Category Archives: Neuroscience

Neuroscience

Brain Mapping Instruments Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities and Analysis Of Top Key Player Forecast To 2026 – Instanews247

The utilization of brain mapping instruments has expanded because of increasing occurrences of brain ailments in different parts of the world. Increasing health concerns and enhanced healthcare infrastructure are a few of the foremost aspects driving the expansion of the worldwide market for brain mapping instruments. Furthermore, an increasing number of diagnostics centers is likewise driving the expansion of the market. Nonetheless, poor healthcare insurance coverage and high expenses related to the brain mapping procedure are limiting the expansion of the worldwide market for brain mapping instruments. Also, lack of helium for magnetic resonance imaging systems, saturation in mature markets and technological constraints related to independent systems are likewise constraining expansion of the worldwide market.

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High affecting aspects, for example, continuous brain mapping investigation and examination projects, neuroscience-based activities by government bodies as well as technological progressions in algorithms and tools which are applied in neuroscience space are considered to enhance the market expansion. These variables are foreseen to support revenue generation by impelling the product implementation in this market over the years to follow.

The existence of institutes & organizations, for example, NIH, University of Utah, NeuroScience Canada, Ontario Brain Institute, Max Planck Florida Institute, along with the University of Pennsylvania; in the space are anticipated to significantly affect the advancement of neuroscience field. These entities act a significant part in quickening neuroscience-based r&d to enhance patient results in those suffering from neurological ailments.

Various activities are embraced by the healthcare communities to take cerebrum related innovations and studies above and beyond. For example, in 2014, the University of Utah presented the Neuroscience Initiative keeping in mind the end goal to help mitigate the staggering impacts of brain disorders. The launch was made for developing the understanding of the impacts of brain disorders on wellbeing and channelizing the learning into inventive solutions for patient care.

Constant presentation of new products by prominent market players in the market to the battle different neurological issue will probably support the Y-O-Y development of this market. For example, in September 2015, Codman Neuro (functioning unit of DePuy Synthes) presented CODMAN CERTAS plus programmable valve, an MRI-safe programmable valve along with eight dissimilar weight settings.

Moreover, key aspects that have quickened the research studies about in this field is the development of a number of different harmful CNS issues, for example, Alzheimers and Parkinsonism sickness. As geriatric populace is inclined to different central sensory systems related disorders, for example, Alzheimers, schizophrenia and Parkinsonism with the rise in the aging populace, this market is foreseen to see lucrative development.

The requirement for minimally invasive, more precise along with manifold neuron recording system is additionally anticipated that would drive r&d of hardware and software utilized for neuro-scientific analyses. This, thusly, is considered to reinforce the overall product portfolio accessible in the market and enhance revenues all through the years to come.

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Enhancing healthcare infrastructure in developing nations, for example, India and China would generate prospects for the worldwide market for brain mapping instruments. Expanding implementation of refurbished diagnostic imaging systems would represent a challenge for expansion of the mind-brain mapping instruments market globally. A few of the foremost companies functioning in the global market are Philips Healthcare, GE Healthcare, Natus Medical, Inc and Siemens Healthcare. Other market players active in the market are Nihon Kohden Corporation, Covidien, PLC., and Advanced Brain Monitoring, Inc.

Partnerships and collaboration are preferred as a feasible strategy to remain competitory in the market by foremost companies. Companies are engrossed in strategic alliances outside the region and within the region, which helps the expansion of both the parties along with the connected regional market.

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Brain Mapping Instruments Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities and Analysis Of Top Key Player Forecast To 2026 - Instanews247

Neuroscience

Science in the 2010s: Neuroscience – Labmate Online

Over the past decade the pace of neuroscience innovation has continued to accelerate, with scientists harnessing advanced technologies and collaborative Open Science frameworksto pioneer new breakthroughs. Want to look back on the past 10 years? Here are some of the most significant neuroscience discoveries of the 2010s.

2010 saw Argentinian neuroscientist and professor Fernando Nottebohm honoured with the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Life Sciences for proving that neurogenesis does occur in the adult vertebrate brain. The discovery was a serious breakthrough for neuroscience, with member sof the Benjamin Franklin Medal committee praising Nottebohm for "generating a completely new approach to the quest for cures for brain injury and degenerative disease."

In 2012 American scientist Van Wedeen pioneered an award-winning study that revealed the intricate wiring patterns of the human brain. It was one of the first studies to portray the organ as a complex yet systematic grid, as opposed to a disorderly tangle.

In 2014 the FIFA World Cup made more than just sports headlines when Brazilian physician Miguel Nicolelis developed a robotic suit that allowed a quadriplegic teen to kick-off the opening game of the tournament. Nicolelis was later inaugurated as a member of the prestigious Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from the University of Manchester kicked off 2016 with a major finding that linked the development of Alzheimers disease to a specific type of virus, as well as two strains of bacteria. The study helped support evidence that the neurodegenerative disease is partly caused by a dormant microbial component, possible triggered by iron dysregulation.

2018 marked a major milestone for neurotechnology, with an open-access studypublished inPLOS One introducing a brain implant system that allows patients paralysed by neurodegenerative disorders to send emails, communicate with others and shop online using brain waves connected to an off-the-shelf Android tablet.

Just weeks before the end of 2019, scientists at the University of North Carolina Health Care discovered a key neural circuit that actively regulates alcohol consumption in animals. The findings were published in the Journal of Neuroscience and offered new insight into the role brain cells play in influencing reward-induced behaviours such as alcohol consumption.

