Author Interviews, Neurological Disorders, Sleep Disorders / 19.01.2016

[caption id="attachment_20628" align="alignleft" width="200"]Dr. Andrew Lim MD, FRCPC Assistant Professor Neurology Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre Toronto, ON Dr. Andrew Lim[/caption] More on Sleep Research on MedicalResearch.com MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Andrew Lim MD, FRCPC Assistant Professor Neurology Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre Toronto, ON Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Lim: Our group had previously shown that sleep fragmentation is associated with an increased risk of dementia and cognitive decline.  However, there were gaps in what we knew about underlying brain changes that may link sleep fragmentation with these neurological outcomes.  Experiments in mice and other animals suggested that damage to blood vessels may be one potential mechanism. In this study of 315 older individuals who had their sleep measured using wrist-watch like accelerometers, we found that individuals who had the most fragmented sleep were also more likely to have more severe damage to brain blood vessels and blood-vessel related brain injury at death.
Author Interviews, JAMA, Mental Health Research, MRI, Neurological Disorders / 12.12.2015

[caption id="attachment_20038" align="alignleft" width="110"]Stephane De Brito, PhD Birmingham Fellow School of Psychology Robert Aitken Building, Room 337a University of Birmingham UK Dr. De Brito[/caption] MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Stephane De Brito, PhD Birmingham Fellow School of Psychology Robert Aitken Building, Room 337a University of Birmingham  UK Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. De Brito: In the last decade, an increasing number of neuroimaging studies have used structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) to examine the brains of youths who show behavioural problems that include antisocial and aggressive behaviour. Those studies have mostly relied on a method called voxel-based morphometry (or VBM), which is a whole-brain and automated technique that allows researchers to objectively assess the local composition of brain tissue, such as grey matter volume. The main problem is that the findings from those sMRI studies have been quite disparate and few have been replicated, partly due to differences in sample sizes and characteristics across studies. Therefore, we set out to carry out a meta-analysis of the available data to provide a clearer account of the literature on this topic. A particular strength of our meta-analysis is that we used the original brain imaging maps (also referred to as statistical parametric maps) from 11 of the 13 studies, which makes our analysis more accurate and reliable. The final sample comprised of 394 youths with behavioural problems and 350 typically developing youths, making it the largest study on this topic to date. Our results showed that, compared to typically developing youths, those with behavioural problems show reduced grey matter volume in the amygdala, the insula, and the prefrontal cortex. These brain areas have been shown to be important for decision-making, empathic responses, processing facial expressions and emotion regulation; key cognitive and affective processes that are shown to be deficient in youths with behavioural problems.
Author Interviews, Genetic Research, Heart Disease, Neurological Disorders, NIH, Science / 05.12.2015

[caption id="attachment_19827" align="alignleft" width="106"]Jonathan Kaltman, MD Chief, Heart Development and Structural Diseases Branch Division of Cardiovascular Sciences National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Dr. Kaltman[/caption] MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jonathan Kaltman, MD Chief, Heart Development and Structural Diseases Branch Division of Cardiovascular Sciences National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute Medical Research: What are the main findings? Dr. Kaltman:  Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the most common birth defect but the cause for most defects is unknown.  Surgery and clinical care of patients with congenital heart disease has improved survival but now we are learning that many patients have neurodevelopmental abnormalities, including learning disability and attention/behavioral issues. Medical Research:  What are the main findings?
  • Using exome sequencing we found that patients with  congenital heart disease have a substantial number of de novo mutations.  This finding is especially strong in patients with CHD and another structural birth defect and/or neurodevelopmental abnormalities.
  • Many of the genes identified are known to be expressed in both the heart and the brain, suggesting a single mutation may contribute to both congenital heart disease and neurodevelopmental abnormalities.
Author Interviews, Brigham & Women's - Harvard, Genetic Research, JAMA, Neurological Disorders, Schizophrenia / 12.11.2015

[caption id="attachment_19334" align="alignleft" width="150"]Frederick W. Vonberg, MA, MBBS Research Fellow in Neurocritical Care Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School Dr. Vonberg[/caption] MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Frederick W. Vonberg, MA, MBBS Research Fellow in Neurocritical Care Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: An association between schizophrenia and epilepsy has long been suspected, ever since people noticed similarities in some aspects of the presentation of the two conditions, and in their epidemiology. For example, people with epilepsy are thought to be more at risk of developing schizophrenia. Furthermore, a psychosis resembling schizophrenia can characterize some forms of epilepsy. Whether this link reflected an overlap in the genetics of the two conditions has remained a mystery, however. In this study, we used a recently developed computational technique to show that there is a significant positive correlation between the genetic variants that are associated with epilepsy and with those that are associated with schizophrenia.
Author Interviews, Exercise - Fitness, Mental Health Research / 07.09.2015

