Alzheimer's Test - Female Gut Pain - Mouse Behavior - 10 Neuroscience Discoveries of 2025

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/dec/17/10-per-cent-over-70s-uk-alzheimers-changes-brain-study

Study finds 10% of over-70s in UK could have Alzheimer’s-like changes in brain

Amelia Hill

One in 10 people in the UK aged 70 and older could have Alzheimer’s-like changes in their brain, according to the clearest, real-world picture of how common the disease’s brain changes are in ordinary, older people.

The detection of the proteins linked with the disease is not a diagnosis. But the findings indicate that more than 1 million over-70s would meet Nice’s clinical criteria for anti-amyloid therapy – a stark contrast to the 70,000 people the NHS has estimated could be eligible if funding were available.

Experts, including those from Alzheimer’s Research UK, have said the findings from the first-ever population-based research into the disease have huge potential for early and accurate diagnosis.

“High-quality studies like this are crucial to enhancing our understanding of how blood tests for Alzheimer’s could be used in clinical practice,” said David Thomas, the head of policy and public affairs at Alzheimer’s Research UK. “We need to generate more evidence so we can use these tests in the NHS.”

The lead author of the research, conducted by King’s College London, Stavanger University hospital and the University of Gothenburg, said the findings could be a “gamechanger in the understanding of the disease”.

The findings also challenge some long-held assumptions about dementia, including the idea that it is mainly a disease that mainly affects women.

Dag Aarsland, a professor of old age psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London and the study’s lead author, said: “In an ageing global population, the assessment and treatment of dementia presents a significant challenge. Our study used a simple blood test to establish changes that contribute to cognitive impairment in those with dementia.”
© 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited 
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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/female-gut-pain-estrogen-ibs-bacteria

This newfound cascade of events may explain some female gut pain

By Bethany Brookshir

Women of reproductive age are more likely than other people to report gut problems like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and can feel dismissed by doctors, as clinicians often put the pain down to diet, stress or hormones.

It was never just “in their heads.” A complex interplay between an important hormone, chemical signals, rare populations of gut cells and the output of gut bacteria could explain why, researchers report December 18 in Science. While the findings are in mice, they suggest new opportunities for treatment.

Gut pain is a visceral experience — literally, pain in the viscera, from nerves that spread throughout the torso and abdomen. “It can be bloating, it can be a sharp pain or it can be just sort of a constant, dull pain,” says David Julius, a neurophysiologist at University of California, San Francisco. About 10 percent of the global population — mostly women —suffers symptoms of IBS, which can occur with diarrhea, constipation or a mix between the two.   

“What makes this so bad is that these women are feeling this pain, they go into the physician … and they were just ignored,” says Holly Ingraham, a physiologist also at the University of California, San Francisco.

Ingraham and Julius knew that the hormone estrogen played a role in this type of pain, which can fluctuate with the menstrual cycle and pregnancy. In a 2023 paper, they showed that female mice are more sensitive to this visceral pain than males. Without estrogen, that extra sensitivity disappeared.

The researchers immediately went looking for cells that might sense estrogen in the gut. To affect a given organ, its cells must have proteins called receptors that recognize estrogen and set off signals in response.

© Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025
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https://www.thetransmitter.org/psychedelics/psychedelics-research-in-rodents-has-a-behavior-problem/

Psychedelics research in rodents has a behavior problem

By Calli McMurray

For the past two and a half years, a team of five labs in the San Francisco Bay Area have endeavored to nail down how psilocybin affects the way mice behave.

Psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs have been shown to improve anxiety and depression symptoms in people, but results in mouse studies are less consistent. Those inconsistencies spell trouble for researchers trying to unpack the drug’s mechanism, because if behavioral changes in mice don’t mirror those in humans, the underlying biological changes might be irrelevant, says team member Boris Heifets, associate professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at Stanford University.

So, to establish a behavioral ground truth, the five labs gave about 200 mice the same dose of psilocybin and measured how the drug affected the animals’ performance on a range of simple behavioral assays, including the elevated plus maze and open field, tail suspension and forced swim tests, while taking the drug as well as 24 hours later.

While on psilocybin, the mice showed a temporary increase in anxiety-like behaviors, including spending less time than usual exploring new objects and open areas, the team reported in April. But, unlike in people, the drug had no lasting effects once it wore off. 

The issue, some behavioral neuroscientists argue, is not replication between labs—it’s the assays themselves.

“I love the idea of these multisite experiments in animal models, but the models—the behavioral models—still have to be the right ones,” says Jennifer Mitchell, professor of neurology and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. “The tests themselves—I’m not sure how much they tell us about what a psychedelic is actually doing.”

© 2025 Simons Foundation
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-mind-blowing-brain-discoveries-from-2025/

10 Most Mind-Blowing Discoveries About the Brain in 2025

By Allison Parshall 

The human brain has 86 billion neurons connected by roughly 100 trillion synapses, making it one of the most complex objects in the known universe. Each year neuroscientists make fascinating, important and downright strange discoveries about how this resilient structure works, and 2025 didn’t disappoint. Here are 10 of the most fascinating brain discoveries of this year for your own brain to noodle on.

Brain scans of thousands of people revealed that the human brain has five distinct eras, with turning points in the way it is organized occurring at age nine, 32, 66 and 83. Across each of these stages—for example, the “adolescent” period between age nine and 32—people’s brains tend to experience the same types of changes.

You don’t remember being a newborn or even a toddler. Adults’ earliest memories tend to start around preschool and no earlier. But recent research suggests that your brain was making memories back then; you just don’t have access to them now. A study of the infant hippocampus, a deep-brain structure crucial for memory formation, found that it can store memories once babies are around one year old—though it’s not clear why we can’t recall them once we grow up.
Untangling Alzheimer’s

Researchers also discovered another oddity of newborn babies’ brain: they have very high levels of a protein that, in adults, indicates Alzheimer’s disease. Tau proteins help to stabilize brain cells’ structure, but they can undergo chemical changes that lead them to become tangled up, a process linked to Alzheimer’s. The fact that healthy newborn brains have high levels of these proteins, which later decrease, suggests that these detrimental changes in adults could be avoided or reversed.
Fluorescence light micrograph of neural progenitor cells. Astrocytes have been stained orange and neural progenitor cells green. Cell nuclei are blue

© 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,
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