Physiology

E-News | WVU recognizes three faculty members as Foundation Outstanding Teachers for 2022 – WVU ENews

Each spring, West Virginia University recognizes selected faculty members for their exceptional and innovative teaching. This year, the 2022 WVU Foundation Awards for Outstanding Teaching honors three faculty members:

Lisa Ingram, a tenured extension assistant professor in 4-H Youth Development with WVU Extension.

Aimee Moorewood, professor in the College of Education and Human Services Department of Curriculum & Instruction, Literacy Studies.

Mark Paternostro, professor, teaching scientist and associate chair for education in the School of Medicines Department of Physiology and Pharmacology.

Each year, the University recognizes faculty members for their exceptional teaching efforts, both within the University and across our communities, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Maryanne Reed said. This years three honorees are a prime example of the talented and dedicated educators we have at WVU. This prestigious award honors their commitment to their students and to the art and science of teaching."

Ingram is recognized for her responsiveness to community concerns, creative design and extensive dissemination of curriculum to her constituents. For example, in response to a rise in incidents of social media bullying between students, she developed and delivered her cyber-bullying and internet curriculum to 2,180 students in kindergarten through 12th grade and 146 adults in Marshall County. Ingram has also helped design a state-wide curriculum on cyberbullying for K-8th graders and has presented I RESPECT You: Camping Inclusion Activities to 94 camping professionals from 21 states at the American Camping Association National Conference.

She has made innovative modifications to the Catch Your Breath curriculum to address the local rise in youth vaping/juuling, which has been offered to 764 youth teachers, counselors and parents in Marshall and Ohio counties. Ingram presented her Hazards of Vaping Train the Trainer session to 41 West Virginia Extension specialists so that they can likewise offer the training to their constituents. This particular workshop earned a 2021 Communicator Award for media presentation from the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts, and an information brochure she created on vaping was recognized in 2020 in the educational category.

Morewood is recognized for her long-standing exceptional teaching effectiveness and for creating innovative, meaningful online learning experiences that have lasting impacts on students in the literacy education program at WVU. Morewood started her higher education career at WVU in 2007, and since this time, nearly 100% of the programs graduates she trained passed the required Praxis exam established by the West Virginia Department of Education. WVUs literacy education program was the first fully-online program in the country to have achieved the International Literacy Associations National Recognition with Certificate of Distinction, honoring its rigorous standards and preparation of literacy professionals.

Morewood and her colleagues designed the conceptual model that serves as the foundation for the online literacy education program. The article describing this conceptual model recently won the Elizabeth G. Sturtevant Exemplary Article Award from the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers. The award committee was also impressed by Morewoods seamless integration of her research agenda and service work to support practicing teachers. Morewood has acquired more than $375,000 from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation to support West Virginia teachers as they worked to increase their literacy content, pedagogy and curricular knowledge. She has served as the principal investigator and co-PI on these grants, designing and facilitating the projects and teaching courses specifically designed for preschool teachers. In addition to graduate-level reading courses, the grants supported preschool teachers to pursue National Board Teacher Certification. To date, 90% of the grant participants who pursued the certification were successful.

Paternostro is recognized for his outstanding teaching effectiveness, innovative teaching methods, significant curricular contributions and efforts to support his students and colleagues. He is an equally effective and exceptional teacher in small and large classes, as well as in person and asynchronous learning environments with undergraduate, graduate and medical professional students. Paternostros primary focus is student success in learning large amounts of complex materials. The committee noted his efforts to significantly shift courses to virtual delivery over the last two years and multiple pages of student feedback documenting his effective teaching in the virtual space.

Paternostros teaching strategies for creating a content-driven, student-friendly asynchronous learning environment included organized, shorter to-the-point virtual lectures, organized weekly content online, bolded keywords and color-coded cues, hiding passwords within lectures that translated to bonus points and a short video showing students how to organize content using flow charts and concept maps for efficient studying. He also utilized self-assessment exercises, weekly emails with class reminders, personal anecdotes, words of encouragement and an inclusive learning community. Paternostro regularly presents his research on large-group teaching and has received multiple teaching awards and recognitions in his college.

Faculty members must be nominated by their college leadership in order to be eligible for the Foundation Award for Outstanding Teaching. Each of the honorees will receive $5,000 in professional development monies from the WVU Foundation.

Established in 1985 by the WVU Foundation, the Outstanding Teaching Awards recognize faculty who are particularly effective and inspiring teachers, as well as those who have established patterns of exceptional innovation in their teaching methods, course and curriculum design and instructional tools.

Read more about these and other awards on the WVU Faculty website.

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E-News | WVU recognizes three faculty members as Foundation Outstanding Teachers for 2022 - WVU ENews

Physiology

Improving the Ecological Impacts of Light Pollution on Birds – AZoCleantech

Artificial light at night (ALAN) has a negative impact on natural systems worldwide. ALAN causes changes in physiology and behavior in organisms, which can have an impact on populations, communities, and ecosystems. ALANs confusing effect on nocturnal migration is one of the most serious consequences for birds.

Image Credit:Albert Beukhof/Shutterstock.com

During the migratory flight, nocturnally migrating birds are drawn to ALAN on an individual level. During the stopover, populations of nocturnally migratory birds have been shown to be closer to ALAN, and species numbers have been demonstrated to be connected with ALAN sources in urban areas. This article will look at seasonal associations with light pollution trends and their effect onnocturnally migrating bird populations. The research was published in Ecosphere.

Outside of seasonal migration, ALAN can have a negative impact on nocturnally migratory birds. Urban sources of ALAN are related to decreased abundance and fewer nocturnally migratory species at the population level during both breeding and non-breeding seasons. ALAN may affect migratory and resident animals circadian rhythms, behavior, and physiology at the individual level.

ALAN is often treated as a static source of pollution in studies on the ecological impacts of ALAN on migrating birds. ALAN, on the other hand, is a dynamic phenomenon influenced by urban expansion and degradation, as well as technological advancements in lighting.

As a result, documenting the effects of ALAN requires using a whole annual cycle viewpoint. However, the spatial link between nocturnally migratory bird populations seasonal distributions and ALAN trends has not been investigated.