Want to know more about the latest neuroscience breakthroughs? Backed by five years of research, Dementias Platform UK is working to transform the dementia research landscape and accelerate the development of diagnosis and treatments, with some of the most significant advances explored in 'Changing Dementia Horizons: DPUK Progress Outlined.

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Science in the 2010s: Neuroscience - Labmate Online

Neuroscience

Bruce McEwen, Pioneer in Study of Stress’s Impact on the Brain, Dies at 81 – Scientific American

A leading figure in the field of neuroscience, BruceMcEwen, died on January 2 after a brief illness.

Beginning in the1960s,McEwenexploredhow stress hormonescould alter the way genes are expressed in the brain, having a consequent impact on memory,mood and decision-making. This work contradicted the accepted academic dogma of the time that the brain does not change during adulthood.

One noted example of the Rockefeller University professors work was the finding that chronic stress could lead to loss of neurons in the brain'shippocampalarea, a locus for memory formation.

McEwen, 81, head of RockefellersHarold and MargaretMillikenHatch Laboratory ofNeuroendocrinology, worked with hiswife KarenBulloch, also a Rockefellerprofessor, to examine brain immune cellsin inflammation andneurodegenerativedisease.

In 1976, he wrote an article forScientific Americanentitled "Interactions between Hormones and Nerve Tissue" in which he observed in the formal language of the day:

During his career, he coined the term allostaticload to convey how lingering stress affectsbody and brainand much of his recent research was devotedto the impact on the brain of nutrition, physical activity, early-life trauma and other factors.

One of McEwens well-known former graduate students, RobertSapolsky, remarked in aprepared statement from Rockefeller:Hiswork became increasingly more expansive and integrativein later years he called himself a molecular sociologist. He made the most seminal findings regarding how steroid hormones affect the brain. Sapolsky is aprofessor of biological sciences at Stanford University.

McEwen'sresearchhas been cited more than 130,000 times in the scientific literature, and he was co-author ofThe End of Stress as We Know It (Joseph Henry Press, 2002).

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Bruce McEwen, Pioneer in Study of Stress's Impact on the Brain, Dies at 81 - Scientific American

Neuroscience

Academic paper in comic form explores ethics of treating torturer with PTSD – Ars Technica

Enlarge / Martinique-born psychiatrist Franz Fanon explored the bioethics of studying and treating trauma in his 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth. An academic paper written in comic form examines one case study in particular from a modern perspective.

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Is it possible to ethically treat someone with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) developed as a result of inflicting torture on others? That's the question posed in a paper published last summer in AJOB Neuroscience, but there's a twist. The paper is written and illustrated as a comic book by Lehigh University artist and neuroscientist Ann E. Fink.

Fink is part of a growing movement called "graphic medicine," a term coined back in 2007 by physician and comics artist Ian Williams to describe the use of comics to enhance both professional and general public discourse on healthcare issues. Comics may be a form of visual rhetoric ideal for medical education and patient care, and proponents include M.K. Czerwiec, aka "Comic Nurse," who worked in an HIV hospice at the height of the AIDS epidemic. When the clinic closed in 2000, she struggled to find an outlet to express the bittersweet emotions she was feeling, but she found the comic format was perfect.

"I realized that the combination of image and text in sequential fashion really helped me organize my thoughts," Czerwiec told the University of Chicago News last year. "It just worked." Now an artist in residence at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, she published a graphic nonfiction memoir/oral history, Taking Turns: Stories from HIV/AIDS Care Unit 371, in 2017. Czerwiec and Williams, along with Penn State University's Michael Green, were among the first attendees in 2010 of what is now an annual international graphic medicine conference. They published The Graphic Medicine Manifesto, a collection of scholarly essays with visual narratives, in 2015.

Like many in the graphic medicine community, Fink has a longstanding interest in comics, although her early training was in psychology and neuroscience, with an emphasis on the larger social and ethical questions surrounding learning, memory, and mental health. During a fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she met comic art legend Lynda Barry and a group called the Applied Comics Kitchen. That's when Fink started using comics to teach topics in biology and health. "A lot of this is really about centering the personal narrative, the experience of the patient, the experience of the provider," she told Ars. But the AJOB Neuroscience paper is her first academic essay in comic form.

In the paper, Fink revisits in comic form a bioethical dilemma described by psychiatrist and political philosopher Franz Fanon in his seminal 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth. Born on the Caribbean island of Martinique (then a French colony) and educated in France, Fanon described the dehumanizing effects of colonialism on the colonized people in his book, offering numerous case studies he'd encountered in the final chapter.

The most well-known is the tale of a white male police inspector in Algeria whose job involved torturing prisoners of the colonial government for many hours each day. He would likely have been diagnosed with PTSD today, since the stress of his day job led to the man regularly beating his wife and children at homeincluding a 20-month-old infant. He sought treatment, Fanon wrote, to deal with the stress and guilt he felt over torturing human beings so that he could continue torturing people at work with "total peace of mind"and thereby curb the impulse to inflict physical abuse on his own family.

The police inspector's bioethics dilemma and decision tree

Ann E. Fink

Should he help this man suffering from PTSD be a better torturer?

Ann E. Fink

Outlining the basics of PTSD

Ann E. Fink

Useful lessons for the torturers of today?

Ann E. Fink

On a lighter note: a dissertation on Icelandic sagas in comic form

Yoav Tirosh

This posed an ethical dilemma for Fanon. The police inspector is both victim and perpetrator: he inflicts abuse on Algerian prisoners and his family, but he himself is also a pawn and a victim of the larger sociopolitical pressures and mental trauma incurred on the job. So should Fanon treat the man and make him a better torturer, thereby sparing his wife and children while Algerian citizens continue to suffer? Or, should he refuse to treat him and let the family continue to suffer? And was it even possible to treat the man in any meaningful sense, if he continued to work in the context of an inherently violent colonial regime?

