovered what Buddhists have known for quite a while, "there is no constant self." Indeed, we know that the body regenerates tissues, and our physical bodies are not in stasis. Additionally, if I think about the person I was at age 14 and who I am now, these are not the same person. As the Buddhists say, based on my wording and interpretation, at each moment in time, there is a different self, like a stream of consciousness. Also, I know the Buddhists often attempt to extinguish their self or ego to end suffering and the cycle of reincarnation. The article explains that Buddhist monks can alter their minds/brains through meditation via neuroplasticity. Certainly, years of neuroimaging of meditators have shown us the effects of neuroplasticity. Going down the rabbit hole of website links from this article, once again, I cannot readily locate the original study, as suggested by the title, which included the words "a new study." This makes things difficult for a neuroscientist who wants to refer to the original works. However, it is clear that many news sources and news websites do not cater to scientists. It is more about sensation and dropping snippets.


Neurodiversity is a concept that originated explicitly from those with neurodevelopmental disorders (ADHD, ASD) interpreting the world and social interactions differently than those without such conditions, i.e., neurotypicals. Neurodiversity and neurodiverse are terms/concepts I hear from my clients as a therapist. Many of my clients embrace and identify with this label, and a movement has begun akin to the LGBTQ+ community. In fact, there are many who regularly identify with both of these communities, which has created a new community. In fact, a simple Google search today, on 5/26/2024, results in, "Research suggests that neurodivergent people are more likely to identify as LGBTQIA+ than neurotypical people, especially those on the autism spectrum." I see these individuals almost daily. Going through the search, I discovered a study supporting this overlap between the neurodiverse and the LGBTQ+ communities.

Interestingly, one of the authors is a researcher at the University of Cambridge, with whom I nearly did my Ph.D under his tutelage there (Warrier et al., 2020). There is even a scientific journal that caters to neurodiversity as the topic, which I have contemplated submitting manuscripts to with my colleagues. The point of the original web article for this brief review was that psychiatrists do not treat the label of neurodiverse, which is embraced by their patients. Additionally, it was mentioned that the acceptance of neurodiversity is against the medical paradigm, as it promotes acceptance rather than needing to change via the pathologizing of human behavioral variants. As a licensed mental health professional, I see this label as freeing for many clients who embrace it. Unfortunately, like many of these web articles, it is truncated for non-subscribers. Thus, I do not have access to the full article.


This article suggests that alterations in the human genome from viruses long ago contribute to brain disorders like DP, BP, SZ, and MS. Once again, this article is truncated for non-subscribers. Thus, the excitement from such a title without being a subscriber means I cannot even find enough information to locate the original study, which was the basis for this article. So, although the subject seems very interesting to me, I could not locate further information. Are all these subscription-based news articles posted on social media to create hype without access to the original studies? Is this to encourage subscriptions?

After doing a deep dive on Google, I found what I think to be the original study by Duarte et al. (2024). The original study examined human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) in 792 post-mortem brain tissue samples. Out of 1,348 HERVs, 26 are correlated with psychiatric disorders. Four of these are associated with increased risk: two with SZ, one with SZ and BP, and one for MDD. The expression of these genes is related to the development of the cortex of the brain. HERVs altering the human genome brings us back to epigenetics being involved in brain disorders. Environmental factors such as viral exposure have altered our DNA. Again, brain disorders need to be viewed as the complex interaction of multiple genes with one another and environmental factors affecting their expression, which can also lead to us passing down such altered genes to our offspring.


Abbreviations in this blog

AD: Alzheimer's disease

ASD: Autism Spectrum Disorder

BP: Bipolar disorder

CJD: Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease

CVD: Cardiovascular disease

DP: Depression MDD: Major Depressive Disorder

MS: Multiple Sclerosis

NIMH: National Institute of Mental Health

PD: Parkinson's disease

RDoC: Research Domain Criteria

SI: Suicidal Ideation

SZ: Schizophrenia


References



Duarte, R. R., Pain, O., Bendall, M. L., de Mulder Rougvie, M., Marston, J. L., Selvackadunco, S., Troakes, C., Leung, S. K., Bamford, R. A., Mill, J., O’Reilly, P. F., Srivastava, D. P., Nixon, D. F., & Powell, T. R. (2024). Integrating human endogenous retroviruses into transcriptome-wide association studies highlights novel risk factors for major psychiatric conditions. Nature Communications, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-48153-z


Insel, T., Cuthbert, B., Garvey, M., Heinssen, R., Pine, D. S., Quinn, K., Sanislow, C., & Wang, P. (2010). Research domain criteria (RDoC): Toward a new classification framework for research on mental disorders. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 167(7), 748–751. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.2010.09091379



Shapson-Coe, A., Januszewski, M., Berger, D. R., Pope, A., Wu, Y., Blakely, T., Schalek, R. L., Li, P. H., Wang, S., Maitin-Shepard, J., Karlupia, N., Dorkenwald, S., Sjostedt, E., Leavitt, L., Lee, D., Troidl, J., Collman, F., Bailey, L., Fitzmaurice, A., … Lichtman, J. W. (2024). A Petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution. Science, 384(6696). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adk4858




Wang, T., Zhang, X., Li, A., Zhu, M., Liu, S., Qin, W., Li, J., Yu, C., Jiang, T., & Liu, B. (2017). Polygenic risk for five psychiatric disorders and cross-disorder and disorder-specific neural connectivity in two independent populations. NeuroImage: Clinical, 14, 441–449. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nicl.2017.02.011


Warrier, V., Greenberg, D. M., Weir, E., Buckingham, C., Smith, P., Lai, M.-C., Allison, C., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2020). Elevated rates of autism, other neurodevelopmental and psychiatric diagnoses, and autistic traits in transgender and gender-diverse individuals. Nature Communications, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-17794-1





Zhang, R., Zhang, B., Shen, C., Sahakian, B. J., Li, Z., Zhang, W., Zhao, Y., Li, Y., Feng, J., & Cheng, W. (2024). Associations of dietary patterns with brain health from behavioral, neuroimaging, biochemical and genetic analyses. Nature Mental Health, 2(5), 535–552. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-024-00226-0







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