The goal of this research is to document how correlations with ALAN annual trends are defined across the entire annual cycle for nocturnally migrating birds, with the objective of enhancing baseline information on the regions and seasons where mitigation efforts like Lights Out programs would have the greatest impact.

Experts show how populations of nocturnally migratory bird species that nest in North America and travel throughout the Western Hemisphere are linked to ALAN patterns throughout the course of the year.

For the combined period 20052020, researchers compare weekly estimations of relative abundance for 42 nocturnally migrating passerine (NMP) bird species obtained from data from the eBird community science initiative with yearly estimates of ALAN for the period 19922013.

As a result, researchers anticipate that the 42 NMP species will be linked to favorable ALAN trends during the majority of their yearly life cycles.

Their goal is to inform ALAN mitigation efforts and increase the understanding of the ecological implications of various types of environmental pollution for birds and other species by validating these predictions.

Researchers assessed the four seasons of the annual cycle (nonbreeding, spring migration, breeding, and fall migration) for the 42 NMP species using the following technique to support the interpretation seen in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The great-circle (geodesic) distance between weekly centroids of occurrence weighted by relative abundance for 42 nocturnally migrating passerine bird species. The fitted black line and 95% confidence band are from a generalized additive mixed model (GAMM) with species included as a random effect. The vertical polygons demarcate spring migration (15 March17 May) and autumn migration (10 August19 October) as delineated by the inflection points in the fitted GAMM line. Image Credit: La Sorte, et al., 2022

Researchers estimated ALAN by year for the period 19922013 in the Western Hemisphere using the harmonized global nighttime light dataset normalized using stepwise calibration (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. (a) Average artificial light at night (ALAN) and (b) the trend in ALAN during the period 19922013 within the Western Hemisphere. The ALAN data are gridded at a 30-arcsecond spatial resolution (ca. 1km at the equator), and the units are digital numbers (DNs; range = 063). The trend analysis was implemented using ordinary least-squares regression. The data are displayed using a Mollweide equal-area projection. Image Credit: La Sorte, et al., 2022

The 42 NMP species had different associations with ALAN annual trends depending on the week and the species, as depicted in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Weekly associations with trends in artificial light at night (ALAN) during the period 19922013 for 42 nocturnally migrating passerine bird species. Image Credit: La Sorte, et al., 2022

Figure 4 shows three significant clusters comprising 19, 15, and 8 species, respectively, discovered via hierarchical cluster analysis based on a minimum cluster size of eight species.

Figure 4. Dendrogram from a hierarchical cluster analysis of weekly associations with trends in artificial light at night for 42 nocturnally migrating passerine (NMP) bird species. The dendrogram labels are the common name alpha codes for the 42 NMP species. The colored annotations below the dendrogram identify species grouped into three clusters using an adaptive branch pruning technique. Image Credit: La Sorte, et al., 2022

In Figure 5, species in Clusters 1 and 3 were linked with low ALAN levels and positive ALAN trends during the non-breeding season, whereas species in Cluster 2 were associated with somewhat higher ALAN levels and greater positive ALAN trends.

Figure 5. Weekly associations with trends in artificial light at night (ALAN) averaged across 42 nocturnally migrating passerine (NMP) bird species in three clusters (see Figure 4). The size of the circles corresponds to average ALAN. The sample sizes are 19, 15, and eight species, respectively. The color ramp is migration speed (see Figure 1) averaged across the 42 NMP species (blue = slow, green = intermediate, and red = fast). The ALAN units are digital numbers (DNs; range = 063). Image Credit: La Sorte, et al., 2022

Figure 6 shows the seasonal distributions of species in the three groups in the Western Hemisphere.

Figure 6. The seasonal distributions within the Western Hemisphere of 42 nocturnally migrating passerine bird species grouped into three clusters (n = 19, 15, and 8, respectively) based on their weekly associations with trends in artificial light at night (see Figure 3). The maps show the proportion of each season species occur in the grid cells averaged across species in each cluster. The data are displayed using a Mollweide equal-area projection. Image Credit: La Sorte, et al., 2022

This research revealed three distinct clusters of NMP species, each of which had differing connections with ALAN trends based on weekly patterns of relative abundance in the Western Hemisphere. During the breeding season, two clusters of species were found in western and northern North America.

The species in these clusters had moderate levels of ALAN and somewhat negative ALAN trends. Species in these clusters were related to low ALAN levels and positive ALAN trends during the non-breeding season. Scientists discovered the third cluster of species whose positive ALAN trends persisted throughout the yearly cycle, peaking during migration, particularly in the spring.

During migratory and the non-breeding season, NMP species experience high ALAN levels and favorable ALAN trends in Central America, according to study findings. Central Americas unique topography necessitates large-scale migration methods inside the area.

Research data revealed that during the breeding season, southern North America had the greatest ALAN levels and strongest positive ALAN trends, whereas, during the non-breeding season, Central America had the highest ALAN levels and strongest positive ALAN trends.

Changes in lighting technology have traditionally influenced ALAN dynamics. This is now predicated on the shift to LED technology, which has resulted in increased ALAN emissions and changes in ALAN spectral composition in some areas. Depending on the scenario, switching to LED technology can either worsen or mitigate ALANs negative effects on birds.

It would be useful to analyze how LED technology, which has advanced since 2013, is affecting the ALAN patterns observed in this study, as well as the ramifications for the regions nocturnally migratory bird species.

For many species, researchers summarized range-wide relationships with ALAN trends by week across the yearly cycle in this study. Exploring species-specific, local-scale connections with ALAN trends in data-poor locations, on the other hand, might be difficult. Efforts to improve the coverage of eBird data in under-sampled parts of the world might be beneficial in improving the spatial quality of these types of analyses.

Within the Western Hemisphere, research findings pinpoint the places and seasons when ALAN mitigation initiatives are most likely to provide the greatest benefits. These findings also lay the groundwork for further research into the impact of ALAN in recent bird population decreases in North America.

During migration, scientists identified Central America as a significant zone where reversing ALAN trends will likely benefit most individuals of the most species, particularly during spring migration.

Outside of migration, researchers found that reversing ALAN trends would likely have the greatest advantages in southern North America during the breeding season and Central America during the non-breeding season.