Fink's interest in learning and memoryparticularly her early experiments on the plasticity of individual neurons in the amygdala region of the brainled to an interest in PTSD. "I always wanted to put it in a broader context," she said. When she read Fanon's police inspector case study in The Wretched of the Earth, the psychiatrist's ethical dilemma struck a chord. "How do you think about PTSD as a reducible biological phenomenon in the context of a society that's sick, violent, and inhumane?" she said.

"How do you think about PTSD as a reducible biological phenomenon in the context of a society that's sick, violent, andinhumane?"

For Fink, the case is a useful starting point to explore the larger ethical issues surrounding the social dimensions of traumatic stress. She developed a "decision tree" to help clarify the complex ethical issues involved. "You can think of PTSD as a biological entity, or something socially contextualized," said Fink. "And you can think of it as a personal narrative issue."

But there are no easy solutions to the dilemma. "I don't have an answer, and that is kind of the point," Fink told Ars. "It wouldn't be a good ethical dilemma if it had a pat answer. The narrative shows us what the problems are." Fanon's own solution wasn't a solution at all. He quit his job at the hospital and joined the Algerian resistance. "This situation wasn't tenable for him in the long run," she said. "HIs ultimate conclusion is that you can't treat PTSD. There's no healing you can do in this inhuman context."

The comic trend might be spreading beyond the health and medicine arena. Last fall, a PhD candidate at the University of Iceland produced a comic version of the abstractfor his doctoral dissertation on a famous 13th century Icelandic saga. TheLjsvetninga saga has multiple versions, and scholarship has typically focused on dating the various versions to determine which might be the earliest. But Yoav Tirosh chose to explore how the saga's construction has constantly changed. His comic abstract is in the form of a dialogue, in which a fictional version of Tirosh meets the ghost of one of the saga's central figures (Gumundr inn rki, a goi, aka a priest or chieftain) in the restroom of a hotel inReykjavk.

I liked the challenge of trying to interpret visually something that is very text-based like a PhD thesis, and initially even intended it to be incorporated into the thesis itself, he told Medievalists.net. This, however, would have delayed my submission in at least a month and time was pressing, so I decided to do it during my post-submission 'vacation.'" It also served as preparation for a bigger goal: Tirosh hopes to produce an introduction to Old Norse literature in comic form one day.

DOI: AJOB Neuroscience, 2019. 10.1080/21507740.2019.1632970 (About DOIs).

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Academic paper in comic form explores ethics of treating torturer with PTSD - Ars Technica

Neuroscience

Integrating Academic Inquiry and Reformist Activism in Psychiatry – Psychiatric Times

CONVERSATIONS IN CRITICAL PSYCHIATRY

Conversations in Critical Psychiatry is an interview series aimed to engage prominent critics within and outside the profession who have made meaningful criticisms of psychiatry and have offered constructive alternative perspectives to the current status quo.

Sandra Steingard, MD, is Chief Medical Officer, Howard Center, Burlington, Vermont and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine. She is chair of the board of the Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care, a member of the board of the American Association of Community Psychiatrists, and on the advisory board of Mad in America Continuing Education. She is editor of the book, Critical Psychiatry: Controversies and Clinical Implications, published by Springer in 2019. Beginning January 2020, she has also assumed the role of Editor-in-Chief of the Community Mental Health Journal.

G. Scott Waterman, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine, where he served at various times as Director of Psychopharmacology, Director of Medical Student Education in Psychiatry, and Associate Dean for Student Affairs. Upon his retirement, Dr Waterman enrolled in the graduate program of the Department of History at the University of Vermont, where he studied extremist social and political movements of modern Europe and America and received his MA a few years ago. He is a member of the executive council of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry and teaches courses in philosophy of psychiatry at the University of Vermont.

Dr Steingard and Dr Waterman have been married for 33 years.

I got to know Dr Waterman through the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatryan organization I would recommend to all readersand I have been impressed with his intellectual rigor in the course of our interactions. He began his career with research interests in the neurobiological foundations of childhood-onset mental illness but eventually shifted his academic focus to philosophy of psychiatry. I became more acquainted with Dr Steingard's ideas after I read Critical Psychiatry: Controversies and Clinical Implications, published earlier last year. The volume presents an overview of the critical psychiatry movement with impressive clarity and is highly accessible to clinicians and trainees. The happy coincidence that these two intelligent and accomplished psychiatrists are married allowed me to engage them in this joint interview where their complementary views, side by side, make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Aftab: Dr Steingard, can you tell us briefly about how you got involved with the critical psychiatry movement and how this involvement has changed how you practice as a psychiatrist? Also, since a disappointingly large number of people think of the critical psychiatry movement as being synonymous with the antipsychiatry movement, can you shed some light on why that is not the case?

Steingard: There is not an absolute delineation between critical psychiatry and antipsychiatry. Bonnie Burstow of the University of Toronto characterizes antipsychiatry as an abolitionist movement whose proponents consider psychiatry so fundamentally flawed as to be beyond reform. Critical psychiatry, on the other hand, includes both critical academic inquiry and reformist activism. It encompasses critiques that range from questioning the validity of our diagnostic system and investigating the effects of conflicts of interest on clinical practice to examining the impact of structural societal forcespoverty, sexism, racism, for exampleon mental well-being and the manifestations of psychiatric disorders. Critical psychiatry also acknowledges the important contributions of those with lived experience of receiving psychiatric treatment or being labeled with psychiatric conditions not only to evaluating clinical care but also designing and conducting research. Those are some of the areas that have had great salience for me.

