Lifeboat Foundation

A large new study shows people who contracted #COVID19 faced substantially higher risks of neuropsychiatric ailments 1 year later, including brain fog, depression, and substance use disorders.

Dozens of papers have examined the lingering mental health effects of COVID-19, but many have measured conditions such as depression and brain fog only a few months after infection. Now, a giant new study shows people who contracted COVID-19 faced substantially higher risks of neuropsychiatric ailments 1 year later, including brain fog, depression, and substance use disorders. The report, based on millions of people who used the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health system early in the pandemic, is published today in.

“Most of us experienced some sort of mental distress during the pandemic, but this shows that people with COVID-19 had a much higher risk of mental health disorders than their contemporaries,” says senior author Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and chief of research at the VA St. Louis Health Care system. “It’s a wake-up call.”

Continue reading “COVID-19 patients face higher risk of brain fog and depression, even 1 year after infection” »

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — Following multiple news organizations covering allegations of animal abuse at Neuralink, Elon Musk’s brain chip company, the tech developer issued a statement on its animal welfare policies.

Earlier this month, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine announced lawsuits against the University of California, Davis and Neuralink over its treatment of the macaque monkeys used to test the experimental brain implants developed by Musk’s company.

Decades of research has shown that limits on calorie intake by flies, worms, and mice can enhance life span in laboratory conditions. But whether such calorie restriction can do the same for humans remains unclear. Now a new study led by Yale researchers confirms the health benefits of moderate calorie restrictions in humans — and identifies a key protein that could be harnessed to extend health in humans.

The findings were published on February 10, 2022, in Science.

The research was based on results from the Comprehensive Assessment of Long-term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy (CALERIE) clinical trial, the first controlled study of calorie restriction in healthy humans. For the trial, researchers first established baseline calorie intake among more than 200 study participants. The researchers then asked a share of those participants to reduce their calorie intake by 14% while the rest continued to eat as usual, and analyzed the long-term health effects of calorie restriction over the next two years.

Ability of immune system to destroy Alzheimer’s-related protein oscillates with daily circadian rhythm.

The brain’s ability to clear a protein closely linked to Alzheimer’s disease is tied to our circadian cycle, according to research published recently in PLOS Genetics. The research underscores the importance of healthy sleep habits in preventing the protein Amyloid-Beta 42 (AB42) from forming clumps in the brain, and opens a path to potential Alzheimer’s therapies.

“Circadian regulation of immune cells plays a role in the intricate relationship between the circadian clock and Alzheimer’s disease,” said Jennifer Hurley, an expert in circadian rhythms, and associate professor of biological science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “This tells us a healthy sleep pattern might be important to alleviate some of the symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease, and this beneficial effect might be imparted by an immune cell type called macrophages/microglia.”

𝙀𝙣𝙙𝙤𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙡𝙞𝙖𝙡-𝙩𝙖𝙧𝙜𝙚𝙩𝙚𝙙 𝘽𝘽𝘽 𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙚𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙨

The Neuro-Network.

𝐉𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐒𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞

Continue reading “Engineered Wnt ligands enable blood-brain barrier repair in neurological disorders” »

The unsung star of Jurassic Park was a mosquito frozen in amber. While you can’t really extract blood from specimens like that, you could be transported back in time if you looked at a specimen of fossilized tree sap and found a 110 million-year-old lizard staring back at you.

Creatures get trapped in amber all the time, but most prehistoric finds are insects. Amber is a great material for preserving arthropods because of their already tough shells that will hold on even if the insides disintegrate. But what about a lizard? Retinosaurus hkamentiensis is a new extinct species of lizard that was unexpectedly found trapped in Burmese amber. No one expected an entire reptile to be preserved so well, from its scaly skin down to its skeleton.

What are now the empty eyes of Retinosaurus may have once seen dinosaurs or giant ferns or dragonflies the size of your head. It was determined to be a juvenile that ran into a sticky situation when it ran into a glob of tree amber that it couldn’t escape. It was so well preserved that paleontologist Andrej Čerňanský of Comenius University and his team, who recently published a study in Scientific Reports, approached the prehistoric lizard almost as if it were alive.

Join us on Patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/MichaelLustgartenPhD

Papers referenced in the video:
Melatonin, human aging, and age-related diseases.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15582288/

Continue reading “Middle-of-the-Night Melatonin Supplementation: Better Sleep, Improved HRV and RHR?” »

The retinal-implant manufacturer has shifted its focus, leaving users with little or no support.

For something so small, neurons can be quite complex—not only because there are billions of them in a brain, but because their function can be influenced by many factors, like their shape and genetic makeup.

A research team led by Daifeng Wang, a Waisman Center professor of biostatistics and medical informatics and computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is adapting machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques to better understand how a variety of traits together affect the way neurons work and behave.

Called manifold learning, the approach may help researchers better understand and even predict brain disorders by looking at specific neuronal properties. The Wang lab recently published its findings in two studies.