Because of urbanization and changes in lighting technology, the problems posed by ALAN for birds and other species will continue to develop, underlining the necessity of documenting ALAN relationships and their consequences at the individual and population levels across locations and seasons.

La Sorte, F.A., Horton, K.G., Johnston, A., Fink, D. and Auer, T. (2022) Seasonal associations with light pollution trends for nocturnally migrating bird populations. Ecosphere, 13(3), p.e3994. Available Online: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.3994.

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Improving the Ecological Impacts of Light Pollution on Birds - AZoCleantech

Physiology

There’s more than one way to grow a baby – UNSW Newsroom

In his 1989 book Wonderful Life, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that, if we could replay the tape, life on Earth would evolve to be fundamentally different each time.

Wings and flight evolved differently, and independently, in (1) pterosaurs, (2) bats, and (3) birds. George Romanes

Was he right? Convergent evolution, in which similar features evolve to perform similar functions in distantly related organisms, offers an excellent model in which to run Goulds thought experiment.

One classic example of convergent evolution is the independent evolution of wings and flight in insects, birds, pterosaurs, and bats. Another is live birth (or viviparity), which has evolved independently from egg-laying more than 150 times in vertebrates (animals with backbones).

To understand how this happened, we studied the genes involved in pregnancy and live birth in six different live-bearing species. We discovered that, despite broad similarities in the anatomy and physiology involved, each species used a completely different set of genetic tools to give birth to live young.

In nearly all live-bearing vertebrates examined so far, changes to the gestational tissues and biophysical processes during pregnancy appear remarkably similar.

Some common elements of the process are:

Live birth is driven by a complex suite of morphological, physiological, and genetic changes. Modified from an image by Basile Morin, CC BY

The changes that occur during pregnancy and birthing must be mainly controlled by genetics, and we know that the expression of genes changes during pregnancy in different live-bearing animals.

However, the generality of these changes is less clear. For example, are the same genes used during pregnancy in mammals and fish? Or are similar outcomes driven by entirely different genes?

Thats what we set out to discover in our study, newly published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Queensland and James Cook University.

An animals development is controlled by its genes, its environment, and an interaction between the two.

Not every gene within an animal is always active. Genes are switched on (or expressed) when needed, and then switched off again when no longer needed.

Gene expression levels naturally vary over time as an animal interacts with the environment and undergoes physiological changes, such as those associated with pregnancy. Using a technique called transcriptomics, we can take snapshots of these changes in gene expression as they occur.

To investigate the genetic changes occurring in the uterus during pregnancy in different species, we collected samples or used existing data from six live-bearing animals: the Australian sharpnose shark, three species of Australian lizards, the gray short-tailed opossum, and the brown lab rat.

The spotted skink Niveoscincus ocellatus, sampled in our study, gives birth to live young. Charles Foster, Author provided

Sampling this wide range of animals allowed us to determine whether the same gene expression changes occur during pregnancy across species in which live birth evolved independently.

Our work is the first quantitative study into the genetic basis of live birth at such a broad evolutionary scale.

We expected to find many of the same genes used during pregnancy to support the growth and survival of embryos in each of the live-bearing species we sampled.

This hypothesis seemed logical, given the many similarities in anatomical changes during pregnancy across live-bearing vertebrates, along with qualitative findings from previous research.

Instead, we found there was no one set of live-bearing genes utilised during pregnancy across our sampled range of animals. In other words, evolution has converged on similar functions for successful pregnancy but those functions have been achieved by recruiting different groups of genes.

Despite not being what we expected, this finding also makes sense. Different animal lineages may have different toolboxes of genes to draw from, due to their unique evolutionary histories.

A genetic toolbox can be thought of as a broad class of genes that perform similar basic functions. Over the long timescales of evolution, different genes from this ancestral toolbox can be recruited to carry out the same physiological functions in different animals.

Like humans, the Australian sharpnose shark transports nutrients to developing embryos via a placenta. Camilla Whittington, Author provided

For example, developing babies require access to a supply of amino acids for successful development. In many species these amino acids are transported from the mother to the fetus across the placenta via solute carrier genes.

We identified more than 75 different solute carrier genes in the combined genetic toolbox of our study species. However, each species recruited different genes from the toolbox to transport amino acids during pregnancy.

Our findings force us to rethink the idea that the cross-species similarities in live birth are controlled by the same genetic changes.

We can also consider our results in the context of Goulds thought experiment about replaying the tape of life.

Was the evolution of live birth predictable? It depends on how you look at it.

Large-scale similarities, such as the anatomy and functions of the uterus, seem predictable. They appear to have evolved repeatedly to solve the biophysical challenges of successful pregnancy.

However, our results show this predictability does not extend to the underlying genes.

Charles Foster, Postdoctoral Research Associate, UNSW Sydney; Camilla Whittington, Senior lecturer, University of Sydney, and James Van Dyke, Senior Lecturer in Biomedical Sciences, La Trobe University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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There's more than one way to grow a baby - UNSW Newsroom

Physiology

ARCS San Diego 2022 Scientist of the Year Virtual Event – KPBS

Each year ARCS San Diego, a local non-profit led entirely by women, hosts a Scientist of the Year fundraiser, which honors a preeminent local scientist. This years honoree, Dr. Ardem Patapoutian, is a professor of neuroscience at Scripps Research and winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Date | Sunday, April 24 (4:00-5:15 pm PDT)

Location | Virtual Weblink

Register here! Free Event Registration required

All funds raised at this event will go towards financial awards to support ARCS Scholars who make outstanding contributions to advance science and keep America competitive on the global stage, which is the ARCS mission.

As indicated by its name Achievement Rewards for College Scientists ARCS provides financial awards to promising graduate students who are pursuing degrees in science, engineering and medical research. Since its inception in 1985, the San Diego Chapter of ARCS has given more than $11.3 million to support graduate students at four local institutions: UC San Diego, SDSU, USD, and Scripps Research.

For further information on this event and/or to register, go to: https://san-diego.arcsfoundation.org/2022-scientist-year-virtual-event

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ARCS San Diego 2022 Scientist of the Year Virtual Event - KPBS

Physiology

Is Your Overtraining Syndrome Really Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport? – iRunFar

Is your overtraining syndrome really relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S)?