The evolution of my critical stance toward psychiatry began early. I entered the field because I was fascinated by psychoanalysis. When I was introduced, as a psychiatry resident, to various critiques of psychoanalytic theory such as Adolf Grnbaums work, I was disappointed at my teachers inability to address them. That contributed to my decision to leave psychoanalytic training and shift my focus to studying and caring for people who experience psychosis. Many new drugs came on the market in the 1990s. I was initially hopeful that they would improve care but was demoralized to witness the blatant hype that was carried out, not only by the pharmaceutical industry but also by academic leaders. Initially, I was comfortable thinking about psychosis as reflective of brain diseaseor at least a disruption of brain functionsbut in more recent years, as I have been introduced to the perspectives of the critical social sciences, as well as to people who have been treated for a variety of psychiatric disorders, I have broadened my perspective on the conceptualization of psychosis (and all psychiatric phenomena).

It is difficult to summarize how this has changed my practice, but I have been influenced by Joanna Moncrieffs drug-centered approach to pharmacotherapy and need-adapted treatments. These ideas have helped me to embody principles that are not inherently controversial but, nevertheless, hard to implement. They include adopting a patient-centered focus, practicing with humility and transparency, and acknowledging that our medical perspective may not be the only (or best) way to conceptualize the nature of our patients distress.

Aftab: Dr Waterman, do you also identify with the critical psychiatry movement? How would you describe your identity as a psychiatrist?

Waterman: I would like to think that, throughout my career, I was a critical psychiatrist in the generic sense of challenging prevailing conceptualizations and practices. And while I have in recent years been largely an observer from the periphery of what has come to be called the critical psychiatry movement, I share a number of its formulations and priorities. Thus, my former preoccupations with matters like mind-body dualistic fallacies in medical discourse and training, the conceptual problems of the biopsychosocial model, and the multiple shortcomings of the DSM diagnostic system have moved aside to make room for concerns about personal autonomy, coercion, epistemic justice, and the commercial corruption of the empiric database of medicine. Although I continue to be deeply involved in philosophy of psychiatry, my identity as a psychiatrist is as a retired oneif, indeed, I remain one at all.

Aftab: Dr Steingard, you and Dr Moncrief write: We live in the era of evidenced-based practice. If an approach is not funded, then it will never acquire the kind of data that would allow it to be considered evidence-based. This creates a closed loop: only research that is hypothesized to be of value is funded; understudied approaches that might be of value are ignored because they are not considered evidenced-based.1

That's a very important point. A lot of people dont appreciate the institutional and political forces which determine what gets funded and what gets studied. It certainly suggests that looking only at evidenced-based literature can be a recipe for confirmation bias. How should we approach this situation?

Steingard: There is no good answer, but it begins with a recognition of the problem. In addition, it is important for psychiatrists to understand what questions randomized controlled studies do and do not answer. For instance, they can detect differences that are not necessarily clinically meaningful. Often, the emphasis is put on the statistical rather than clinical significance of findings and then an echo chamber of public relations promotes a narrative in the absence of more critical examination of the data. On the other hand, I appreciate that it is extremely time consuming to parse out all of the available data on each topic that might be of interest to a busy clinician. One has to decide at some point to trust expert sources. I wish we could have more confidence in the academic establishment.

Aftab: Dr Waterman, one of the reasons you were drawn to psychiatry was the promise that a neuroscientific understanding of psychiatric conditions is on the horizon and it will transform the way we practice psychiatry. What do you think explains the failure of neuroscience so far to have the revolutionary impact on clinical psychiatry that was expected? Do you have conceptual reasons to think that such a revolution may never happen?

Waterman: When we were residents, Sandy and I attended a lecture by the renowned philosopher of mind and of neuroscience, Patricia Churchland (whose argumentsalong with those of her husband, Paul Churchlandfor a particular brand of materialism exerted great influence on me). She recounted an anecdote involving their son, who I believe was about six years old at the time. He reportedly asked of his philosopher-parents at breakfast one morning, What if the brain is more complicated than it is smart? While doubtless not the first person to pose that question, it seems unlikely to be one that has occurred to many first-graders!

The profound complexities of the brain are only half of the equation. The expectation that advances in neuroscience would revolutionize clinical psychiatry seems to me to be predicated on anticipation of sufficient understandings of two (at least currently) disparate arenas: the brain being one and the other being the psychiatric phenomena whose neuroscientific foundations are being sought but which manifest at the level of the whole person. Those phenomena entail both subjective/first-person (emotions, cognitions) and objective/third-person (behaviors) components that are themselves both complex and heterogenous from person to person. The complexities they present include things like the looping effects of which Ian Hacking writes,2 whose material instantiation in the brain might be intractable. So what comprehension of psychiatric phenomenahow best to capture, define, describe, and classify themwill allow us to match up such understandings with our growing grasp of neuroscience? Moreover, what levels of neuroscientific understandinggenes?, gene products?, neurons?, neural circuits?, regional or whole-brain physiology?, combinations of them?should we expect to match up with our still-elusive grasp of psychiatric phenomena? I remain enough of a materialist to believe that advances in neuroscience might well translate into significant advances in clinical psychiatry, but enough of an empiricist to recognize that a revolution is not in the offing and that explanatory pluralism (and its clinical extensions) are our best bet for the foreseeable future.

Aftab: Dr Steingard, can you elaborate for the readers your approach to psychopharmacology that you have espoused in Critical Psychiatry?

