March 29, 2023
It often was thought that the speed of information transmitted among regions of the brain stabilized during early adolescence. A new study in Nature Neuroscience by Mayo Clinic researchers and colleagues from the Netherlands found transmission speeds continue to increase into early adulthood....
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March 26, 2023
ROCHESTER, Minn. — Senescence is an aspect of aging that involves a biological dysfunction that occurs in response to repetitive stressors. Biological aging is associated with an increase in the incidence of cardiovascular disease, but whether heart failure is itself a senescent process indep...
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March 22, 2023
Clinical notes in medical records are rich sources of data about human health. But tapping them for medical research can be challenging because these data come from various sources — and they all look different. "There's no standardization in how data is organized and classified across medica...
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March 19, 2023
ROCHESTER, Minn. — According to a new study published by Mayo Clinic researchers, the COVID-19 pandemic was linked to a 17% increase in the death rate in Minnesota during the first year of the pandemic compared to the two previous years. Deaths were driven by both COVID-19 and other causes li...
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March 8, 2023
The liver has the greatest regenerative capacity of any organ in the body, making it possible for surgeons to treat cancerous and noncancerous diseases with extensive surgical approaches. However, underlying chronic liver diseases, like cirrhosis or nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, are known to in...
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March 3, 2023
ROCHESTER, Minn. — Being overweight impacts your heart health in more ways than you might think. A new JACC review paper from Mayo Clinic outlines how obesity affects the common tests used to diagnose heart disease and impacts treatments. Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death i...
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March 3, 2023
Rare Disease Day on Feb. 28 raises awareness of the 30 million people in the U.S. who have a rare disease. Months after young Maggie Carmichael started taking an experimental drug for her ultra-rare genetic disease, she was able to trade in her wheelchair for a walker. The 9-year-old Mayo Clini...
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March 2, 2023
In a study published in Molecular Psychiatry, Mark Frye, M.D., a Mayo Clinic researcher and collaborators, investigated the risk of treatment-emergent mania in bipolar disorder when treated with antidepressants. "We found that antidepressants that increase mitochondrial energetics (cells that...
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February 22, 2023
Tissue engineering techniques discovered at Mayo Clinic and Arizona State University created a humanlike vocal cord (fold) structure with the potential to produce a natural-sounding voice. The bioengineered scaffold mimics human vocal folds, with ability to vibrate and make sound. The study tea...
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February 16, 2023
Clinicians and researchers around the world are combining artificial intelligence, known as AI, with health care to help identify patients at greater risk of cardiovascular diseases, such as stroke and heart failure. However, as use of these AI-enhanced tools grows, researchers at Mayo Clinic...
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The role of the anterior cingulate cortex in aggression and impulsivity.
Aggression is a complex social behavior that evolved in the context of defending a territory, fighting for limited resources, and competing for mates and protection. Although aggression considered as a negative or undesirable emotion is an essential part of many species’ repertoire of social behaviors. For humans, the motivations, actions, and limits of aggressive acts are not always clear. However, uncontrolled aggression may have destructive consequences, and it develops inappropriately into violence. At the neural level, several studies demonstrated that aggression is related to cortical abnormalities, including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). This review summarizes the state of th...
Examination of onset trajectories and persistence of binge-like eating behavior in mice after intermittent palatable food exposure.
Binge eating is a persistent behavior associated with a chronic course of illness and poor treatment outcomes. While clinical research is unable to capture the full course of binge eating, preclinical approaches offer the opportunity to examine binge-like eating from onset through chronic durations, allowing identification of factors contributing to binge eating persistence. The present study quantified the trajectories of binge-like eating onset and modeled cycles of abstinence/relapse to develop a translational model for binge eating persistence. Adult male and female C57Bl6/J mice were randomized to a binge-like palatable food access schedule (daily 2-hr, 3×/week) or continuous, nonbinge...
Maternal repetitive hypoxia prior to mating confers epigenetic resilience to memory impairment in male progeny.
We showed previously in a mouse model of vascular cognitive impairment and dementia involving chronic cerebral hypoperfusion (CCH) that repetitive hypoxic conditioning (RHC) of both parents results in the epigenetic, intergenerational transmission of resilience to recognition memory loss in adult progeny, as assessed by the novel object recognition test. The present study was undertaken in the same model to determine whether RHC treatment of one or both parents is required to confer dementia resilience intergenerationally. We found inherited resilience to 3 months of CCH in males is maternally mediated (p = .006). Statistically, we observed a strong trend for the paternal germline t...
Effect of striatal dopamine on Pavlovian bias. A large [¹⁸F]-DOPA PET study.
Interaction between Pavlovian and instrumental control systems is key for adaptive motivated behavior, but also plays an important role in various neuropsychiatric disorders, including depression, addiction, and anxiety. Here, we employed the flouorodopa positron emission tomography ([¹⁸F]-DOPA PET) in healthy participants (N = 100) to assess whether dopamine synthesis capacity (Ki), specifically in the ventral striatum, accounts for individual variation in Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT). Surprisingly, this was not the case. Rather, the relationship of ventral striatal Ki with PIT depended on working memory (WM) capacity. Ventral striatal dopamine boosted the...
Biological sex influences the contribution of sign-tracking and anxiety-like behavior toward remifentanil self-administration.
Most people sample addictive drugs, but use becomes disordered in only a small minority. Two important factors that influence susceptibility to addiction are individual differences in personality traits and biological sex. The influence of traits on addiction-like behavior is well-characterized in preclinical models of cocaine self-administration, but less is understood in regards to opioids. How biological sex influences trait susceptibility to opioid self-administration is likewise less studied than psychostimulants. Thus, we sought to elucidate how biological sex and several addiction-relevant traits interact with the propensity to self-administer the opioid remifentanil. We first screene...
Prefrontal and medial temporal interactions in memory functions in the rhesus monkey.
Both the medial temporal lobe and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex have been implicated in learning and memory. However, it has been difficult to ascertain the degree to which the two structures are dependent on each other or interact in subserving these cognitive functions. To investigate this question directly, we prepared two group of monkeys. First, the contralateral frontal-hippocampal split group (CFHS) received a unilateral lesion of the hippocampus and surrounding posterior parahippocampal cortices (H +), combined with a contralateral lesion of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plus transection of the corpus callosum and anterior commissure. This preparation funct...
