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Click here for the index of all years
December 2024
November 2024
October 2024
September 2024
- Emily Jacobs of UC Santa Barbara monitored changes in the brain of 38-year-old fellow neuroscientist Liz Chrastil of UC Irvine, providing the first comprehensive study of changes in the brain of a pregnant woman. Women's brains are understudied. In particular, 140 million women becoming pregnant each year, and remain pregnant for nine months, and still we know very little about what happens to their brains. We know a lot of what happens to their body, including the 100-fold to 1,000-fold increase in hormone production, but little about the changes inside the brain. These hormones drive reorganization in the central nervous system. The brain of a pregnant woman is as "plastic" as the brain of a teenager, which led some scientists to label pregnancy as another stage of development during which the brain reorganizes itself. During puberty, the brain shrinks by about 4%: the amygdala and hippocampus get bigger while "gray matter" (he outermost layer) shrinks. Something similar happens to pregnant women: their brain shrinks by about 4%, resulting in reorganization of the brain. (paper)
August 2024
- Matthew Campen's team at the University of New Mexico has shown that microplastics are infiltrating brain tissue. Several studies link microplastics to cancers, disrupted endocrine and immune systems, and impaired learning and memory.
(paper)
July 2024
- Mice lived 25% longer when the inflammation-boosting protein IL-11 (regulated by Interleukin 11) was inhibited. Drug candidates that block IL-11 are already in human trials for treatment of cancer and fibrosis. Molecular biologist Anissa Widjaja at National University of Singapore discovered the link between IL-11 and ageing by accident when she was testing a method for detecting IL-11. (paper).
- Varun Dwaraka of TruDiagnostic and Lucia Aronica of Stanford studied twins on different diets and determined that those on an eight-week plant-based diet had their biological age estimation (DNA methylation levels) decreased, i.e. they were "younger" than their carnivorous twins. The decrease in biological age related to heart, hormone, liver, inflammatory, and metabolic systems. They took into consideration various indicators of epigenetic age acceleration: PC GrimAge, PC PhenoAge, DunedinPACE, etc. (paper)
June 2024
- Sam Vickery and other scientists of Heinrich-Heine-University in Germany have discovered a correlation that seems to imply that the truly unique parts of the human brains are also the ones more vulnerable to aging. The human brain is three times as large as that of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, but most of the regions are of equal size. The regions that are much bigger in human brains serve a range of functions. These regions must have grown during evolution when the human branch separated from the chimp branch. It turns out that these regions are also the ones that age more quickly. (paper)
May 2024
- Brian Edlow's team at Massachusetts General Hospital mapped a subcortical network that sustains wakefulness, which is a key component of consciousness.
Unlike cortical networks that sustain awareness, whose connectivity maps are widely available, subcortical structures such as the brainstem are tiny and complex, and adequate mapping is still missing.
The default ascending arousal network is linked to the cortical default mode network that contributes to awareness.
(paper)
April 2024
- Elizabeth Engler-Chiurazzi at Tulane University found a correlation between how easily people catch
colds and flu and the aging of their brains.
(paper)
March 2024
- A team led by Penn State’s Soomi Lee studied four distinct sleep patterns: good sleepers, weekend catch-up sleepers, insomnia sleepers, and nappers. Sleep habits have a profound impact on chronic health conditions later in life. Generally speaking, insomnia sleepers and nappers are not only most common but also linked to greater chronic health risks (cardiovascular disease, diabetes, depression, etc). (paper)
February 2024
- A team from Austria used AI to analyze a dataset containing 44 million records of hospital stays to quantitatively analyze "cradle-to-grave disease trajectories" (paper)
January 2024
- Santiago Clocchiatti-Tuozzo of Yale University analyzed brain images of nearly 40,000 middle-aged people to determine how sleep duration impacts brain health. Both too much and too little sleep cause dangerous changes in brain structure (increased presence and larger volume of white matter hyperintensities and reduced fractional anisotropy) that are correlated with higher risks of stroke and dementia. Stroke and dementia are the result of a long process that over the years sabotages the health of the brain. White matter hyperintensities are lesions on the brain. Fractional anisotropy measures the uniformity of water diffusion along nerve axons. (paper)
Click here for 2023 news
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