Steingard: This approach has been characterized by Joanna Moncrieff as a drug-centered approach to psychopharmacotherapy. It considers the drugs we use as psychoactive substances that alter brain function in ways that may be experienced as beneficial. This is distinct from a disease-centered approach which posits that the drugs work by fixing something that is not working correctly. There has been much discussion in our field (including in articles in Psychiatric Times) about whether or not psychiatry as a field promoted the so-called chemical imbalance theory. I would argue that most people have come to believe that the drugs we prescribe work by correcting problems thought to underlie psychiatric conditions. Thus, for example, SSRIs are said to fix a problem in the serotonin system and antipsychotic drugs fix a problem in the dopamine system. However, what we have learned is that while the drugs clinical effects might be related to the way they alter these systems, evidence is lacking that depression results from low levels of serotonin and psychosis reflects high levels of dopamine. Nevertheless, these beliefs persist and influence the way physicians talk to patients about these drugs.

Aftab: You write The challenge is that psychiatrists are currently charged with being the gatekeepers to psychoactive drug use . . . Rather than putting psychiatrists in the role of determining who can and cannot have legitimate access to such drugs, psychiatrists can be the experts on drug action.3 How does the drug-centered approach change the gatekeeper role of psychiatrists, since whether you adopt a drug-centered approach or disease-centered approach, psychiatrists still have the prescribing power and therefore they still have the responsibility to determine legitimate access?

Steingard: As long as psychiatrists (and others) hold prescribing privileges, there is no way for us to avoid acting as gatekeepers to drug access. However, what I prefer about the drug-centered approach is that it avoids what I think is a false distinction between good and bad drugs or between good and bad uses of drugs. The disease-centered approach fosters the notions that good drugs are those that are used to treat diseases or disorders while bad drugs are those that people use recreationally. Such thinking leads to the tortured distinction we see in discussions of cannabis between so-called medical and recreational marijuana. From a drug-centered perspective, our role would be to educate not only our patients but our communities about what these drugs do, what problems they can cause, and the challenges of discontinuation, among other things. We would help people make judicious decisions about their health. People have sought out psychoactive substances for a very long time and this is not likely to abate. If we push aside the moral judgements and the sometimes-arbitrary distinctions between medical and other uses, we would have a more honest and transparent discussion about what these drugs do and do not do.

Continued >

References:

1. Moncrieff J, Steingard S. What is Critical Psychiatry? In: Critical Psychiatry: Controversies and Clinical Implications. Steingard S (Ed). Cham, Switzerland: Springer; 2019.

2. Hacking I. The Looping Effect of Human Kinds. In: Sperber D, Premack D, and Premack AJ, eds. Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate. Oxford: Clarendon Press; 1995.

3. Steingard S. A Path to the Future for Psychiatry? In: Critical Psychiatry: Controversies and Clinical Implications. Steingard S, Ed. Cham, Switzerland: Springer; 2019.

4. Waterman GS, Batra J. Biopsychosocial psychiatry. Am J Psychiatry. 2003;160:185.

5. Waterman GS. Why I am not a psychiatrist and Responses to commentaries. Bulletin of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry. 2019;26:2-3,9-12. https://philosophyandpsychiatry.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/aapp-bulletin-vol-26-1-2019-.pdf. Accessed January 3, 2019.

6. Waterman GS. Does the biopsychosocial model help or hinder our efforts to understand and teach psychiatry? Psychiatric Times. 2006;23(14):12-13.

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Integrating Academic Inquiry and Reformist Activism in Psychiatry - Psychiatric Times

Neuroscience

Engrams Emerging as the Basic Unit of Memory – Technology Networks

Though scientist Richard Semon introduced the concept of the engram 115 years ago to posit a neural basis for memory, direct evidence for engrams has only begun to accumulate recently as sophisticated technologies and methods have become available.

In a new review in Science, Professors Susumu Tonegawa of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT and Sheena Josselyn of the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and the University of Toronto describe the rapid progress they and colleagues have been making over the last dozen years in identifying, characterizing and even manipulating engrams, as well as the major outstanding questions of the field.

Experiments in rodents have revealed that engrams exist as multiscale networks of neurons. An experience becomes stored as a potentially retrievable memory in the brain when excited neurons in a brain region such as the hippocampus or amygdala become recruited into a local ensemble. These ensembles combine with others in other regions, such as the cortex, into an engram complex. Crucial to this process of linking engram cells is the ability of neurons to forge new circuit connections, via processes known as synaptic plasticity and dendritic spine formation. Importantly, experiments show that the memory initially stored across an engram complex can be retrieved by its reactivation but may also persist silently even when memories cannot be naturally recalled, for instance in mouse models used to study memory disorders such as early stage Alzheimers disease.

More than 100 years ago Semon put forth a law of engraphy, wrote Josselyn, Senior Scientist at SickKids, Professor of Psychology and Physiology at the University of Toronto and Senior Fellow in the Brain, Mind & Consciousness Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and Tonegawa, Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at the RIKEN-MIT Laboratory for Neural Circuit Genetics and investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at MIT. Combining these theoretical ideas with the new tools that allow researchers to image and manipulate engrams at the level of cell ensembles facilitated many important insights into memory function.

For instance, evidence indicates that both increased intrinsic excitability and synaptic plasticity work hand in hand to form engrams and that these processes may also be important in memory linking, memory retrieval, and memory consolidation.

For as much as the field has learned, Josselyn and Tonegawa wrote, there are still important unanswered questions and untapped potential applications: How do engrams change over time? How can engrams and memories be studied more directly in humans? And can applying knowledge about biological engrams inspire advances in artificial intelligence, which in turn could feedback new insights into the workings of engrams?

The paper appears in Sciences Jan. 3 edition.

