Tag Archives: mental illness

Creative Minds: Mapping the Biocircuitry of Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder

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Bruce Yankner

Bruce Yankner

As a graduate student in the 1980s, Bruce Yankner wondered what if cancer-causing genes switched on in non-dividing neurons of the brain. Rather than form a tumor, would those genes cause neurons to degenerate? To explore such what-ifs, Yankner spent his days tinkering with neural cells, using viruses to insert various mutant genes and study their effects. In a stroke of luck, one of Yankner’s insertions encoded a precursor to a protein called amyloid. Those experiments and later ones from Yankner’s own lab showed definitively that high concentrations of amyloid, as found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, are toxic to neural cells [1].

The discovery set Yankner on a career path to study normal changes in the aging human brain and their connection to neurodegenerative diseases. At Harvard Medical School, Boston, Yankner and his colleague George Church are now recipients of an NIH Director’s 2016 Transformative Research Award to apply what they’ve learned about the aging brain to study changes in the brains of younger people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, two poorly understood psychiatric disorders.

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NIH Family Members Giving Back: Kafui Dzirasa

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Kafui Dzirasa at UMBC

Caption: Kafui Dzirasa (front center) with the current group of Meyerhoff Scholars at University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Credit: Olubukola Abiona

Kafui Dzirasa keeps an open-door policy in his busy NIH-supported lab at Duke University, Durham, NC. If his trainees have a quick question or just need to discuss an upcoming experiment, they’re always welcome to pull up a chair. The donuts are on him.

But when trainees pop by his office and see he’s out for the day, they have a good idea of what it means. Dzirasa has most likely traveled up to his native Maryland to volunteer as a mentor for students in a college program that will be forever near and dear to him. It’s the Meyerhoff Scholars Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Since its launch in 1988, this groundbreaking program has served as a needed pipeline to help increase diversity in the sciences—with more than 1,000 alumni, including Dzirasa, and 270 current students of all races.

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Creative Minds: A Transcriptional “Periodic Table” of Human Neurons

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neuronal cell

Caption: Mouse fibroblasts converted into induced neuronal cells, showing neuronal appendages (red), nuclei (blue) and the neural protein tau (yellow).
Credit: Kristin Baldwin, Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA

Writers have The Elements of Style, chemists have the periodic table, and biomedical researchers could soon have a comprehensive reference on how to make neurons in a dish. Kristin Baldwin of the Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, has received a 2016 NIH Director’s Pioneer Award to begin drafting an online resource that will provide other researchers the information they need to reprogram mature human skin cells reproducibly into a variety of neurons that closely resemble those found in the brain and nervous system.

These lab-grown neurons could be used to improve our understanding of basic human biology and to develop better models for studying Alzheimer’s disease, autism, and a wide range of other neurological conditions. Such questions have been extremely difficult to explore in mice and other animal models because they have shorter lifespans and different brain structures than humans.

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Fighting Depression: Ketamine Metabolite May Offer Benefits Without the Risks

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Depressed Woman

Thinkstock/Ryan McVay

For people struggling with severe depression, antidepressants have the potential to provide much-needed relief, but they often take weeks to work. That’s why there is growing excitement about reports that the anesthetic drug ketamine, when delivered intravenously in very low doses, can lift depression and suicidal thoughts within a matter of hours. Still, there has been reluctance to consider ketamine for widespread treatment of depression because, even at low doses, it can produce very distressing side effects, such as dissociation—a sense of disconnection from one’s own thoughts, feelings, and sense of identity. Now, new findings suggest there may be a way to tap into ketamine’s depression-fighting benefits without the side effects.

In a mouse study published in the journal Nature, an NIH-funded research team found that the antidepressant effects of ketamine are produced not by the drug itself, but by one of its metabolites—a substance formed as the body breaks ketamine down. What’s more, the work demonstrates that this beneficial metabolite does not cause the risky dissociation effects associated with ketamine. While further development and subsequent clinical trials are needed, the findings are a promising step toward the development of a new generation of rapid-acting antidepressant drugs.

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Study May RAISE Standard for Treating First Psychotic Episode

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Support for young adults

Thinkstock photo

Each year, about 100,000 American adolescents and young adults, their lives and dreams ahead of them, experience their first episode of psychosis, a symptom of schizophrenia and other mental illnesses characterized by dramatic changes in perception, personality, and ability to function [1]. This often-terrifying experience, which can last for months, will prompt some to seek help from mental health professionals, whose services can in many situations help them get back on track and reduce the risk of relapse. Still, for far too many young people and their families, the search for help is riddled with long delays, contradictory information, and inadequate treatment in a mental health system whose resources have been stretched thin.

There’s got to be a better way to reach more of these young people, and, now, results of a major NIH-supported clinical study point to a possible way to get there [2]. In this large study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, teams of mental health specialists partnered with young people and their families to create individualized treatment plans. After two years of follow-up, researchers found that this personalized, team-based approach to care had helped more young people stick with treatment, feel better about their quality of life, return to school and work, and seek follow-up help than standard care involving a single clinician.

Many studies show the longer that people with psychotic episodes go untreated, the harder it is to stabilize their symptoms and the more problems they develop. A common presentation is schizophrenia, a persistent, severe brain disorder that often can be diagnosed only months or even years after a first psychotic episode. Schizophrenia affects 1.1 percent of Americans ages 18 and older, and currently accounts for about 30 percent of all spending on mental health treatment [3].

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