14 Search Results for "adolescent brain"
Tracing Spread of Zika Virus in the Americas
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Here I am visiting the Ziika Forest area of Uganda, where the Zika virus was first identified in 1947.
Credit: National Institutes of Health
A couple of summers ago, the threat of mosquito-borne Zika virus disease in tropical areas of the Americas caused major concern, and altered the travel plans of many. The concern was driven by reports of Zika-infected women giving birth to babies with small heads and incompletely developed brains (microcephaly), as well as other serious birth defects. So, with another summer vacation season now upon us, you might wonder what’s become of Zika.
While pregnant women and couples planning on having kids should still take extra precautions [1] when travelling outside the country, the near-term risk of disease outbreaks has largely subsided because so many folks living in affected areas have already been exposed to the virus and developed protective immunity. But the Zika virus—first identified in the Ziika Forest in Uganda in 1947—has by no means been eliminated, making it crucial to learn more about how it spreads to avert future outbreaks. It’s very likely we have not heard the last of Zika in the Western hemisphere.
Recently, an international research team, partly funded by NIH, used genomic tools to trace the spread of the Zika virus. Genomic analysis can be used to build a “family tree” of viral isolates, and such analysis suggests that the first Zika cases in Central America were reported about a year after the virus had actually arrived and begun to spread.
The Zika virus, having circulated for decades in Africa and Asia before sparking a major outbreak in French Polynesia in 2013, slipped undetected across the Pacific Ocean into Brazil early in 2014, as established in previous studies. The new work reveals that by that summer, the bug had already hopped unnoticed to Honduras, spreading rapidly to other Central American nations and Mexico—likely by late 2014 and into 2015 [2].
Working Toward Greater Precision in Childhood Cancers
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Credit: National Cancer Institute, NIH
Each year, more than 15,000 American children and teenagers will be diagnosed with cancer. While great progress has been made in treating many types of childhood cancer, it remains the leading cause of disease-related death among kids who make it past infancy in the United States [1]. One reason for that sobering reality is our relatively limited knowledge about the precise biological mechanisms responsible for childhood cancers—information vital for designing targeted therapies to fight the disease in all its varied forms.
Now, two complementary studies have brought into clearer focus the genomic landscapes of many types of childhood cancer [2, 3]. The studies, which analyzed DNA data representing tumor and normal tissue from more than 2,600 young people with cancer, uncovered thousands of genomic alterations in about 200 different genes that appear to drive childhood cancers. These so-called “driver genes” included many that were different than those found in similar studies of adult cancers, as well as a considerable number of mutations that appear amenable to targeting with precision therapies already available or under development.
Creative Minds: Helping More Kids Beat Anxiety Disorders
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Dylan Gee
While earning her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, Dylan Gee often encountered children and adolescents battling phobias, panic attacks, and other anxiety disorders. Most overcame them with the help of psychotherapy. But not all of the kids did, and Gee spent many an hour brainstorming about how to help her tougher cases, often to find that nothing worked.
What Gee noticed was that so many of the interventions she pondered were based on studies in adults. Little was actually known about the dramatic changes that a child’s developing brain undergoes and their implications for coping under stress. Gee, an assistant professor at Yale University, New Haven, CT, decided to dedicate her research career to bridging the gap between basic neuroscience and clinical interventions to treat children and adolescents with persistent anxiety and stress-related disorders.
Scoliosis Traced to Problems in Spinal Fluid Flow
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Normal zebrafish (top left) and a normal skeleton (bottom left); zebrafish with scoliosis (top right) and an abnormal scoliotic skeleton (bottom right).
Credit: Grimes DT, Boswell CW, Morante NF, Henkelman RM.
Many of us may remember undergoing a simple screening test in school to look for abnormal curvatures of the spine. The condition known as adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (IS) affects 3 percent of children, typically showing up in the tween or early teen years when kids are growing rapidly. While scoliosis can occur due to physical defects in bones or muscles, more often the C- or S-shaped spinal curves develop for unknown reasons. Because the basic biological mechanisms of IS have been poorly understood, treatment to prevent further progression and potentially painful disfigurement has been limited to restrictive braces or corrective surgery.
Now, in work involving zebrafish models of IS, a team of NIH-funded researchers and their colleagues report a surprising discovery that suggests it may be possible to develop more precisely targeted therapeutics to reduce or even prevent scoliosis. The team’s experiments have, for the first time, shown that mutation of a gene associated with spinal curvature in both zebrafish and humans has its effect by altering the function of the tiny hair-like projections, known as cilia, that line the spinal cord. Without the cilia’s normal, beating movements, the fluid that bathes the brain and spinal cord doesn’t flow properly, and zebrafish develop abnormal spinal curves that look much like those seen in kids with scoliosis. However, when the researchers used genetic engineering to correct such mutations and thereby restore normal cilia function and flow of cerebral spinal fluid (CSF), the zebrafish did not develop spinal curvature.
Study Shows DNA Sequencing Brings Greater Precision to Childhood Cancer
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: Baylor’s Sharon Plon consults with a family at the Texas Children’s Cancer Center in Houston.
Credit: Paul V. Kuntz/Texas Children’s Hospital
An impressive number of fundamental advances in our understanding of cancer have occurred over the past several decades. One of the most profound is the realization that cancer is a disease of the genome, driven by a wide array of changes in DNA—some in the germline and affecting all cells of the body, but most occurring in individual cells during life (so-called “somatic mutations”). As the technology for sequencing cancer genomes has advanced, we are learning that virtually all cancers carry a unique set of mutations. Most are DNA copying errors of no significance (we call those “passengers”), but a few of them occur in genes that regulate cell growth and contribute causatively to the cancer (we call those “drivers”). We are now learning that it may be far more important for treating cancer to figure out what driver mutations are present in a patient’s tumor than to identify in which organ it arose. And, as a new study shows, this approach even appears to have potential to help cancer’s littlest victims.
Using genomic technology to analyze both tumor and blood samples from a large number of children who’d been newly diagnosed with cancer, an NIH-funded research team uncovered genetic clues with the potential to refine diagnosis, identify inherited cancer susceptibility, or guide treatment for nearly 40 percent of the children [1]. The potential driver mutations spanned a broad spectrum of genes previously implicated not only in pediatric cancers, but also in adult cancers. While much more work remains to determine how genomic analyses can be used to devise precise, new strategies for treating kids with cancer, the study provides an excellent example of the kind of research that NIH hopes to accelerate under the nation’s new cancer “moonshot,” a research initiative recently announced by the President and being led by the Vice President.
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