This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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Engrams Emerging as the Basic Unit of Memory - Technology Networks

Neuroscience

A Molecular Map of the Brains Decision-Making Area – Technology Networks

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have come one step closer toward understanding how the part of our brain that is central for decision-making and the development of addiction is organized on a molecular level. In mouse models and with methods used for mapping cell types and brain tissue, the researchers were able to visualize the organization of different opioid-islands in striatum. Their spatiomolecular map, published in the journal Cell Reports, may further our understanding of the brain's reward-system.

Striatum is the inner part of the brain that among other things regulates rewards, motivation, impulses and motor function. It is considered central to decision-making and the development of various addictions.

In this study, the researchers created a molecular 3D-map of the nerve cells targeted by opioids, such as morphine and heroin, and showed how they are organized in striatum. It is an important step toward understanding how the brain's network governing motivation and drug addiction is organized. In the study, the researchers described a spatiomolecular code that can be used to divide striatum into different subregions.

"Our map forms the basis for a new understanding of the brain's probably most important network for decision-making," says Konstantinos Meletis, associate professor at the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet and the study's main author. "It may contribute to an increased understanding of both normal reward processes and the effects of various addictive substances on this network."

To find this molecular code, the researchers used single-nucleus RNA sequencing, a method to study small differences in individual cells, and mapping of the striatal gene expression. The results provide the first demonstration of molecular codes that divide the striatum into three main levels of classification: a spatial, a patch-matrix and a cell-type specific organization.

"With this new knowledge we may now begin to analyze the function of different types of nerve cells in different molecularly defined areas," says Meletis. "This is the first step in directly defining the networks' role in controlling decision-making and addiction with the help of optogenetics."

This new knowledge may also form the basis for the development of new treatments based on a mechanistic understanding of the brain's network, according to the researchers.

Reference:Antje Mrtin, Daniela Calvigioni, Ourania Tzortzi, Janos Fuzik, Emil Wrnberg, Konstantinos Meletis. A Spatiomolecular Map of the Striatum. Cell Reports, 2019; 29 (13): 4320 DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.11.096

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A Molecular Map of the Brains Decision-Making Area - Technology Networks

Neuroscience

Loyola physician one among the contributing authors of new guidelines for treatment of ischemic stroke – News-Medical.net

The American Heart Association/American Stroke Association recently appointed a writing group to provide updated guidelines for the early management of acute ischemic stroke. The group was comprised of specialists in various areas of expertise, including neurology, neurosurgery, neurointerventional radiology, translational neuroscience, critical care, emergency medicine and nursing. This group of multidisciplinary experts reviewed randomized trials relevant to the treatment of ischemic stroke and developed new and updated guidelines.

Jos Biller, MD, chairperson of neurology at Loyola University Medical Center, was a contributing author of these updated guidelines for the treatment of adults with acute arterial ischemic stroke. He said,

The expectation is that the modern practice of medicine should be based on best evidence. The guidelines followed a meticulous methodology and are largely based on rigorous randomized trials."

Clinically, Dr. Biller cares for patients with aneurysms, brain hemorrhages and transient ischemic attacks in addition to caring for stroke patients. Loyola University Medical Center is recognized by the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association as a certified comprehensive stroke center. In addition to providing evidence-based stroke care to its own patients, Loyola provides telestroke services for hospitals across Illinois and neighboring states. "We emphasize 'time equals brain,' which is why the evaluation and treatment of acute stroke is time-sensitive. Through the use of technology, we can provide expertise on the diagnosis and management of strokes to our colleagues at other hospitals in real time," he said.

The updated guidelines apply to adult patients with ischemic stroke from the time symptoms appear to two weeks post-stroke. The guidelines have been made available to emergency medical services responders, physicians, allied health professionals and hospital administrators. Patients will benefit from major changes to treatment protocols, including updates to the use of aspirin and thrombolytic agents, the urgency of intervention with guidelines for prehospital triage and transport, as well as initiation of in-hospital measures to prevent recurrent stroke.

Stroke is a principal cause of mortality and disability. In the United States, stroke is the fifth leading cause of death, with more than 133,000 people dying because of stroke each year. At Loyola, said Dr. Biller, "we strive to practice evidence-based medicine and collaborate in the search for new knowledge. It is expected that within five to six years, the guidelines will be updated again because we will have new evidence."

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Loyola physician one among the contributing authors of new guidelines for treatment of ischemic stroke - News-Medical.net

Neuroscience

Want to Sync the 2 Hemispheres of Your Brain? Neuroscience Says to Do This Daily (It Only Takes 4 Minutes) – Inc.

You know those moments when everything just flows? You're in the conference room brainstorming with your team and you can just feel the energy, the cohesion. Or you're writing your book and it's just pouring out of you, the words an effortless stream of brilliance.

Wouldn't it be nice to have more of those moments in 2020?

Imagine there was something you could do daily that would simultaneously:

Build your core strength Release stress and tension Enhance whole-brain thinking (get your left and right hemispheres to work together) Calm your mind Energize your body

Now imagine it only took a few minutes to do, and you could do it anywhere.

There is. It's called the cross-crawl, and it's for real.

Neuroscientists have long known that cross-body movements help the left and right hemispheres of your brain to connect and coordinate. This is important because the more your hemispheres connect, the more optimally you perform on any given task.

The cross-crawl is simply a form of cross-lateral body movements--movements where you use opposition, like crawling, walking, or swimming. The magic comes from using opposite sides of the body to work together (i.e. coordinating the right arm and left leg, then left arm and right leg).