Almost a year ago, I received an email with a subject line asking almost this same question. The message was about a paper co-authored by two of my favorite exercise physiology researchers, Trent Stellingwerff and Ida A. Heikura.My interest was piqued.

Ive shared my personal struggles with overtraining syndrome on iRunFar, and its still the article I get the most emails about. Most often I hear from athletes looking for advice as they struggle with chronic fatigue.

Its hard to help because there are not a lot of satisfying answers yet. So, when another possible mechanism for why you and your running performance might be out of sorts comes along, its a good thing for us to explore.

In this article, well do just that. Well evaluate the similarities between overtraining syndrome and relative energy deficiency in sport, discuss why the similarities might lead to a misdiagnosis of overtraining syndrome, why getting a correct diagnosis is important, and what athletes and their support systems should watch for based on this new information.

Keely Henninger on her way to winning the 2022 Gorge Waterfalls 50k a few years after recovering from low energy availability and relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S). Photo: Steven Mortinson

Overtraining syndrome (OTS) is not a verb; you cannot actively do it. Its a noun, the destination on a continuum of training stress. We need some training stress to make physiological adaptations and improve our fitness, but we get into trouble when we pair these stresses with inadequate rest.

The definitions set forth over the past decade have helped to elucidate the different stops along the overtraining continuum (2).

Overreaching is akin to positive training stress, but a little bigger. Periodically, you can utilize overreaching in a training camp or on a long weekend that, when backed up with adequate rest, can have large positive impacts on performance.

However, if you continue to overreach, without stepping off the gas, you can end up in a place of non-functional overreaching. This is where you are no longer positively adapting to the stress. If you continue to press the gas pedal, you are headed toward the destination of OTS. The difference between non-functional overreaching and OTS is the timeframe of impaired performance, with the former lasting weeks and the latter months.

The outcome of OTS is a combination of factors that decrease performance and impact overall health, including (1):

The idea of the overtraining continuum is that, as overreaching progresses to non-functional overreaching and possibly to overtraining syndrome (OTS), you have an increase in fatigue and severity of symptoms. Image: Halson, S. L., & Jeukendrup, A. E. (2004). Does Overtraining Exist? Sports Medicine,34(14), 967-981. doi:10.2165/00007256-200434140-00003 (6)

First introduced by the International Olympic Committee in 2014 and further updated in 2018, relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S) has gotten a lot of attention in the endurance world of late in an effort to educate athletes and their support systems about the risks of intentionally or unintentionally under fueling (3, 4).

What the introduction of RED-S did was to create a larger umbrella term that took into account the already defined female athlete triad (disordered eating, loss of normal menstruation, and bone-density issues) and added all the other ways low energy availability impacts physiological function, health, and performance, which recognized that all athletes are susceptible to RED-S regardless of gender.

The major underpinning of RED-S is chronically poor energy availability. While this is sometimes intentional (disordered eating), we want to stress that we take part in a sport where it can be hard to meet our high energy demands day after day. If you combine inadequate energy intake with high exercise energy expenditure, you have a recipe for disaster.

I reached out to friend and professional runner Keely Henninger to discuss her experience with low energy availability and RED-S that culminated in a major bone stress injury.

Keely Henninger. Photo: Luke Webster

iRunFar: After an incredible 2018 season, in 2019 you sustained a sacral stress fracture. Tell us about that experience.

Keely Henninger:I was ignoring the warning signs my body was putting out for years. My 2018 season looked good on paper, but I was constantly battling highs and lows, overtraining, and under-fueling.

When I started training for 2019, my body was still not cooperating. Id wake up extremely tired and dreaded going for a run but for a while, I pushed on. When I finally had to stop due to the sacral stress fracture, I felt relieved. I finally had a reason to stop, and my body and mind thanked me.

The injury forced me to take a holistic view of my training, to acknowledge that I had been doing a lot wrong, and reprioritize training and recovery. I wish I could say I nailed the balance as soon as my injury healed, but it took years of slowly adjusting to get to a spot where I have balance, prioritize recovery, and run for the right reasons.

iRunFar: Why do you think its hard for athletes to identify low energy availability and/or RED-S when in the throes of it?

Henninger:We are in this sport because we are extremely good at enduring pain and pushing our bodies to their limits. However, there is a level of suffering that is beneficial and a level that is not. We need to be able to recognize [the issues that arent beneficial to our health, like] changes in behavior, persistent fatigue, a lack of menstrual cycle (for those who menstruate), a lack of libido (for everyone), and a lack of morning erection (for those who should have one).

For a while losing your period was viewed as normal and a badge of honor in endurance running. We didnt view this as a warning sign that we were training too hard, but instead that we were training hard enough. As this narrative changes, I hope that more athletes will be able to identify unhealthy patterns and signals before it turns into a big-bone injury and that they will learn to slow down before they are forced to stop.

iRunFar: What do you wish you could tell the Keely of 2018 and 2019?

Henninger:You dont have to be constantly suffering to be the best runner you can be. We can feel good during workouts, have energy for a life outside of training, and fuel so that we recover and perform to our potential. This doesnt make us less of an athlete.

We suffer enough during the big races and big days out on the trails, we dont have to make our lives harder by making all aspects of training a test of attrition. If we treat ourselves with respect, then we will be able to reach our potential. If we constantly beat ourselves down and demand more, then we may break before we ever reach it.

What Keely experienced, and what so many other athletes have experienced, is not dissimilar from OTS in part because this chronic stress in this case from under-recovery spurred by inadequate energy intake also creates a disruption in biochemical, endocrine, and sex hormones.

Low energy availability can present from different root causes, including those which are unintentional or intentional (disordered eating). However, its an imbalance between dietary energy intake and the amount of energy you need daily to support normal functions and exercise. Being in a chronic state of low energy availability ultimately leads to relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S) which encompasses not only the female athlete triad but all other deficits of that state regardless of gender. Image: Sim, A., & Burns, S.F. (2021). Review: questionnaires as measures for low energy availability and relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S) in athletes. Journal of Eating Disorders, 9. (5)

So, what are the main differences between OTS and RED-S? Unlike in OTS, RED-S has a sizable negative impact on bone health, including decreased bone mineral density and an increased risk for bone stress injuries like stress fractures and stress reactions (1).