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Eric A.F. Herbst MSc Ph.D. student Human Health and Nutritional Sciences University of Guelph Guelph, ONEric A.F. Herbst MSc Ph.D. student Human Health and Nutritional Sciences University of Guelph Guelph, ON Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Many neurological diseases result in declines in mitochondrial content and function in the brain. Therefore, the purpose for this study was to determine if mitochondrial content could be enhanced in the brain through exercise, as previously demonstrated in skeletal muscle, and also to determine if similar exercise-signaling pathways are activated between the two tissues in the process. This study found that despite reproducing similar findings in skeletal muscle, acute and chronic exercise did not activate traditional signaling mechanisms (AMPK, ERK1/2, CAMKII, P38) in either the cortex or striatum of the brain, nor did it result in sustained increases in mitochondrial respiration, DNA copy number, or protein content.
Author Interviews, Neurological Disorders, PLoS, Psychological Science / 12.06.2015

Dr. rer. nat. Kristin Prehn, Dipl.-Psych. Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin Department of Neurology & NeuroCure Clinical Research Cente Berlin GermanyMedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. rer. nat. Kristin Prehn, Dipl.-Psych. Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin Department of Neurology & NeuroCure Clinical Research Cente Berlin Germany MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Prehn: The study is based on the theory by renowned American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg stating that people progress through different levels of moral reasoning. At lower levels, individuals judge moral issues based on self-interest or laws and rules. Individuals at the post-conventional level also take into account deeper principles and shared ideals. The Kohlbergian theory influenced moral psychology and education for decades. No study to date, however, had investigated in which way moral development is reflected in human brain structure and function. In our study, we compared gray matter brain volume in healthy young subjects who either reached the post-conventional level or did not reach that level so far. We found that subjects at the post-conventional level showed larger volume in a specific brain region of the prefrontal cortex which is essential for moral reasoning as well as the integration of emotion and cognition during human behavior.
Author Interviews, Genetic Research, Karolinski Institute, Nature, Neurological Disorders / 11.05.2015

[caption id="attachment_14115" align="alignleft" width="150"]Kristina Bečanovič Ph.D. Photo: Ulf Sirborn[/caption] MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Kristina Bečanovič Ph.D. Department of Clinical Neuroscience Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden Medical Research: What is the background for this study? Dr. Bečanović: While the symptoms normally debut in middle-age, there is wide individual variation in how Huntington disease manifests itself, and even though two people carry the exact same genetic mutation that codes for the huntingtin protein, there can be up to a 20-year difference in onset of motor symptoms. This suggests that genetic variants, transcription factors and environmental factors could contribute to the observed differences in disease expressivity. As the identification of regulatory factors of the huntingtin gene would be targets for therapeutic intervention, we set out to study the regulation of the huntingtin gene as it has not been well-known which factors regulate the expression levels. We were interested in identifying both genetic variants and transcription factors that are of importance for gene regulation. We therefore used DNA from Huntington disease patients to study the regulation of the huntingtin gene promoter in cells.
Author Interviews, Columbia, JAMA, Neurological Disorders / 19.01.2015

Jose Gutierrez MD, MPH Assistant Professor of Neurology Division of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease Columbia University Medical Center NY, NYMedicalResearch.com Interview with: Jose Gutierrez MD, MPH Assistant Professor of Neurology Division of Stroke and Cerebrovascular Disease Columbia University Medical Center NY, NY Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Gutierrez: There is growing interest in the effects of vascular health in cognition. The prevailing thought is that vascular disease leads to worse cognition due to direct structural damage of the brain, as in the case of brain infarcts, microhemorrhages or white matter hyperintensities, which are themselves associated with traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension, diabetes, smoking etc. Arterial stiffness, particularly of the aorta, has gained interest among researchers as predictors of vascular disease and worse cognition, but it is not clear whether arterial stiffness in the absence of traditional definition of vascular disease may be associated with worse cognition. We investigated in a representative sample of the US among adults 60 years or older who underwent cognitive testing with the Digit Symbol Subtraction test and who also had other measures of vascular disease, including blood workup, blood pressure measurement and Pulse pressure. We hypothesized that indirect measures of arterial stiffness such as ABI > 1.3 or pulse pressure would be associated with worse cognition, even among those without any clinical vascular disease or traditional vascular risk factors. We Included 2573 US adults in the sample, segregated those with any self-reported vascular disease or vascular risk factors and we found that among those without vascular disease or risk factors, an ABI > 1.3 and increased intra-visit blood pressure variability were predictors of worse cognitive performance compared with those without these indicators. Among participants with both indirect markers of arterial stiffness, their cognitive performance was worse that having only one of them suggesting additive effects of these two variables.