Performing the cross-crawl strengthens the bridge between the right and left hemispheres of your brain, which allows electrical impulses and information to pass freely between the two. This helps with not only physical coordination, but thinking-based activities like learning a language, reading, and focusing.

According to neurophysiologistDr. Carla Hannaford, "Cross-lateral movements, like a baby's crawling, activate both hemispheres [of the brain] in a balanced way ... When both eyes, both ears, both hands and feet are being used equally, the corpus callosum orchestrating these processes between the two hemispheres becomes more highly developed."

This can have a major impact.

This was, as you might imagine, a huge problem. He wouldn't be able to graduate from high school if he couldn't read. He wouldn't be able to attend college or hold any number of jobs. His life would be, in many ways, compromised.

Fortunately, he and his parents were told about cross-lateral movements. The whole family started doing the cross-crawl with Todd, daily. They did it twice--once in the morning, before leaving for school (and work); and once in the evening, before bed.

Six weeks later, Todd was reading.

We tend to think about our physical bodies and mental capacity as two completely separate entities. But they're not; they're intimately linked. Our biology is our life. Our life is our biology. And by changing one, we can change the other.

According to Dr. Hannaford, the reason the transformation was so quick for Todd was that he, in fact, already had everything he needed in his brain--the two hemispheres just weren't communicating. By doing the cross-crawl, he stimulated the corpus callosum, linked the two hemispheres, and got them connected.

As an adult, you can use the cross-crawl for a number of different things. Because it's both calming and energizing, you can use it to both discharge energy (as in, after a stressful meeting); or recharge your energy (before a big presentation).

It's one of the quickest and easiest ways to stimulate your brain development and stabilize your nervous system. Basically, whenever you do it, you're reintegrating your brain and nervous system; it's like a little reboot for your bodymind.

So how do you do this magical exercise?

An easy way is to do a sort of elaborate march. You stand with your feet apart and arms all the way out (parallel to the ground). Shift your weight to your left foot, lift your right knee and touch it with your left hand. Go back to both feet and immediately shift to the other side. Repeat in anupbeat, rhythmic way--you can even do it to music. Breathe fully. (Asimple videoif you'd rather see it.)

You want to do this for only about 1-2 minutes at a time (or ~30 reps). You're not looking for full muscle fatigue, just stimulation. (For those interested in more cross-lateral movements for kids--especially those who struggle with focus issues--there are several morehere.)

As an adult, you are daily bombarded by a multiplicity of stimuli. Coworkers pingyou on Slack while yougettexts about your friend's upcoming birthday dinner (for which you still need a gift), plusVenmo notifications for ramen last night and an email about whether you want to split a hotel room for that conference next month.

You need reliable, easy, and effective strategies to not only managestress, but reliably getto peak performance. You need to be able to turn it on when you need to turn it on.

Heading into an important meeting? Do the cross-crawl.

Frustrated with a project or coworker? Do the cross-crawl.

Stuck on that one part of the deck that just doesn't seem to be coming together? Do the cross-crawl.

Doing the cross-crawl throughout the day is one of the best self-care activities you can do,and exercises you can have your team do. It's free, easy, and fast. Build it into your daily schedule. Teach it to your staff. Better yet, do it with your staff.

Then get ready for fireworks.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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Want to Sync the 2 Hemispheres of Your Brain? Neuroscience Says to Do This Daily (It Only Takes 4 Minutes) - Inc.

Neuroscience

Take That Back: The Top Scientific Retractions of 2019 – Livescience.com

"If it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong. That's all there is to it." So said famed physicist Richard Feynman at a lecture about the scientific method at Cornell University in 1964.

Feynman appears to be only half correct, though. Yes, one's proposed theory is wrong if it doesn't agree with experiment. But that's not all there is to it. With carelessness or outright fraud, you can make it seem that your theory is correct and get it published in a top scientific journal.

Usually, such deception is eventually discovered. This past year was rich in scientific retractions of papers filled with poor processes and, in many cases, blatant fabrications. Here are five from 2019 that made the news in part because they mislead and provide false hope.

God created the Earth 6,000 years ago, according to many Christian creationists. And on the sixth day of creation, God made three species of timber vole with ribonucleotides that would come to demonstrate the shortcomings of the theory of evolution, according to a 1989 paper in the International Journal of Neuroscience.

Russian scientist Dmitrii Kuznetsov, the author of this paper, claimed that each of these three very closely related voles have ribonucleotides enzymes that are the building blocks of DNA and thus DNA repair that are utterly incompatible across the three species. This finding supports "the general creationist concept on the problems of the origin of boundless multitudes of different and harmonically functioning forms of life," Kuznetsov wrote in the paper.

But did Kuznetsov break the commandment about bearing false witness? Swedish biologist Dan Larhammar, who in 2018 became president of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, questioned Kuznetsov's findings in a letter to the journal published way back in 1994. As reported in The Scientist in November 2019, Larhammar claimed that the results were superficially demonstrated and that many of the references couldn't be verified, even after he contacted scientists cited in the paper.

The International Journal of Neuroscience agreed with Larhammar and retracted the paper, albeit 30 years later. Kuznetsov has been accused multiple times of scientific misconduct, including for his analysis of the Shroud of Turin, which scholars claim originated in the Middle Ages but which Kuznetsov suggested could be the 2,000-year-old death shroud of Jesus.

Why the 30-year delay for a retraction? Thirty years in a 6,000-year-old Earth would be equivalent to 20 million years in a 4-billion-year-old Earth. Maybe the journal was hesitant to retype the original title, "In Vitro Studies of Interactions Between Frequent and Unique Mrnas and Cytoplasmic Factors from Brain Tissue of Several Species of Wild Timber Voles of Northern Eurasia, Clethrionomys Glareolus, Clethrionomys Frater and Clethrionomys Gapperi: A New Criticism to a Modern Molecular-Genetic Concept of Biological Evolution."