The second difference is that OTS causes central nervous system dysfunction, while RED-S imparts that plus sex hormone dysfunction.

While OTS and RED-S share many commonalities in symptoms all but bone health because of under-recovery, they are not the same condition and shouldnt be treated as such. How do you know which path to go down when looking for answers?

Either path is a little bit of an investigation. This is because both OTS and RED-S are identified by a diagnosis of exclusion. Despite years of trying, both lack a validated universal identifier, something that says, Yes, you have OTS, or, Yes, you have RED-S.

Traditionally, for OTS this has meant ruling out any natural diseases (thyroid disease or other autoimmune conditions, celiac disease, and more), infections (Lyme disease, mononucleosis, and more), and deficiencies like anemia, and allergies. This list has now grown to rule out other dietary deficiencies, including dietary caloric restriction, unintended inadequate energy intake, and insufficient carbohydrate and/or protein intake. Essentially, you now must rule out low energy availability and/or RED-S to meet the diagnosis of exclusion for OTS (1).

For me, this was a lightbulb moment and highlights the importance of getting an accurate diagnosis early. Understanding which road to head down for appropriate recommendations and prescriptive behavior changes to heal will vary depending on if you are dealing with OTS versus RED-S, and weve been missing low energy availability and/or RED-S in this equation for a long time.

Its long been speculated that only a very small portion of individuals who have been given an OTS diagnosis actually have it, and the review that Stellingwerff and colleagues put together paints this same picture (1). This is largely because low energy availability and RED-S are newer concepts than non-functional overreaching and OTS.

Ive said it before and Ill say it again: its really hard to overtrain, but its really easy to under-recover. And for many, under-recovery likely begins with inadequate fueling. This is a great example of how new research creates new insight.

It would be easy to say that overtraining syndrome (OTS) and relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S) are linked by looking at this Venn diagram. However, one major difference is that RED-S is a state of chronic low energy availability due to energy intake not meeting your daily needs. While the female athlete triad overlaps with RED-S due to menstrual irregularities and poor bone health, RED-S can impact athletes regardless of gender. Image: iRunFar/Corrine Malcolm

What can you do if you are worried you might fall into one of these two camps? When battling chronic fatigue and a falloff in athletic performance, lean into your support system. Both OTS and RED-S are multifactorial and should be treated with medical, nutritional, psychological, and physiological approaches.

Additionally, one of the most critical findings from the review article was that there was a need for increased awareness among coaches, physicians, physical therapists, and other sports practitioners of the signs and symptoms of OTS and RED-S for early diagnosis and treatment.

Here are the most important points for athletes and their support system to consider:

Be Aware of Menstruation Irregularities

If you are a person who menstruates and are experiencing amenorrhea (absence of your normal cycle) or oligomenorrhea (frequent irregular cycles), there is a good chance your energy intake doesnt meet your energy expenditure.This is a good time to tag in your primary care provider and registered dietitian to evaluate hormonal disturbances and energy availability. This is most likely a result of low energy availability or RED-S, not OTS.

Watch for Bone Stress Injuries

If you have found yourself with a bone stress injury, particularly a big bone like your femur, pelvis, or sacrum (as these are less prone to straightforward overuse injuries), its again time to tag in the professionals.As we mentioned earlier, bone stress injuries are the one symptom that falls squarely in the low energy availability and RED-S camp, as they negatively impact bone mineral density.

Rule Out Natural Diseases

If you are struggling with any of the other symptoms that build off chronic fatigue and impaired performance, tagging in your primary care provider and a registered dietitian is a good first step. They can help rule out any natural diseases or infections and start to evaluate if you are matching your energy intake needs and exercise energy expenditure throughout different phases of your training cycle. This needs to include not only matching your general energy intake needs but also making sure you are taking in adequate carbohydrates and protein.

Discuss Training Levels While Recovering

While training can continue with low energy availability and RED-S, working closely with your coach and medical team to make sure that you are limiting additional stress in order to start to regain balance is important. This likely means a small scaling down of training while increasing daily caloric intake.

For non-functional overreaching or OTS, a period of complete rest is advised. This will vary greatly depending on the individual, but for non-functional overreaching, it could be weeks and for OTS this could be months to years.

This rest should be followed by a gradual rebuild that includes the use of shorter double runs rather than longer single runs to manage stress during the ramp-up to normal volume. This might include steps forward and backward and thats why the next piece is so important!

Consider Your Psychological Wellbeing

What about the psychological component? While you may lean heavily into your medical and nutritional support systems, leaning into your therapist and other supports like your coach and family are also critically important during this time.

Being injured yes, OTS and RED-S are metabolic injuries is incredibly hard on a psychological level, and having help to lean on and work through this time is critical. Your mental health is as important as your physical health.

This theoretical framework highlights the responsibilities and accountabilities of a multifactorial (medical, nutrition, psychology, and physiology) approach for athletes and their support systems to prevent, diagnose, and treat overtraining syndrome (OTS) and relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S). Image: Stellingwerff, T., Heikura, A. I., Meeusen, R., Bermon, S., Seiler, S., Mountjoy, L. M., Burke, M. L. (2021). Overtraining Syndrome (OTS) and Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDS): Shared Pathways, Symptoms and Complexities. Sports Medicine https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01491-0 (1)

Please share your experiences with overtraining syndrome or relative energy deficiency in sport. If you feel comfortable, wed love to hear about your symptoms, diagnosis process, and how you healed from these injuries. Thanks!

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Is Your Overtraining Syndrome Really Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport? - iRunFar

Physiology

The inspiring women who have won the Nobel Prize – msnNOW

Ever since the first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, the award has been considered one of the highest honors an individual can receive. Awards are given out each year, in the categories of physics, chemistry, "physiology or medicine," literature, peace, and economics (one per category). The Nobel Foundation describes the medal as an award given to those who ... have conferred the greatest benefit to Mankind. Since 1901, there have been more than 900 recipients of this prestigious honor, but out of those 900-plus Nobel Laureates, only 58 have been women. Thankfully, this number is rising quicker and quicker as time goes on, and more and more of the incredible women who shape our world for the better are getting the recognition they deserve.

