Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: neuroscience

High risk of sleep apnea linked to poorer mental health in adults over 45

Researchers at Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and University of Ottawa found that high risk of obstructive sleep apnea was associated with approximately 40% higher odds of a composite poor mental health outcome at baseline and follow-up among adults aged 45–85 years in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging.

Identifying factors associated with mental health outcomes is an important goal on several fronts. Mental health conditions rank among the leading contributors to global disease burden, with anxiety and depressive disorders described as most common. Individuals living with mental health conditions face higher risks of cardiometabolic diseases, unemployment, homelessness, disability, and hospitalizations. Economically, mental disorders carry an estimated $1 trillion annual global cost in lost productivity.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) involves repeated upper airway narrowing during sleep. Disturbed breathing can break up sleep (sleep fragmentation), trigger a stress response in the nervous system (sympathetic activation), and cause episodes of low oxygen in the blood (intermittent hypoxemia).

Encoding adaptive intelligence in molecular matter by design

For more than 50 years, scientists have sought alternatives to silicon for building molecular electronics. The vision was elegant; the reality proved far more complex. Within a device, molecules behave not as orderly textbook entities but as densely interacting systems where electrons flow, ions redistribute, interfaces evolve, and even subtle structural variations can induce strongly nonlinear responses. The promise was compelling, yet predictive control remained elusive.

Meanwhile, neuromorphic computing—hardware inspired by the brain—has followed a parallel ambition: to discover a material that can store information, compute, and adapt within the same physical substrate and in real time. Yet today’s dominant platforms, largely based on oxide materials and filamentary switching mechanisms, continue to behave as engineered machines that emulate learning, rather than as matter that intrinsically embodies it.

A new study from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) published in Advanced Materials suggests that these two long-standing challenges may finally converge.

COVID-19 Leaves Lasting Changes in the Brain, Even After Full Recovery

Summary: Advanced imaging reveals that COVID-19 may cause lasting brain changes, even in people without ongoing symptoms, pointing to hidden neurological effects that could persist long after recovery.

COVID-19 affects more than the lungs. Research shows that even after people have fully recovered from the infection, the virus can cause significant changes in the brain, underscoring its lasting effects on neurological health.

COVID-19 is widely recognized for its impact on the lungs, but growing evidence shows that the virus can also cause lasting changes in the brain, even in people who have fully recovered. These findings point to potential long-term neurological consequences that extend beyond the acute phase of the illness.

A Disrupted Brain Rhythm May Explain Anxiety, Insomnia, and Worse in Cancer Patients

Scientists have discovered that breast cancer can disturb the brain’s daily stress hormone rhythms early in disease development. “The brain is an exquisite sensor of what’s going on in your body,” says Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Assistant Professor Jeremy Borniger. “But it requires balance. Ne

The brain has a hidden language and scientists just found it

Researchers have created a protein that can detect the faint chemical signals neurons receive from other brain cells. By tracking glutamate in real time, scientists can finally see how neurons process incoming information before sending signals onward. This reveals a missing layer of brain communication that has been invisible until now. The discovery could reshape how scientists study learning, memory, and brain disease.

Psilocybin shows promise for rapid reduction of cancer-related depression

A new analysis of clinical trial data indicates that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy provides immediate relief for anxiety and depression in advanced cancer patients, though the antidepressant effects may not persist without specific dosing strategies.

TransBrain: a computational framework for translating brain-wide phenotypes between humans and mice

TransBrain translates brain phenotypes between mouse and human via homology mapping, thus making it possible to capitalize on the wealth of knowledge about the mouse brain and gain insights into the human brain.

A hormone can access the brain by ‘hitchhiking’ on extracellular vesicles, researchers discover

Researchers at Touro University Nevada have discovered that tiny particles in the blood, called extracellular vesicles (EVs), are a major player in how a group of hormones are shuttled through the body. Physical exercise can stimulate this process.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, open the door to deeper understanding of hormone circulation and access to the brain, how exercise may trigger changes in energy balance, mental health, and immune function, and circulation of certain drugs.

Blood and other body fluids are teeming with EVs—tiny particles that exist outside of cells. EVs transmit signals from cell-to-cell within tissues and a long distance across organ systems by delivering biological cargo such as proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids into cells. They also remove cell waste.

Interoception Is Our Sixth Sense, and It May Be Key to Mental Health

The treatment was unusual in that alongside talk therapy, May underwent several sessions in a sensory-deprivation chamber: a dark, soundproof room where she floated in a shallow pool of water heated to match the temperature of her skin and saturated with Epsom salts to make her more buoyant. The goal was to blunt May’s external senses, enabling her to feel from within—focusing on the steady thudding of her heart, the gentle flow of air in and out of her lungs, and other internal bodily signals.

The ability to connect with the body’s inner signals is called interoception. Some people are better at it than others, and one’s aptitude for it may change. Life events can also bolster or damage a person’s interoceptive skills. Sahib Khalsa, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues think a disrupted interoception system might be one of the driving forces behind anorexia nervosa. So they decided to repurpose a decades-old therapy called flotation-REST (for “reduced environmental stimulation therapy”) and launched a trial with it in 2018. They. hypothesized that in people with anorexia and some other disorders, an underreliance on internal signals may lead to an overreliance on external ones, such as how one looks in the mirror, that ultimately causes distorted body image, one of the key factors underlying these conditions. “When they’re in the float environment, they experience internal signals more strongly,” Khalsa says. “And having that experience may then confer a different understanding of the brain-body relationship that they have.”

Disruptions in interoception may underlie anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health ailments.

By Diana Kwon edited by Jeanna Bryner.

Biology-inspired brain model matches animal learning and reveals overlooked neuron activity

A new computational model of the brain based closely on its biology and physiology has not only learned a simple visual category learning task exactly as well as lab animals, but even enabled the discovery of counterintuitive activity by a group of neurons that researchers working with animals to perform the same task had not noticed in their data before, reports a team of scientists at Dartmouth College, MIT, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

/* */