PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Lipidomics research provides clues for drug resistance in schizophrenia

2021-07-06
(Press-News.org) Researchers from Skoltech and the Mental Health Research Center have found 22 lipids in the blood plasma of people with schizophrenia that were associated with lower symptom improvement over time during treatment. These can help track resistance to medication that affects over a third of patients. The paper was published in the journal Biomolecules. Studies suggest that up to 34% of people living with schizophrenia can be resistant to two or more antipsychotic medications used to treat the disorder. Individual responses vary greatly, and there are no satisfactory biomarkers of treatment response yet, which can often turn finding the right medication into a painful and protracted guessing game. Recently researchers have turned to studying lipids and the important function they are now known to play in both the properties and functionality of the brain, such as membrane fluidity and permeability, retrograde signaling, neural plasticity, and neurotransmitter release modulation. "Lipidomics is a growing field, and a lot remains unknown about lipid metabolism and its alteration in disease, which makes lipidomics a promising field for new discoveries," the paper's lead author, Anna Tkachev of the Skoltech Center for Neurobiology and Brain Restoration (CNBR), says. Anna Tkachev and her colleagues measured the blood lipid abundances for 322 blood plasma lipids in 92 individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia and undergoing treatment in a hospital. They studied the associations between symptom improvement and individual changes in blood plasma lipid levels by collecting blood plasma at two distinct time points: at the beginning and at the end of a hospital stay that lasted for 37 days on average. Doctors used the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) to assess the condition of the patients; a higher score corresponds to more severe symptoms, so researchers were looking for a drop in PANSS score over time. All but one patient showed improvement, but the extent was different. "We found that, for patients with the least improvement in symptom severity, 22 lipids, including 20 triglyceride species, were increased at the second time point, while patients with most improvement did not demonstrate the same increase in lipid levels," the authors write. Anna Tkachev notes that a lot remains uncertain about the role of lipids in disease, and the role of lipids in schizophrenia in particular. "Typically, in a clinical setting, only total triglycerides are measured in the blood. In our study, we assessed lipids at a more detailed level of individual triglyceride species. The lipids we find significant in our study (shorter chain triglycerides) are not among the most abundant triglycerides, and any variation in their levels would probably remain undetected at the level of total triglyceride measurement. Because many studies in the past have focused on total triglyceride levels and not detailed level of individual lipid species, it is difficult to say for now what these alterations signify," she says. The lipids the team found seem to be related to metabolic alterations: they have been reported to be affected in diabetes and non-alcohol fatty liver disease. "Metabolic abnormalities are, unfortunately, common in patients suffering from schizophrenia, and managing these metabolic abnormalities is an important part of managing the psychiatric disorder. However, there seems to be a complex interplay between metabolic abnormalities and psychiatric health. The role these metabolic abnormalities play in schizophrenia is not well understood, and the cause-effect relationship between the two is unclear as well," Tkachev explains. Since the researchers were looking at individual changes in lipid levels and not the levels of lipids at baseline, their results cannot be used for a predictive model of treatment response. "Our results show that different levels of symptom improvement are associated with different alterations in lipid levels. Rather than providing a predictive biomarker, we hope that our results can help further the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of disease manifestation and treatment response," Tkachev says. END


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

New study uncovers how a series of sleep loss impacts mental and physical wellbeing

2021-07-06
TAMPA, Fla. (July 6, 2021) - All it takes is three consecutive nights of sleep loss to cause your mental and physical well-being to greatly deteriorate. A new study published in Annals of Behavioral Medicine looked at the consequences of sleeping fewer than six hours for eight consecutive nights - the minimum duration of sleep that experts say is necessary to support optimal health in average adults. Lead author Soomi Lee, assistant professor in the School of Aging Studies at the University of South Florida, found the biggest jump in symptoms appeared after just one night of sleep loss. The number of mental and physical problems steadily got worse, peaking on day three. At that point, research shows the human body got relatively used to repeated sleep loss. But that all ...

