Stress & Insight - Autism Clinics - Parkinson's Advances - Fields Obit

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May 23, 2026, 7:45:04 AM (5 days ago) May 23

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01644-z

Stress impairs your brain’s ability to link memories — dampening insight

Simon Spichak

Acute stress makes it difficult to link memories of past events with fresh information, a study1 suggests. The results help to explain why people struggle to show insight under pressure.

The study, published today in Science Advances, combined brain imaging and psychological testing to show how stress disrupts people’s ability to tap into records of previous experiences and make deductions.

The combination of behavioural testing and neural imaging “to actually see what’s going awry is really compelling”, says Brice Kuhl, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon in Eugene, who was not involved in the study.
Only connect

The brain connects new and old information to make inferences through a cognitive process called integration. For example, if you have a memory of your friend wearing a bright green jacket, and you see a bright green jacket on a park bench, you might integrate your memory and the visual input to infer that your friend is at the park. This ability can be impaired in individuals with some mental-health conditions, such as anxiety disorders and psychosis.

The brain area called the hippocampus is essential for integration. Since it is also particularly vulnerable to stress, Lars Schwabe, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany, and his colleagues decided to test how acute stress would affect the brain’s ability to integrate information and make inferences.
Memory task

On the experiment’s first day, 121 participants were asked to memorize a series of paired images, each containing one image of an animal and one image of either a face or a scene.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/23/health/autism-therapy-clinics.html

Short Naps, Long Hours: How Autism Clinics Squeeze Medicaid Dollars Out of Preschoolers

By Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz

On a sunny Wednesday morning last month, dozens of preschoolers filed into a Compleat Kidz autism clinic in Concord, N.C. One wore light-up sneakers. Another had a Spider-Man lunchbox. They settled into tiny green cubicles, each accompanied by a staff member, and started their work.

A decade ago, this Charlotte suburb had no clinics providing therapy to children with autism. Now it has 12. Inside this one, children buzzed with activity as they worked long sessions with therapists. One 6-year-old girl, exhausted after hours of therapy, fell fast asleep in her therapist’s lap.

Soon, a supervisor, Stephen Schroeder, intervened.

“How long?” Mr. Schroeder asked Courtney Evans, the therapist.

“I set the timer for 7. We’re almost done,” Ms. Evans said. A couple of minutes later, she nudged the child awake. The girl cried.

At Compleat Kidz, a fast-growing chain of autism clinics based in North Carolina, the policy is firm: Naps cannot be longer than seven minutes before children are awakened to resume therapy. The company says this is necessary to prevent fraud since clinics can be paid only when children are awake and getting services. But it also allows the clinic to bill insurers or Medicaid for more hours.

Across the United States, where treatment for autistic children was once fairly rare, thousands of clinics have sprung up, turning a once obscure therapy into a multibillion-dollar industry. The growth has been fueled by rising autism diagnoses, state insurance mandates and a federal requirement that Medicaid cover the therapy. Private equity investors have rushed into the business, buying up chains and opening new clinics..

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/parkinsons-diagnosis-tools-pen-chemical

New tools may help diagnose Parkinson’s earlier than ever

By Meghan Rosen

Neurologist David Standaert can often tell if someone has Parkinson’s disease in a matter of minutes. Maybe their hand trembles and one of their arms doesn’t swing as much as the other when they walk. Maybe their voice sounds softer than usual, and they have a stillness to their body and a masklike look on their face, with little expressivity or blinking. “I always tell patients, ‘It’s not any one thing that tells me you have Parkinson’s. It’s all of these things together,’ ” he says.

But Standaert’s is a rare skill. A movement disorder specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, he has been diagnosing people with the disease for decades. He’s one of fewer than 1,000 doctors in the United States trained to spot and treat the sometimes-subtle signs of Parkinson’s. That’s a problem because more than 1 million people in the country have the disease, and the number is climbing as the population ages. “There are nowhere near enough movement disorder specialists to go diagnosing all these people,” Standaert says.

A lack of specialists is just one of the problems that plagues Parkinson’s diagnosis, which has proved difficult in part because the disease is so complicated. Over time, and for reasons scientists don’t fully understand, particular nerve cells deep in the brain become damaged and die. For patients, this can manifest as tremors and a constellation of other symptoms that start mild and progressively worsen. Eventually, as muscles stiffen and swallowing becomes difficult, people may become bedridden, in need of round-the-clock care.

But Parkinson’s disease varies tremendously, Standaert says. Which symptoms arise, how severe they are and how quickly they progress differ from person to person. “I have seen tens of thousands of patients with Parkinson’s disease, and no two are the same,” he says.

https://www.thetransmitter.org/pain/in-memoriam-howard-fields-pain-research-pioneer/

In memoriam: Howard Fields, pain research pioneer

By Natalia Mesa

In 1967, Howard Fields was drafted into the U.S. military and stationed at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was the height of the Vietnam War, and Fields, who had recently graduated from Stanford University with an M.D. and Ph.D., was assigned to treat wounded soldiers.

Among his patients was a man with median nerve causalgia, a painful condition caused by nerve damage following physical trauma. Treatment options for pain were limited at the time, and Fields decided to try what he later recalled as “this strange therapy” that electrically stimulated the peripheral nerve. “The results were dramatic,” Fields wrote in an autobiographical narrative. “Immediate, complete relief lasting for several hours.”

His experience with the Vietnam War would guide his career in research. “He saw a lot of trauma,” says Jennifer Mitchell, professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), who was a graduate student in Fields’ lab. “I think he was compelled to help people that were suffering.”

Fields died of complications from prostate cancer on 1 May 2026, at the age of 86. He spent his career mapping the pain-modulating circuits in the central nervous system, and his lab was the first to demonstrate the efficacy of opioids for neuropathic pain and topical lidocaine for postherpetic neuralgia. Later, he pivoted to studying addiction and mapped out the mechanisms by which opioids co-opt reward circuitry.

His work around the physiology and anatomy of pain circuits made Fields “a giant in the field,” says Mary Heinricher, professor of neurological surgery and biomedical engineering at Oregon Health & Science University, who did a postdoctoral fellowship with Fields. In fact, Heinricher adds, “It wasn’t really a field of research before his generation.”