A recent study from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland shows that mental well-being can boost physical activity and vice versa.
Key Findings:
Positive Feelings Encourage Activity: People aged 60 to 88 who felt more positive emotions stayed active or even increased their activity during the COVID-19 restrictions.
Depressive Feelings Lower Activity: Those who felt depressed were less active and more likely to reduce their activity during the pandemic.
Age Matters:
Stronger Link Around 60: The connection between positive emotions and physical activity was more solid for people around 60, compared to those over 70.
Older Restrictions: In Finland, stricter rules for older adults may have impacted how mental well-being influenced physical activity.
Importance of Mental Well-Being:
Positive Cycle: Mental well-being can help keep you physically active, creating a cycle of positivity.
Supporting Activity: Focusing on lifting mental well-being, not just preventing depressive feelings, is crucial for staying active, even in challenging times.
Bottom Line:
Supporting mental health is essential for promoting an active lifestyle. Positive emotions are key in helping people, especially older adults, stay active and healthy.
According to a study published by the American Academy of Neurology, pregnant individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) have a significantly higher risk of developing mental illnesses both during and after pregnancy compared to those without MS.
The research, which analyzed data from 894,852 pregnant individuals over 15 years, revealed that 42% of pregnant people with MS experienced mental health issues during pregnancy, which increased to 50% in the first year after giving birth. In comparison, only 30% of people without MS had mental health issues during pregnancy, rising to 38% after birth.
Ruth Ann Marrie, MD, PhD, the study’s lead author, emphasized that understanding mental health challenges for pregnant individuals with MS is crucial, as it can affect both the parents and their children.
The study found that new mental illness diagnoses affected 8% of people with MS during pregnancy and 14% in the first year post-birth, compared to 7% and 11% for those without MS, respectively. Even after accounting for factors like age and income, the risk of mental illness remained significantly higher for those with MS.
“These findings highlight the importance of preventive and early treatment of mental health issues in pregnant individuals with MS,” said Marrie.
Curious to learn more about how these findings could impact MS treatment and pregnancy management? Dive into the full study!
Fampridine is currently used to improve walking ability in individuals with multiple sclerosis. A new study indicates that it may also assist people with reduced working memory, which is often observed in mental health conditions like schizophrenia or depression.
Working memory is essential for everyday tasks, such as remembering a code long enough to type it in and engaging in conversations by reacting appropriately to what others say. It allows us to retain information for a brief period actively, typically a few seconds. However, certain conditions, including schizophrenia, depression, and ADHD, can impair working memory. Individuals affected by these conditions may struggle to follow conversations and to organize their thoughts effectively.
Fampridine is a drug that could help in such cases, as researchers led by Professor Andreas Papassotiropoulos and Professor Dominique de Quervain at the University of Basel have shown.
Practical only if working memory is poor
In their study, the researchers tested the effectiveness of fampridine on working memory in 43 healthy adults. Fampridine showed a more pronounced effect in participants whose baseline working memory was low. After taking the active substance for three days, they scored better in the relevant tests than those who took the placebo. In contrast, the drug showed no effect in people with good baseline working memory.
The researchers also observed that fampridine increased brain excitability in all participants, thus enabling faster processing of stimuli. The study was randomized and double-blind.
The established drug, a new application
“Fampridine doesn’t improve everyone’s working memory. But it could be a treatment option for those with reduced working memory,” explains Andreas Papassotiropoulos. Dominique de Quervain adds: “That’s why, together with researchers from the University Psychiatric Clinics Basel (UPK), we’re planning studies to test the efficacy of fampridine in schizophrenia and depression.”
The drug is currently used to improve walking ability in multiple sclerosis (MS). Particularly in capsule form, which releases the active ingredient slowly in the body, fampridine has shown effects on cognitive performance in MS patients. For some, it alleviates the mental fatigue that can accompany MS.
The researchers did not select the drug at random. This study followed comprehensive analyses of genome data to find starting points for repurposing established drugs. Fampridine acts on specific ion channels in nerve cells that, according to the researchers’ analyses, also play a role in mental disorders such as schizophrenia.