In this gallery, lets look back on some of the wonderful women who have become Nobel Laureates.

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The inspiring women who have won the Nobel Prize - msnNOW

Neuroscience

For Neurons, Where They Begin Isnt Necessarily Where They End – Neuroscience News

Summary: A new study sheds light on the movement of neurons throughout the brain during fetal development. Researchers also found the two hemispheres of the human cortex separated earlier in development than previously thought.

Source: UCSD

The making of a human brain remains a mostly mysterious process that races from an embryonic neural tube to more than 100 billion interconnected neurons in the brain of a newborn.

To achieve this marvel of biological engineering, the developing fetal brain must grow, on average, at a rate of roughly 250,000 nerve cells per minute throughout the course of a pregnancy.

Thesenerve cellsare often generated far from where they will eventually reside and function in the newbrain, a migration that, while much investigated in animal models using chemical or biological tracers, has never been studied directly in humans. Until now.

In a new paper, published online April 20, 2022 inNature, scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Rady Childrens Institute of Genomic Medicine describe novel methods for inferring the movement of human brain cells duringfetal developmentby studying healthy adult individuals who have recently passed away from natural causes.

Every time a cell divides into twodaughter cells, by chance, there arise one or more new mutations, which leave a trail of breadcrumbs that can be read out by modern DNA sequencers, said senior author Joseph Gleeson, MD, Rady Professor of Neuroscience at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of neuroscience research at the Rady Childrens Institute for Genomic Medicine.

By developing methods to read these mutations across the brain, we are able to reveal key insights into how the human brain forms, in comparison with other species.

Although there are 3 billion DNA basesand more than 30 trillion cells in the human bodyGleeson and colleagues focused their efforts on just a few hundred DNA mutations that likely arose during the first few cell divisions after fertilization of the embryo or during early development of the brain. By tracking these mutations throughout the brain in deceased individuals, they were able to reconstruct development of the human brain for the first time.

To understand the type of cells displaying these breadcrumb mutations, they developed methods to isolate each of the majorcell typesin the brain. For instance, by profiling the mutations in excitatory neurons compared with inhibitory neurons, they confirmed the long-held suspicion that these two cell types are generated in different germinal zones of the brain, and then later mix together in thecerebral cortex, the outermost layer of the organ.

However, they also discovered that the mutations found in the left and right sides of the brain were different from one another, suggesting thatat least in humansthe two cerebral hemispheres separate during development much earlier than previously suspected.

The results have implications for certain human diseases, like intractable epilepsies, where patients show spontaneous convulsive seizures and require surgery to remove an epileptic brain focus, said Martin W. Breuss, Ph.D., former project scientist at UC San Diego and now an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Breuss is co-first author with Xiaoxu Yang, Ph.D., postdoctoral scholar and Johannes C. M. Schlachetzki, MD, project scientist, both at UC San Diego; and Danny Antaki, Ph.D., a former postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego, now at Twist Biosciences.

This study, the authors said, solves the mystery as to why these foci are almost always restricted to one hemisphere of the brain. Applying these results to other neurological conditions could help scientists understand more mysteries of the brain.

Author: Scott LaFeeSource: UCSDContact: Scott LaFee UCSDImage: The image is credited to Veronika Mertens

Original Research: Closed access.Somatic mosaicism reveals clonal distributions of neocortical development by Martin W. Breuss et al. Nature

Abstract

Somatic mosaicism reveals clonal distributions of neocortical development

The structure of the human neocortex underlies species-specific traits and reflects intricate developmental programs. Here we sought to reconstruct processes that occur during early development by sampling

adult human tissues. We analysed neocortical clones in a post-mortem human brain through a comprehensive assessment of brain somatic mosaicism, acting as neutral lineage recorders.

We combined the sampling of 25 distinct anatomic locations with deep whole-genome sequencing in a neurotypical deceased individual and confirmed results with 5 samples collected from each of three additional donors. We identified 259 bona fide mosaic variants from the index case, then deconvolved distinct geographical, cell-type and clade organizations across the brain and other organs.

We found that clones derived after the accumulation of 90200 progenitors in the cerebral cortex tended to respect the midline axis, well before the anteriorposterior or ventraldorsal axes, representing a secondary hierarchy following the overall patterning of forebrain and hindbrain domains.

Clones across neocortically derived cells were consistent with a dual origin from both dorsal and ventral cellular populations, similar to rodents, whereas the microglia lineage appeared distinct from other resident brain cells.

Our data provide a comprehensive analysis of brain somatic mosaicism across the neocortex and demonstrate cellular origins and progenitor distribution patterns within the human brain.

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For Neurons, Where They Begin Isnt Necessarily Where They End - Neuroscience News

Neuroscience

New Discoveries About the Origin of the Brains Immune System – Neuroscience News

Summary: New findings reveal phagocytes do not fully mature until after birth, contradicting previous assumptions that they mature during embryonic development.

Source: University of Freiberg

What gets into the brain and what doesnt is strictly regulated. Researchers at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Freiburg have now studied phagocytes that coat the blood vessels in the brain and reinforce the blood-brain barrier.

As the scientists from the Institute of Neuropathology at the Medical CenterUniversity of Freiburg together with an international research team have shown, these cells only mature fully after birth according to a defined step-by-step developmental program.

Until now, it had been assumed that this process was completed during embryonic development.

Their studies, which were published in the journalNatureon April 20, 2022, were initially carried out on genetically modified mouse lines and were confirmed on human samples. They are expected to provide important insights into the development and treatment of diseases of the brain.

We were able to show that theimmune cellswe studied migrate from the cerebral membrane to theblood vesselsin the brain shortly before birth and mature there. This process is probably not completed until weeks after birth and could partly explain why the brain is so vulnerable at the beginning of life, says Prof. Dr. Marco Prinz, Medical Director of the Institute of Neuropathology at the Medical CenterUniversity of Freiburg and head of the Collaborative Research Center/Transregio 167NeuroMac and member of the Cluster of Excellence CIBSS -Centre for Integrative Biological Signalling Studies at the University of Freiburg.