Interscalene brachial plexus block in arthroscopic shoulder surgery

2021-07-06
Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Daowei Lin, Zhixiao Han, Yanni Fu, Xiaoqiu Zhu, Jin Li, Hui Xu, Jing Wen, Fei Wang and Mingyan Guo from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong, China, The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan, China and University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA discuss how interscalene brachial plexus block combined with general anesthesia attenuates stress and inflammatory response in arthroscopic shoulder surgery. In arthroscopic shoulder surgery, general ...

"All the lonely people": The impact of loneliness in old age on life and health expectancy

2021-07-06
Singapore, 7 July 2021 - In 1966, The Beatles cemented the plight of lonely older people in the popular imagination with the iconic 'Eleanor Rigby', a song that turned pop music on its head when it stayed at number one on the British charts for four weeks. Today, the impact of loneliness in old age on life and health expectancy has been categorically quantified for the first time in a study by scientists at Duke-NUS Medical School (Singapore), Nihon University (Tokyo, Japan) and their collaborators, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. "We found that lonely older adults can expect to live a shorter life than their peers who don't perceive themselves as ...

Cancer therapy: Integration of reactive oxygen species generation and prodrug activation

2021-07-06
Announcing a new article publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Xiao'en Shi, Xu Zhang, Xinlu Zhang, Haizhen Guo and Sheng Wang from Tianjin University, Tianjin, China discuss the integration of reactive oxygen species generation and prodrug activation for cancer therapy. The combination of chemotherapeutic drugs and reactive oxygen species (ROS) can improve cancer treatment outcome. Many ROS-generation strategies can specifically consume tumor-inherent oxygen and generate ROS, resulting in amplified ROS level and aggravated hypoxia. Therefore, the ROS generation strategy can integrate with prodrug activation strategy to realize synergetic therapy. In recent years, stimuli-responsive nanomedicines have ...

Satellite galaxies can carry on forming stars when they pass close to their parent galaxies

Satellite galaxies can carry on forming stars when they pass close to their parent galaxies
2021-07-06
Historically most scientists thought that once a satellite galaxy has passed close by its higher mass parent galaxy its star formation would stop because the larger galaxy would remove the gas from it, leaving it shorn of the material it would need to make new stars. However, for the first time, a team led by the researcher at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Arianna di Cintio, has shown using numerical simulations that this is not always the case. The results of the study were recently published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). Using sophisticated simulations of the whole of the Local Group of galaxies, including the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy and their respective satellite ...

The evolution of vinegar flies is based on the variation of male sex pheromones

The evolution of vinegar flies is based on the variation of male sex pheromones
2021-07-06
By analyzing the genomes of 99 species of vinegar flies and evaluating their chemical odor profiles and sexual behaviors, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology show that sex pheromones and the corresponding olfactory channels in the insect brain evolve rapidly and independently. Female flies are able to recognize conspecific males through their specific odor profiles. Interestingly, closely related species show distinct differences in odor profiles, which helps to prevent mating between different species. Males, in turn, chemically mark females during mating so that they become less attractive to other males. The ...

High risk of divorce after TBI? Not necessarily, study suggests

2021-07-06
July 6, 2021 - Traumatic brain injury (TBI) has a major impact on the lives of affected patients and families. But it doesn't necessarily lead to an increased risk of marital instability, as two-thirds of patients with TBI are still married to the same partner 10 years after their injury, reports a study in the July/August issue of the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation (JHTR). The official journal of the Brain Injury Association of America, JHTR is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer. For marriages that do end, divorce most often occurs within the first year after TBI, according to the new research by Flora M. Hammond, MD, of Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, and colleagues. "Our data dispel ...

Improved prediction of Indian Monsoon onset three months in advance using machine learning

Improved prediction of Indian Monsoon onset three months in advance using machine learning
2021-07-06
The onset of the Indian summer monsoon has been predicted three months ahead for the last 40 years with the highest precision up until today. The result indicates longer seasonal forecasts based on machine learning may be a way to mitigate the consequences of an erratic monsoon system under future global warming. Dr. Takahito Mitsui and Dr. Niklas Boers of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK Potsdam), Germany, published the results in Environmental Research Letters. The work is part of the European TiPES project, Coordinated from The Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark and PIK Potsdam. Millions of people as well as natural habitats depend on the ...