Rehabilitation psychologists Abbey Hughes and Meghan Beier discuss common mental health disorders often experienced by patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). They explain how these disorders are typically diagnosed in a primary care setting and outline the signs to look for when treating patients with MS.
Excitatory neurons from mice’s brains are depicted in green, and PV inhibitory neurons are pictured in magenta. Cells in the deep hippocampus, which helps navigate space, are represented toward the left side of the image. Toward the right side, cells are defined in the visual cortex. Findings from Johns Hopkins Medicine may help scientists better understand the causes of autism, schizophrenia and epilepsy.
Neuroscientists from Johns Hopkins Medicine say they have determined how a brain cell surface molecule shapes certain neurons’ behaviour.
The research, which was published on October 2 in Nature, reveals how a molecule called the calcium-permeable (CP)-AMPA receptor suppresses a specific neuron’s ability to pay attention to specific external cues, such as your friend’s earrings. The study was conducted on genetically engineered mice. Understanding why some neurons are less “selective” about their response to certain cues may also help researchers study conditions such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, and autism, which are marked by the faulty processing of external cues and misfirings of neurons in the mammalian brain.
“We have found that the calcium-permeable subtype of AMPA receptors plays an additional role in suppressing the selectivity of a specific neuron,” says Dr. Ingie Hong, the first author and a neuroscience instructor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Until now, the function of these particular receptors in the broader mammalian brain during everyday activities has been a mystery.”
AMPA receptors are critical to the fast transfer of information and memory formation in the brain, such as hearing and remembering a person’s name. The subtype of AMPA receptors in this study, CP-AMPA receptors, act as a “gate” that lowers the selectivity of parvalbumin (PV) neurons, which are inhibitory and thereby cast unselective inhibition to nearby neurons, the researchers say.
“Selective neurons will respond to something really specific, for example, your grandfather’s mustache, whereas less selective neurons will respond to different faces or people as well,” Hong says. “We’ve been looking for the mechanisms and molecules that control this specificity, or selectivity, and how it goes awry in conditions such as autism and epilepsy, where excitatory neurons can become overstimulated.”
The researchers also found that mutations of GluA2, a protein subunit within the CP-AMPA receptor, are associated with intellectual disabilities.
“Human mutations in the GluA2 subunit of the AMPA receptors, which regulates the calcium permeability of the receptor, can lead to intellectual disability and autism,” says senior author Huganir. “This suggests tight control of AMPA receptor calcium permeability is essential for human cognition.”
Specifically, the investigators focused on CP-AMPA receptors in two distinct areas of the brain, the visual cortex, where neurons process visual information, and the hippocampus, where neurons respond to “where you are, where you are headed, or where you have been,” Hong says.
To conduct their research, the scientists developed novel adeno-associated virus vectors to replace calcium permeable AMPA receptors with impermeable counterparts and express them in the mouse brain. They say they hope these vectors can help treat disorders that arise from AMPA receptor mutations in the future.
To map out PV neuron selectivity, the scientists used advanced imaging techniques to observe neuron structure and activity deep within genetically engineered mice brains while showing them video stimuli.
“In most cases, we found that these PV neurons, which are typically less selective, became more selective to visual stimuli as well as spatial location when we swapped out CP-AMPA receptors for impermeable molecules, making inhibitory neurons act more like excitatory neurons,” Hong says.
The researchers say the high amount of CP-AMPA receptors in PV neurons is well-conserved across many species of mammals, including humans.
“Making neuron inhibition less selective makes our neural circuits more efficient than species that don’t have this molecular feature,” Hong says. “It probably also means that our neural networks are more stable.”
Hong says the new research may also have implications for machine learning used in artificial intelligence.
“In machine learning, there are many computerized ‘artificial’ neurons that are trained to be very selective or less selective,” he says. “We’re trying to find how specific and less specific units can work together to give us smarter machines and smarter AI.”
Credit David Cheon and Ingie Hong
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