The vaccine against the human papillomavirus (HPV) has the potential to eliminate most cases of cervical cancer worldwide and save millions of lives. The HPV vaccine can also prevent the majority of vaginal, anal and penile cancers. But that's only if parents vaccinate their children against HPV.

A growing number are opting out over fears that the HPV vaccine is harmful. In Japan, for example, HPV vaccination rates fell from about 70 percent to 1 percent, its current level, in just a few years after unfounded reports of vaccine side effects, according to research published this year in the journal Expert Review of Vaccines.

As such, vaccine proponents are skeptical of any new study purporting problems with the HPV vaccine. Gayle DeLong, an associate professor of economics and finance at Baruch College in New York, learned that quickly. In 2018, she published a paper in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health, Part A, in which she reported a link between the HPV vaccine and infertility. Married women between ages 25 and 29 who had received the HPV vaccine were less likely to have conceived compared with married women who didn't receive the vaccine, DeLong found.

The finding was promoted within anti-vaccination circles, but the study had multiple statistical shortcomings, such as not controlling for birth-control use. Moreover, those women who received the vaccine had a higher educational level. So, it could be that college-educated women who had received the vaccine were delaying childbirth until after age 30, as is the U.S. trend.

The journal retracted the paper in December 2019, noting "serious flaws in the statistical analysis and interpretation of the data in this paper." The World Health Organization has placed the HPV vaccine on its list of essential medicines, right up there with penicillin and acetaminophen, as a sign of its safety and efficacy.

On Nov. 13, 2019, Cao Xuetao, one of China's most prominent scientists, spoke to his fellow countrymen from the Great Hall of People in Beijing about research integrity. Some 6,000 people were in attendance, and the speech was live-streamed to 800,000 college students across the vast nation, mandatory viewing for most.

The topic was a contentious one. Just a year prior, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and several other agencies had promulgated a series of punitive measures to be used in cases of scientific misconduct, a sign that the Chinese government was considering the matter seriously. This had come in the wake of numerous scientific scandals in China, such as the retraction of more than 100 papers in 2017 over faked peer review and data manipulation.

Cao is a former president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, current president of the prestigious Nankai University, leader of several labs and chief research integrity officer for all Chinese research. His accolades are many. But now, Cao's actions are drawing close scrutiny, as he has been accused of scientific misconduct.

As reported on Nov. 22 in the journal Science, a multitude of Cao's papers appear to have doctored images. Science sleuth Elisabeth Bik, based in San Francisco, noticed that several images from a 2009 paper, in particular, looked like repeats. Bik has outed many scientists for data manipulation. Cao's body of work was soon scrutinized; they found examples of charts and images appearing to be repeated and manipulated in dozens of papers, which soon may be retracted.

Cao pledged to look into the matter. As noted, he's the leader of several labs and has a full-time gig as a university president, and he likely relies on postdoctoral fellows and graduate students to conduct actual research. And they likely want to please the boss with superficially good results. The same would apply to other elite scientists in China, which means the problem of scientific misconduct might be difficult to root out.

The cancer research community was ecstatic over a study published in the journal Nature in September 2018 that described a homing system to deliver the powerful anti-cancer chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy to brain cancer cells, which have long been out of reach to drug therapies.

But the researchers who conducted the study, from Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, may not have crossed the bloodbrain barrier, after all, but rather the factfiction barrier.

Within a few weeks of publication, other scientists began homing in on what may be widespread image manipulation. Nearly every image appeared to be fudged and not supportive of the underlying data, according to comments posted on an anonymous post-publication peer-review website called PubPeer.

The journal Nature investigated and retracted the paper in February 2019. The validity of this homing system remains in doubt. Some commenters on PubPeer noted that Nature should have spotted the image manipulation during the peer-review process. Software exists to detect it. It's either that or expect scientists to be honest.

He Jiankui has not been seen publicly since January 2019, just a few months after he infamously announced the birth of twin girls whose DNA was edited using CRISPR. His plan was to make the girls immune to HIV infection by modifying a gene known to offer some protection against the virus.

Seemingly proud of his achievement, He encountered swift worldwide condemnation not merely over the secrecy of the experiment but also for the possible harm that could have been done to the babies, whose genes were manipulated while in an embryonic state. CRISPR is an imperfect technique that can alter DNA in unknown and sometimes harmful ways, as animal studies have demonstrated.

The Chinese government, which may have supported He's efforts, has since suspended all of his research activities and, according to the New York Times, has kept him under guard.

Not much is known about He's procedure. Here's what is known: Scientists have stated that the basic premise of the work altering a gene called CCR5 to prevent HIV infection is shortsighted because this altered gene, found in nature, does not offer uniform HIV protection to those people who carry it. Moreover, the twins were given imperfect versions of this altered gene, and the health consequences are unknown, according to investigative work done by MIT Technology Review.

So, this was an experimental study otherwise suitable only for lab animals, medically unnecessary and poorly executed at that. There was a third gene-edited baby, too, perhaps born in the summer of 2019. Nothing is known of the baby's fate.

At issue is germline gene-editing on embryos. Gene alteration at this early stage ensures that all genetic modifications are copied into every cell in the body, including egg and sperm cells, making the changes inheritable. Otherwise, CRISPR and similar technologies continue to show great promise in curing genetic diseases in children and adults through more isolated and limited gene modification.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Take That Back: The Top Scientific Retractions of 2019 - Livescience.com