Innovation matters: “At a price of £45 per person, Sleepio is cost saving compared with usual treatment in primary care. This is based on an analysis of primary care resource use data before and after Sleepio was introduced in 9 GP practices. Healthcare costs were lower at 1 year, mostly because of fewer GP appointments and sleeping pills prescribed.”
Lifestyle matters: “The more complex our lives are, the more we need simple things that can ground us and help us to be more resilient – to rebalance and rebalance and rebalance again. Building the mental muscles to find balance when one gets off balance is a critical skill thrive and to build cognitive reserve in our fast-changing times. As our monthly gatherings showed us over the years, practicing rebalance in good company not only reinforces neural pathways and capabilities but also strengthens the bonds of trust and confidence that are invaluable to build a healthy environment to thrive in.”
One of the benefits of VR is that patients know they are in a simulation, which enables “psychological distance from problematic reactions,” the study authors wrote. “The process of finding the best uses and implementation methods of this immersive technology at scale in mental health is only beginning.”
“While all tech sectors received smaller funding totals than the previous quarter, digital health plunged much further than others did … investor interest in mental health tech wavered as the market and public companies like Talkspace and Cerebral come under scrutiny.”
“The main finding of our study is that we could indeed find evidence that high brain age gap is behaving as an accelerated brain aging biomarker.” — Dr. David Jones, neurologist at Mayo Clinic
Finally, a couple fun brain teasers to help you flex your math/ cognitive mental muscles:
Welcome to a new edition of SharpBrains’ e‑newsletter, featuring timely brain & mental health news and a fun brain teaser to test the limits of multi-tasking.
“The volume of grey matter (brain cells) increases rapidly from mid-gestation onwards, peaking just before we are six years old. It then begins to decrease slowly.” “The volume of white matter (brain connections) also increased rapidly from mid-gestation through early childhood and peaks just before we are 29 years old.” “The decline in white matter volume begins to accelerate after 50 years.”
“Become more intentional about consuming news … newspapers, TV news programs, and many social media sites make their money by grabbing your attention—and nothing grabs attention better than negative news. But repeated exposure to crises wreaks havoc with our well-being and can lead to bad decision making.”
#3. As announced in our previous e‑newsletter, the Center for BrainHealth at UT-Dallas hosted a talk titled Navigating the Brain Health Market with Álvaro Fernández Ibáñez on April 21st. We had over a thousand participants, hundreds of comments and a superb Q&A at the end — you can enjoy the full session recording HERE, over at YouTube.
“Our study shows that it’s possible to map the diverse and wildly subjective psychedelic experiences to specific regions in the brain. These insights may lead to new ways to combine existing or yet to be discovered compounds to produce desired treatment effects for a range of psychiatric conditions.”
“Through an app downloaded to a patient’s own smartphone or tablet, Altoida’s tech first offers up a 10-minute test. A variety of Augmented Reality (AR)-powered exercises measure 11 areas of the brain that have been linked to Alzheimer’s. The video-game-like activities ask users to hide and relocate virtual objects around the room, simulate a fire evacuation and search for virtual items while a sound continuously plays .. The resulting report highlights symptoms of cognitive decline—such as hand and gait errors, eye tracking, pupil dilation and more—and provides a score of the likelihood that they’ll develop Alzheimer’s within the next year.”
“As an implementation scientist, it is always exciting to have other scientists evaluate the reproducibility of the performance of our passive digital marker in very different populations,” said Malaz Boustani, M.D., Richard M. Fairbanks Professor of Aging Research at Indiana University. “Reproducibility is the cornerstone of scientific progress.”
“There’s still a lot of foundational work that needs to be done,” said Maya Desai, director of life sciences for Guidehouse. “There’s a lot of behavioral change that needs to happen across the stakeholders and their mindsets to think about digital therapeutics as a category of its own.”
Welcome to a new edition of SharpBrains’ e‑newsletter, featuring timely brain & mental health news, two excellent new books and a few fun brain teasers.
“The real challenge is not finding a therapist, it’s finding a therapist who knows how to provide the treatments that work. In the early 2000s, Myrna Weissman was trying to understand why so few therapists use scientifically based treatments. She found that over 60 percent of professional schools of psychology and master’s level social work programs did not include any supervised training for any scientifically based therapy … In contrast to evidence-based care, I call this “eminence-based care.” — Dr. Thomas Insel in his excellent new book
“Spain played a unique role in Cajal’s discoveries—that is, in the progression of neuroscience. The country was not a hotbed of scientific research. Lacking mentors, Cajal nearly abandoned his efforts. But working independently may have forged his autonomy and freed him from the influence of traditional theories. He also longed to disprove the stereotypes about Spain. “One could admit that Spain produces some genius artist, such as a long-haired poet or gesticulating dancer of either sex,” Cajal later wrote, “but the idea that a true man of science would emerge from there was considered absurd.” — Fascinating insights into the “father of modern neuroscience”
“After controlling for sex, socioeconomic status, and ADHD symptoms at age 12, the weekly amount video game play reported at age 12 predicted higher levels of self-reported ADHD symptoms at age 13 … The magnitude of the effect was not large, but it was statistically significant. In contrast, higher levels of ADHD symptoms at age 12 did not predict an increase in video game play one year later.”