The late timing of the maturation of the phagocytes, also called macrophages, was very surprising to us, since theprecursor cellsare already present in the brain long before, says Prinz.

In addition, the scientists were able to show for the first time that the vessels, as structure-giving cells of the brain, send important signals for normal development of the brains macrophages.

Theblood-brain barrieris formed by cells on the blood vessels of the brain. They control which substances can enter the brain and which cannot. This protects the brain from harmful substances and pathogens. The blood-brain barrier is particularly permeable in the case of infectious diseases, certain brain tumors and oxygen deficiency.

Significance for Alzheimers, multiple sclerosis and more

In addition to the blood-brain barrier, the immune cells we studied control what can reach thebrain cellsfrom the blood, they eat pathogens and prevent excessive inflammation. They are also involved in the development of cancer, Alzheimers disease and multiple sclerosis. Our findings could be important for a better understanding of these diseases and future therapies, Prinz adds.

Color-coded cells and gene analyses

For their study, the researchers led by the two first authors Dr. Takahiro Masuda from Kyushu University, Japan, and Dr. Lukas Amann from the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Freiburg used several newly established mouse lines.

With these, different types of brain macrophages and theirprogenitor cellscould be specifically labeled for the first time and later found in the different brain regions using high-resolution microscopy. In addition, they examined the gene activity of individual cells and thus determined their degree of maturity.

We were also able to confirm the data on human brains. This gives us a much deeper understanding of the timing and molecular mechanisms in the development of the cells. This knowledge can now be used to explore new and more specific therapeutic approaches forbraindiseases, says biologist Dr. Lukas Amann, who works at the Institute of Neuropathology at the Medica CenterUniversity of Freiburg.

Author: Press OfficeSource: University of FreibergContact: Press Office University of FreibergImage: The image is credited to University of Freiburg / Dr. Lukas Amann

Original Research: Closed access.Specification of CNS macrophage subsets occurs postnatally in defined niches by Lukas Amann et al. Nature

Abstract

Specification of CNS macrophage subsets occurs postnatally in defined niches

All tissue-resident macrophages of the central nervous system (CNS)including parenchymal microglia, as well as CNS-associated macrophages (CAMs) such as meningeal and perivascular macrophagesare part of the CNS endogenous innate immune system that acts as the first line of defence during infections or trauma.

It has been suggested that microglia and all subsets of CAMs are derived from prenatal cellular sources in the yolk sac that were defined as early erythromyeloid progenitors.

However, the precise ontogenetic relationships, the underlying transcriptional programs and the molecular signals that drive the development of distinct CAM subsets in situ are poorly understood.

Here we show, using fate-mapping systems, single-cell profiling and cell-specific mutants, that only meningeal macrophages and microglia share a common prenatal progenitor.

By contrast, perivascular macrophages originate from perinatal meningeal macrophages only after birth in an integrin-dependent manner. The establishment of perivascular macrophages critically requires the presence of arterial vascular smooth muscle cells.

Together, our data reveal a precisely timed process in distinct anatomical niches for the establishment of macrophagesubsetsin the CNS.

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New Discoveries About the Origin of the Brains Immune System - Neuroscience News

Neuroscience

Can Neuroscience Help Humans to Hate Each Other Less? – The Wire

This article was originally published on The Wire Science, our website dedicated to science, health and environment reportage and analysis. Follow, read and share.

The recent news of Bajrang Muni Udasin of Sitapur issuing rape threats to Muslim women is one of several such speeches delivered by members of different communities against people they perceive to be others. History is replete with anecdotes in which hate expressed against a particular group subsequently avalanched to violence against them.

Hateful speeches, literature and media reports often paint a picture of other groups in an effort to dehumanise their members. The targeted group, is equated in language with animal or subhuman behaviour. Using terms like termites, rats and bed bugs for a community undermines their agency and paves the way for violence against their people to the extent that it wont provoke the sort of empathy that violence against other groups might. Adolf Hitlers campaign against Jews during World War II is the most well-known example of such a campaign.

As a neurobiologist, I have often wondered if we can locate regions in the brain that contribute to hate towards and dehumanisation of a group of people in a manner that can be measured, and if we can elucidate its mechanism to the extent that we can ameliorate or even eliminate it before it goes overboard.

Gordon Allport, a pioneer of personality psychology and who taught at Harvard University, was the first to publish research on the psychology of hate speech and dehumanisation in his celebrated work The Nature of Prejudice (1954). He argued that prejudice against a group of people can be transmitted through language and proposed that hate speech, which he called antilocution, results in extreme hostility that in turn gives rise to violence.

Also read: The Slow Poison of Hate Speech Harms in Obvious and Insidious Ways

In 2015, Gail and Richard Murrow, of the departments of neurology and neurosurgery, University of North Carolina, argued similarly: that hate speech results in dehumanisation, which in turn leads to unthinking acceptance of atrocities against the target group. Dehumanization automatically reduces the pain empathy that emotionally underpins rights-based attitudes and behavior, they wrote.

Now, a question arises: could the dehumanisation of one group of people have a neurobiological basis? Might some part of the brain be responsible for controlling this behaviour?

In the words of Edmund Glaser, In anatomical terms the brain is a vast assembly of neurons, the cells that are responsible for generating the behaviours that encompass physical movement, sensory perception, human emotions, and human intelligence itself. These neurons are diverse in shape and function. They use chemical compounds called neurotransmitters to communicate with each other. Neurons join each other to form complex neural networks to store, exchange and manipulate information, with different groups of neurons associated with different functions.

In fact, it is an established fact in neuroscience that different functions motor or sensory are associated with particular regions within the brain. In 2006, Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske of the psychology department at Princeton University studied brain activity of humans when encountered with different social groups. They observed the blood-oxygen level dependent signals through MRI scans to understand which particular regions of the brain were associated with dehumanisation. The study found that emotions like pride, envy and pity were controlled by the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in the brain.

When an individual witnessed a person belonging to a certain social group being cast as less human, the mPFC showed a corresponding and relative lack of activation while the amygdala and the insula, two other regions, showed higher activation. These latter regions were found to be associated with disgust. Harris and Fiske wrote, members of some social groups seem to be dehumanized, at least as indicated by the absence of the typical neural signature for social cognition, as well as the exaggerated amygdala and insula reactions (consistent with disgust) and the disgust ratings they elicit.

