June 7, 2023
When people think of a pharmacist, they usually think of someone dispensing medication. Pharmacists do fill prescriptions, but there's another type of pharmacist who plays a vital role in clinical research. The research pharmacist is skilled in making the clinical trial part of drug development...
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June 2, 2023
To glimpse the future of medicine, step inside Mayo Clinic's cutting-edge Center for Individualized Medicine. There, physicians, researchers, data scientists, artificial intelligence engineers and bioethicists are working side-by-side to investigate massive "omics" data sets. The innovative ap...
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June 2, 2023
It's been six years since Mayo Clinic physician Abba Zubair, M.D., Ph.D., watched stem cells from his regenerative medicine laboratory blast into space as part of a research effort to see if zero gravity would help the cells multiply faster. Approximately 15 million people worldwide experience ...
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May 27, 2023
It's long been accepted that the part of the brain called the primary motor cortex controls body movements. Certain groups of cells direct specific movements — for example, of the feet, hands or tongue. The cells of the primary motor cortex are organized as a type of topographical map of corr...
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May 26, 2023
Mayo Clinic researchers have identified a diverse range of environmental chemicals in human bile in patients with primary sclerosing cholangitis, a rare, chronic liver disease of the bile ducts. The study, published in Exposome, represents a new frontier of research at Mayo Clinic's Center for ...
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May 26, 2023
Mayo Clinic physician-scientists are working on regenerative biotherapeutics such as orthobiologics and other regenerative bioinjectables to bring advanced procedures to more patients. Orthobiologics are biological agents that stimulate healing when standard therapies don't work. Examples are p...
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May 26, 2023
In 2018, a male patient in his 60s began experiencing chest pains, which turned out to be caused by multiple blood clots in his lungs. As he visited several institutions in and around his home state of Michigan, doctors conducted the typical testing panels to look for a condition called thrombo...
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May 12, 2023
Chad Semling, who is 47 years old, spent 113 days in the hospital for recovery and rehabilitation before being admitted to Advanced Care at Home, a Mayo Clinic program that uses telehealth to provide health care remotely for patients who live in rural and urban areas. Semling, a Mayo Clinic pat...
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April 22, 2023
ROCHESTER, Minn. — Obesity and its associated cardiometabolic issues are a major health concern in the U.S. and internationally. According to a study published in 2017, 12% of the world's adult population was affected by obesity in 2016, double the percentage from 30 years earlier. With obesi...
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April 22, 2023
A breast cancer diagnosis is a life-changing event. Now, patients with multiple tumors may have another option when it comes to fighting the disease. Dr. Judy Boughey, a surgical oncologist with the Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center, led a recent study that found some patients can avoid a...
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Psilocybe cubensis extract potently prevents fear memory recall and freezing behavior in short- but not long-term in a rat model of posttraumatic stress disorder.
Psilocybe cubensis is a species of psilocybin mushroom (magic mushroom) of moderate potency whose principal active compounds are psilocybin and psilocin. Recent studies have shown the significant procognitive and mood-enhancer effects of Psilocybe cubensis. However, evidence is so limited, especially in preclinical studies. We aimed to investigate the effect of Psilocybe cubensis extract on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-like behavior, pain perception, locomotor activity, and anxiety in a rat model of PTSD. Male rats were exposed to three consecutive shocks (0.8 mA, 3 s interval) paired with three sounds broadcasted 3 s before delivering shocks (75 dB, 3 s). After 1, 3, or 21 days, fre...
Sex similarities and dopaminergic differences in interval timing.
Rodent behavioral studies have largely focused on male animals, which has limited the generalizability and conclusions of neuroscience research. Working with humans and rodents, we studied sex effects during interval timing that requires participants to estimate an interval of several seconds by making motor responses. Interval timing requires attention to the passage of time and working memory for temporal rules. We found no differences between human females and males in interval timing response times (timing accuracy) or the coefficient of variance of response times (timing precision). Consistent with prior work, we also found no differences between female and male rodents in timing accura...
Less is more: Smaller hippocampal subfield volumes predict greater improvements in posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms over 2 years.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a heterogeneous disorder, and symptom severity varies over time. Neurobiological factors that predict PTSD symptoms and their chronicity remain unclear. This study investigated whether the volume of the hippocampus and its subfields, particularly cornu ammonis (CA) 1, CA3, and dentate gyrus, are associated with current PTSD symptoms and whether they predict PTSD symptom changes over 2 years. We examined clinical and structural magnetic resonance imaging measures from 252 trauma-exposed post-9/11 veterans (159 with Time 1 PTSD diagnosis) during assessments approximately 2 years apart. Automated hippocampal subfield segmentation was performed with FreeSu...
Indirect and direct cannabinoid agonists differentially affect mesolimbic dopamine release and related behaviors.
The cannabinoid system is being researched as a potential pharmaceutical target for a multitude of disorders. The present study examined the effect of indirect and direct cannabinoid agonists on mesolimbic dopamine release and related behaviors in C57BL/6J (B6) mice. The indirect cannabinoid agonist N-arachidonoyl serotonin (AA-5-HT) indirectly agonizes the cannabinoid system by preventing the metabolism of endocannabinoids through fatty acid amide hydrolase inhibition while also inhibiting transient receptor potential vanilloid Type 1 channels. Effects of AA-5-HT were compared with the direct cannabinoid receptor Type 1 agonist arachidonoyl-2′-chloroethylamide (ACEA). In Experiment 1, mic...
Lrp8 knockout mice fed a selenium-replete diet display subtle deficits in their spatial learning and memory function.
Selenium is an essential trace element that is delivered to the brain by the selenium transport protein selenoprotein P (SEPP1), primarily by binding to its receptor low-density lipoprotein receptor-related protein 8 (LRP8), also known as apolipoprotein E receptor 2 (ApoER2), at the blood–brain barrier. Selenium transport is required for several important brain functions, with transgenic deletion of either Sepp1 or Lrp8 resulting in severe neurological dysfunction and death in mice fed a selenium-deficient diet. Previous studies have reported that although feeding a standard chow diet can prevent these severe deficits, some motor coordination and cognitive dysfunction rem...