Doctors warn against off-label use of new Alzheimer's drug for cerebral amyloid angiopathy

2021-07-06
BOSTON - A novel therapy recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for patients with Alzheimer's disease amid considerable controversy should not be prescribed by physicians off-label for cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), a similar cerebrovascular condition, according to Steven Greenberg, MD, PhD, director of the Hemorrhagic Stroke Research Program at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and president of the International Cerebral Amyloid Angiopathy Association (ICAAA). In a letter published in The Lancet Neurology, Greenberg and eight other officers of the association wrote that there is no clinical evidence that the monoclonal antibody aducanumab is beneficial to patients with CAA, a condition in which proteins known ...

Relationship between chromosomal instability and senescence revealed in the fly Drosophila

Relationship between chromosomal instability and senescence revealed in the fly Drosophila
2021-07-06
Chromosomal instability is a feature of solid tumours such as carcinoma. Likewise, cellular senescence is a process that is highly related to cellular ageing and its link to cancer is becoming increasingly clear. Scientists led by ICREA researcher Dr. Marco Milán at IRB Barcelona have revealed the link between chromosomal instability and cellular senescence. "Chromosomal instability and senescence are two characteristics common to most tumours, and yet it was not known how one related to the other. Our studies indicate that senescence may be one of the intermediate links between chromosomal alterations and cancer," says Dr. Milan, head of the Development and Growth Control laboratory at IRB Barcelona. "The behaviour we saw in cells with chromosomal instability ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Wildlife monitoring technologies used to intimidate and spy on women, study finds

Around 450,000 children disadvantaged by lack of school support for color blindness

Reality check: making indoor smartphone-based augmented reality work

Overthinking what you said? It’s your ‘lizard brain’ talking to newer, advanced parts of your brain

Black men — including transit workers — are targets for aggression on public transportation, study shows

Troubling spike in severe pregnancy-related complications for all ages in Illinois

Alcohol use identified by UTHealth Houston researchers as most common predictor of escalated cannabis vaping among youths in Texas

Need a landing pad for helicopter parenting? Frame tasks as learning

New MUSC Hollings Cancer Center research shows how Golgi stress affects T-cells' tumor-fighting ability

#16to365: New resources for year-round activism to end gender-based violence and strengthen bodily autonomy for all

Earliest fish-trapping facility in Central America discovered in Maya lowlands

São Paulo to host School on Disordered Systems

New insights into sleep uncover key mechanisms related to cognitive function

USC announces strategic collaboration with Autobahn Labs to accelerate drug discovery

Detroit health professionals urge the community to act and address the dangers of antimicrobial resistance

3D-printing advance mitigates three defects simultaneously for failure-free metal parts 

Ancient hot water on Mars points to habitable past: Curtin study

In Patagonia, more snow could protect glaciers from melt — but only if we curb greenhouse gas emissions soon

Simplicity is key to understanding and achieving goals

Caste differentiation in ants

Nutrition that aligns with guidelines during pregnancy may be associated with better infant growth outcomes, NIH study finds

New technology points to unexpected uses for snoRNA

Racial and ethnic variation in survival in early-onset colorectal cancer

Disparities by race and urbanicity in online health care facility reviews

Exploring factors affecting workers' acquisition of exercise habits using machine learning approaches

Nano-patterned copper oxide sensor for ultra-low hydrogen detection

Maintaining bridge safer; Digital sensing-based monitoring system

A novel approach for the composition design of high-entropy fluorite oxides with low thermal conductivity

A groundbreaking new approach to treating chronic abdominal pain

ECOG-ACRIN appoints seven researchers to scientific committee leadership positions

[Press-News.org] Lipidomics research provides clues for drug resistance in schizophrenia