Glaser whose invention of computer microscopy and subsequent study of brain morphology revolutionised neuroscience in 2009 pointed out that locating the insula or any other region to be the centre of hate in the brain is insufficient. The problem is more complex. He argued that history is full of examples of hatred being spread among people through the use of language: the propagation of hatred, mass hatred, to be truly successful in its violent ends, may require the existence of a hate region existing in specialized variations or mutations in different brains. There must be, he argued, a propagation channel of sorts that allows the brains of multiple people of a social group to synchronise.

In the 1990s, scientists discovered certain neurons in rhesus macaque monkeys that facilitated an automatic mirror neural simulation in one individual of certain motor acts they observed another individual performing. These neurons are called mirror neurons. There has since been a debate over the existence of mirror neurons among humans as well. Several scientists have tried to prove that such a mirror neural mechanism could exist among us and help us express empathy.

In 2015, Murrow and Murrow proposed that neural simulation mechanisms, whether in the form of mirror neurons or other neural mechanisms, do exist in the human brain, and that such neural simulation is the source of the pain empathy theorized to motivate prosocial and helping behavior. They further argued that this human mirror neural system responds only to actions performed by other members of the same species, i.e. humans.

So if a group is dehumanised, our brains may not be able to empathise with its members.

As war, war crimes, extremism and terrorism demand our attention, neuroscientists around the world must start devoting more of their time and resources to understand the neurobiological basis of hate better, with support from governments and other stakeholders. Glaser himself had an optimistic vision in mind:

if the hate center(s) is (are) inhibited, as by some yet-unknown medication targeting hate neurons, hate would be suppressed or removed, and the brain and the person would continue hate-free until the drug is discontinued. One might also suggest that there are other centers in the brain that connect to the hate center and are capable of reducing or inhibiting its activity. By modifying the activity of these centers, therefore, one could also increase or decrease the level of hatred.

This may seem like science fiction today, but theres no reason it cant be reality in sufficient time.

Mahino Fatima is a neurobiologist, former assistant professor (ad hoc) at Miranda House, Delhi University, and DST-SERB-NPDF, ICMR-Research Associate, School of Life Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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Can Neuroscience Help Humans to Hate Each Other Less? - The Wire

Neuroscience

The Brain Employs an Alarm System to Suppress Intrusive Thoughts – Neuroscience News

Summary: The anterior cingulate cortex generates a reactive alarm, increasing its activity to signal to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to stop intrusive thoughts and memories.

Source: SfN

Forget what you saw: a brain region detects when you are about to think of an unwanted memory and alerts other regions to suppress it, according to research recently published inJournal of Neuroscience.

Crespo Garca et al. measured participants brain activity with both EEG and fMRI while they completed a memory task.

The participants memorized sets of words (i.e., gate and train) and were asked to either recall a cue words pair (see gate, think about train) or only focus on the cue word (see gate, only think about gate).

During proactive memory suppression, activity increased in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a brain region involved in cognitive control, within the first 500 milliseconds of the task.

The ACC relayed information to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which then inhibited activity in the hippocampus, a key region for memory recall.

The activity levels in the ACC and DLPFC remained low for the rest of the trial, a sign of success the memory was stopped early enough so no more suppression was needed.

If the memory was not suppressed in time, the ACC generated a reactive alarm, increasing its activity to signal to the DLPFC to stop the intrusion.

Author: Calli McMurraySource: SfNContact: Calli McMurray SfNImage: The image is credited to Crespo Garca et al

Original Research: Closed access.Anterior Cingulate Cortex Signals the Need to Control Intrusive Thoughts During Motivated Forgetting by Crespo Garca et al. Journal of Neuroscience

Abstract

Anterior Cingulate Cortex Signals the Need to Control Intrusive Thoughts During Motivated Forgetting

How do people limit awareness of unwanted memories? When such memories intrude, a control process engages the right DLPFC (rDLPFC) to inhibit hippocampal activity and stop retrieval. It remains unknown how the need for control is detected, and whether control operates proactively to prevent unwelcome memories from being retrieved, or responds reactively, to counteract intrusions.

We hypothesized that dorsal ACC (dACC) detects the emergence of an unwanted trace in awareness and transmits the need for inhibitory control to rDLPFC. During a memory suppression task, we measured in humans (both sexes) trial-by-trial variations in dACCs theta power and N2 amplitude, two EEG markers thought to reflect the need for control.

With simultaneous EEG-fMRI recordings, we tracked interactions between dACC, rDLPFC and hippocampus during suppression.

We found a clear role of dACC in detecting the need for memory control and upregulating prefrontal inhibition. Importantly, we identified distinct early (350-400 ms) and late (500-700 ms) dACC contributions, suggesting both proactive control prior to recollection, and reactive control in response to intrusions.

Stronger early activity was associated with reduced hippocampal activity and diminished BOLD signal in dACC and rDLPFC, suggesting that pre-empting retrieval reduced overall control demands.

In the later window, dACC activity was larger and effective connectivity analyses revealed robust communication from dACC to rDLPFC and from rDLPFC to hippocampus, tied to successful forgetting.

Together, our findings support a model in which dACC detects the emergence of unwanted content, triggering top-down inhibitory control, and in which rDLPFC countermands intruding thoughts that penetrate awareness.

Significance Statement:

Preventing unwanted memories from coming to mind is an adaptive ability of humans. This ability relies on inhibitory control processes in the prefrontal cortex to modulate hippocampal retrieval processes.

How and when reminders to unwelcome memories come to trigger prefrontal control mechanisms remains unknown. Here we acquired neuroimaging data with both high spatial and temporal resolution as participants suppressed specific memories.

We found that the anterior cingulate cortex detects the need for memory control, responding both proactively to early warning signals about unwelcome content and reactively to intrusive thoughts themselves.

When unwanted traces emerge in awareness, anterior cingulate communicates with prefrontal cortex and triggers top-down inhibitory control over the hippocampus through specific neural oscillatory networks.

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The Brain Employs an Alarm System to Suppress Intrusive Thoughts - Neuroscience News