Here is your weekly NEWS-Line for Mental Health Care Providers eNewsletter. For the latest news, jobs, education and blogs, posted daily, bookmark www.news-line.com/SY_home or to take NEWS-Line everywhere with you, save www.news-line.com/SY_home to your phone. Also, enjoy the latest issue of NEWS-Line magazine, always free.
NEWS:
Pathway Discovered That Prevents Buildup Of Alzheimer’s Protein
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists have discovered a pathway that functions like a car wash to prevent the buildup of a toxic protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The report appeared online today in the journal Cell.
The findings in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s offer a possible new approach to treatment of the chronic neurodegenerative disorder, which is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. The newly identified pathway also helps regulate inflammation, so the discovery could yield strategies for unleashing the immune response against malignant brain tumors.
Researchers called the pathway LC3-associated endocytosis or LANDO. They found the pathway in microglial cells, the primary immune cells of the brain and central nervous system. However, preliminary evidence suggests LANDO is a fundamental process that functions in cells throughout the body.
Investigat
Read Full Article
Hidden Consciousness Detectable With EEG Just Days After Brain Injury
Close analysis of EEG data reveals that nearly 1 in 7 brain-injured ICU patients shows evidence of hidden consciousness just days after injury. Patients with such signs are more likely to recover, neurologists at Columbia University and NewYork-Presbyterian have found.
In the study, the researchers used a machine learning technique to analyze standard EEG data collected from 104 unresponsive patients to look for patient-specific brain activity indicating that they could understand instructions to move their hands. If the findings are confirmed in larger studies, the technique could help physicians better predict which patients will likely regain consciousness.
“Though our study was small, it suggests that EEG—a tool that’s readily available at the patient’s bedside in the ICU in almost any hospital across the globe—has the potential to completely change how we manage patients with acut
Read Full Article
Understanding How Tics Are Suppressed May Help Some At Risk For Tic Disorders
At least 20% of elementary school-age children develop tics such as excessive blinking, throat clearing or sniffing, but for most of those kids, the tics don’t become a long-term problem. Conventional wisdom has held that most tics go away on their own and that only in rare cases do they become chronic or develop into a disorder such as Tourette syndrome.
However, studying children shortly after tics first appear, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis discovered that tics don’t go away completely; rather, most children simply exhibit tics less when others are watching. Learning how they do that may provide insight to help others at risk for significant tic disorders.
The findings are published online June 26 in the Journal of Child Neurology.
“We found that tics were still present one year after they first appeared but that many of the kids we studied ha
Read Full Article
Artificial Intelligence Could Be ‘Game Changer’ In Detecting, Managing Alzheimer’s Disease
Worldwide, about 44 million people are living with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) or a related form of dementia. Although 82% of seniors in the United States say it’s important to have their thinking or memory checked, only 16% say they receive regular cognitive assessments.
Many traditional memory assessment tools are widely available to health professionals, though deficiencies in screening and detection accuracy and reliability remain prevalent. But even with the increasingly favorable instrument MemTrax, a very simple online memory test using images recognition, the clinical efficacy of this new approach as a memory function screening tool has not been sufficiently demonstrated or validated. In practice, there are numerous integrated and complex factors to consider in interpreting memory evaluation test results, which presents a real challenge for clinicians. All these factors stand as