“Whether we garden, have a view of nature out our window, visit nearby parks, or even just watch a nature video, we can help ourselves deal with the stresses and strains of COVID isolation by giving ourselves and our kids a dose of “Vitamin N.”
Good to see recognized the need for “reimbursement innovation” for emerging digital biomarkers & therapeutics — the FDA does have both sticks and carrots to leverage
“NEAT is a proof-of-concept effort attempting to develop a new tool for mental and behavioral health screening that moves us beyond historical and current methods of questions and consciously filtered responses … If successful, NEAT will not only significantly augment behavioral health screening, but it could also serve as a new way to assess ultimate treatment efficacy, since patients will often tell their clinicians what they think the clinician wants to hear rather than how they are truly feeling.” — Greg Witkop, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office
For the mental health crisis of care, quality is as much of a problem as quantity.
Most people who seek mental health care for the first time are baffled by how to find a clinician. I know what many parents felt. When my daughter, Lara, finished her first semester at Oberlin, she returned home to Atlanta thin and exhausted. I was excited to have her back home and entirely clueless about her desperate struggle with anorexia. In fact, as I learned later, she had been driven by obsessions about her weight and her appearance for over a year by that point. As was true of Amy, her perfectionism and her shame at not being perfect kept her from sharing this struggle. And now, in a crisis after a year of anguish, she was asking for help. As a professor of psychiatry at the university, I should have noticed her serious mental illness, and yet I missed it. At least, now that Lara was asking for help, I should know where to find the best care. But the university had no resources specifically for eating disorders, and I could not find a center for her treatment any better than Amy’s parents had. Fortunately, Lara, ever the problem solver, found an intensive outpatient program with a superb therapist and began a long, successful road to recovery. But even as a professional in this space, I found it difficult to navigate the maze of care. The first issue is that there are so many different types of professionals: social workers, marriage and family counselors, clinical psychologists, professional psychologists, psychiatrists —and they all call themselves therapists. The choice really matters, because what you receive depends largely on whom you see.
This is not true for cancer or asthma or heart disease, but in mental health care, there is little consensus among the various care providers as to how to approach even the most common forms of mental illness.
Welcome to a new edition of SharpBrains’ e‑newsletter, featuring this time eight scientific reports and industry resources plus a few fun brain teasers.
“Girls who spent less than an hour on screens and boys who spent less than 90 minutes on screens were not negatively impacted by it. But at higher amounts of screen time, their life satisfaction dropped significantly—they were less happy with their lives, and it got worse the more time they spent … (the) study also found that teens who got more regular exercise had greater life satisfaction and fewer physical complaints for both genders. Not only that, the effects were largely unrelated to how much time a teen spent on screens, so that if teens exercised more, it could potentially undo the damage to their well-being that went along with even six or eight hours of screen time.”
‘Obesity and depression are both major global health challenges, and our study provides the most robust evidence to date that higher BMI causes depression,’ said lead author Jess O’Loughlin. ‘Understanding whether physical or social factors are responsible for this relationship can help inform effective strategies to improve mental health and wellbeing.’
Let’s hope! — “I think Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) will continue to be adapted for more problems, diagnoses, and conditions. We will train many kinds of caregivers, teachers, front-line workers, police, and even politicians.”
“We discovered that the most predictive model – representing the most common mode of city navigation – was not the quickest path, but instead one that tried to minimize the angle between the direction a person is moving and the line from the person to their destination … Evolution is a story of trade-offs, not optimizations, and the cognitive load of calculating a perfect path rather than relying on the simpler pointing method might not be worth a few saved minutes. After all, early humans had to preserve brain power for dodging stampeding elephants, just like people today might need to focus on avoiding aggressive SUVs.”
“Designed with the help of Dutch academic Isabela Granic … the game is centred around an avatar who stays in bed for the day and aims to relax players by using soothing music, muted colours and self-care practices. Think meditative tasks such as word games and guided breathing exercises. There’s no way to win, compete or binge – in fact, it deliberately starts to feel boring after a few minutes of play, which disincentivizes mindless scrolling. #SelfCare was an instant hit, garnering half a million downloads in its first six weeks without any advertising…”
“What made this proof-of-principle trial successful was the discovery of a neural biomarker – a specific pattern of brain activity that indicates the onset of symptoms – and the team’s ability to customize a new DBS device to respond only when it recognizes that pattern. The device then stimulates a different area of the brain circuit, creating on-demand, immediate therapy that is unique to both the patient’s brain and the neural circuit causing her illness.”
“After initially indicating that Aduhelm could be prescribed to anyone with dementia, the Food and Drug Administration now specifies that the prescription drug be given to individuals with mild cognitive impairment or early-stage Alzheimer’s, the groups in which the medication was studied.Yet this narrower recommendation raises questions. What does a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment mean? Is Aduhelm appropriate for all people with mild cognitive impairment, or only some? And who should decide which patients qualify for treatment: dementia specialists or primary care physicians?”
Hoping you enjoy the great series over at Scientific American and especially #7, titled Welcome to the Ultimate Neuroscience Lab: Your Smartphone, by Emory neuroethicist Karen Rommelfanger and our very own Álvaro Fernández Ibáñez.
The time it takes for all thoughts to occur is ultimately shaped by the characteristics of the neurons and the networks involved. Many things influence the speed at which information flows through the system, but three key factors are: distance, myelination, complexity,
“This evaluation revealed significant value in introducing an evidence-based digital sleep intervention at scale within a clinical mental health service,” researchers from Big Health and Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust conclude.
“These findings from three studies with diverse samples and methodologies underscore an upside to the specter of uncertainty: it can cause people to savor the positives of the present.”
“Specifically, parents of an ADHD child have a 34% higher risk of dementia and 55% higher risk of Alzheimer’s, the results showed. Grandparents have about an 11% increased risk of either condition.”
As the researchers point out, “It is thus clear how the resulting gap between the research and “real world” fields is massive.” We do have the impression that the Aduhelm FDA saga is far from over.
Welcome to a new edition of SharpBrains’ e‑newsletter, featuring this time nine scientific reports and industry developments to help promote lifelong brain and mental health.
“… venting likely doesn’t soothe anger as much as augment it. That’s because encouraging people to act out their anger makes them relive it in their bodies, strengthening the neural pathways for anger and making it easier to get angry the next time around. Studies on venting anger (without effective feedback), whether online or verbally, have also found it to be generally unhelpful … To get out of that, you can ask the person to step back and help you reframe your experience by asking, “How should I think about this differently?” or “What should I do in this situation?”
“The new company would find it pushing well beyond its current mindfulness focus to, “provide the full spectrum of proven, effective virtual support – from mindfulness and meditation, to text-based behavioral health coaching, to video-based therapy and psychiatry – for all types of patient populations.”
Their independent review concludes that “given the lack of evidence of a robust and meaningful clinical benefit and the known safety signal, we recommend against offering this agent to patients with Alzheimer’s dementia (mild or otherwise) or mild cognitive impairment.”
Addressing the ongoing controversy about conservatorships, a USC Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry shares a great article to debunk these all-too-common myths
If you have not encountered the “Linda brain teaser” before, please give it a try! If you have, you’ll enjoy the new paper titled Tversky and Kahneman’s Cognitive Illusions: Who Can Solve Them, and Why?
Welcome to a new edition of SharpBrains’ e‑newsletter, featuring a life well lived, the latest news on brain health and innovation, and some brain teasers in honor of International Brain Teaser Month.
#8. “I am encouraged by Cognito’s innovative approach,” said Allan Levey, M.D., Ph.D., Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurology at Emory University and Director of the Emory Goizueta Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “This strategy translating recent advances in non-invasive modulation of brain activity with sensory stimulation with light and sound has the potential to be an urgently needed safe, non-invasive, and effective treatment for millions of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.” Neurostimulation device GammaSense by Cognito Therapeutics secures FDA Breakthrough Device Designation to explore Alzheimer’s Disease applications
Welcome to a new edition of SharpBrains’ e‑newsletter, featuring fascinating findings, books and resources for lifelong brain health.
#1. “The human brain functions thanks to its wide neuronal network that is deemed to contain approximately 69 billion neurons. On the other hand, the observable universe can count upon a cosmic web of at least 100 billion galaxies. Within both systems, only 30% of their masses are composed of galaxies and neurons. Within both systems, galaxies and neurons arrange themselves in long filaments or nodes between the filaments. Finally, within both systems, 70% of the distribution of mass or energy is composed of components playing an apparently passive role: water in the brain and dark energy in the observable Universe.” Understanding Brain Health via Cosmological Health, and vice versa
#3. “Of all the qualities parents can cultivate in their children, hope and optimism are the most precious. We can nurture hope and optimism in our kids by demonstrating that we always have some control over our environment and ourselves. The future isn’t a tide that’s going to crush us, it’s a wave we’re a part of.” — Madeline Levine, author of Ready or Not. Three favorite 2020 books on parenting and mental health
#10. Finally, we asked our team and trusted advisors to compile a list of ideas to stay sane and healthy in the months ahead, prioritizing habits shown to promote brain health, resilience and positive neuroplasticity: Enjoy these 3 New Year Resolutions and 36 Ideas for a Happier & Healthier 2021
As we start to celebrate the Holidays and welcome a much needed New Year, I asked our team and trusted advisors to compile a list of gift (and self-gift) ideas to help us stay sane and healthy in the months ahead, prioritizing three habits which have been shown to promote brain health, resilience and positive neuroplasticity:
Read: Here’s a selection of 12 fascinating books to add healthy novelty, variety and challenge to our reading lives — and therefore to our brains and minds
Brain Health, Neuroplasticity and Neurotechnology News 
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