Publisher Health

Currently, various classes of drugs are available for the treatment of mental illnesses — such as depression and anxiety disorders. However, although these drugs confer benefits, they are also associated with adverse side-effects. Conseqeuntly, medical researchers continuously thrive to improve the pharmacological properties of therapeutic agents to optimize the benefit-to-side-effect ratio. The research group led by Harald Sitte at the Center for Physiology and Pharmacology of the MedUni Vienna has conducted a study to identify new drugs that could potentially be used for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders. Importantly, the lead compounds displayed reduced risk of drug abuse and other adverse effects when compared to other agents that are currently under evaluation. The research results were recently published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
In their preclinical experiments, the research team, led by Harald Sitte from the Institute of Pharmacology at MedUni Vienna’s Center for Physiology and Pharmacology, identified the potential of certain substances from the family of synthetic cathinone compounds for the treatment of mental illnesses. Cathinones are derived from cathine, which is found in the khat plant, and are known for their ability to release monoamines such as noradrenaline, dopamine and serotonin. “These substances first showed serotonin-related effects in our cell models, and then also in our mouse model,” says Harald Sitte, referring to this messenger substance that is considered to be a key factor in the drug treatment of depression and anxiety disorders such as social phobias or post-traumatic stress disorder. The cathinone compounds used in the study attracted the scientists’ attention due to their preference for releasing serotonin without significantly increasing the dopamine level in the brain’s “reward centre.” “Consequently, the new drugs we are researching are less likely to be abused and are also associated with fewer adverse effects overall,” emphasises Harald Sitte.
Serotonin release with less risk
Mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety disorders can be alleviated by increasing extracellular serotonin levels in the brain. This is usually achieved by substances that are classified as antidepressants. The mode of action of these so-called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) is based on blocking the reuptake of serotonin from the synaptic cleft (neuronal interspace), which increases the amount of serotonin in the extracellular space. Of note, “classical” antidepressants inhibit and “block” the serotonin transporter. In contrast, recent evidence from preclinical and clinical studies identified the potential of drugs that elicit the release of serotonin via the serotonin transporter, i.e. substances that invert the natural transport direction of the serotonin transporter. However, the serotonin-releasing agents currently undergoing clinical trials carry the risk of abuse and harmful side effects – such as MDMA, also known as “ecstasy,” which is taken as a “party drug” in non-clinical settings. “Our research identified the first representatives of a new serotonin-releasing class of drugs that do not produce various adverse effects,” says study leader Harald Sitte, summarising the results of the study, which was conducted by first authors Felix Mayer (Florida Atlantic University) and Marco Niello (Center for Physiology and Pharmacology at MedUni Vienna) in collaboration with Vienna University of Technology, Florida Atlantic University, Peking University and the National Institute of Drug Abuse in Baltimore.
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Materials provided by Medical University of Vienna. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The behavior of sperm cells is due, in part, to the individual DNA make-up of these cells, rather than only to the genetics of males, finds a team of scientists. Its results, which provide a new understanding of the competition among sperm cells to fertilize the egg, have larger implications for the reproductive process.
The study, whichcenters on the swimming behavior of sperm cells, is the first to establish a direct effect of mutation on sperm behavior and suggests that the development and application of screens based on sperm behavior can improve the quality of the genetics they carry.
“Until now, the predominant view was that this variation in swimming behavior reflected the overall genetics of the male rather than the variable genetics of the individual sperm cells,” explains Richard Borowsky, a professor emeritus in NYU’s Department of Biology and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Scientific Reports. “This study is the first to demonstrate that genetic differences can directly affect the swimming behavior of sperm cells.”
This fuller grasp, he adds, may offer additional knowledge on the impact of abnormal sperm cells on offspring, notably birth defects.
The work , which included Haining Chen, an NYU graduate student at the time of the study and now at Westlake University in Hangzhou, China, focused on sperm cells in male fish — specifically Astyanax mexicanus cave fish. It compared the sperm cells in normal fish with those of fish whose sperm production had been artificially mutated. This allowed the scientists to identify behavioral and morphological characteristics potentially altering the sperm’s chances in the race to fertilize the egg.
Their results showed no difference in flagellar length — the hair-like appendage that propels them as they swim towards the egg — between the normal and mutated samples. However, there was greater variability in the velocity, or swimming speed, of the mutated samples compared to the normal ones — meaning that in many instances, the mutated samples swam at lower and faster speeds than did normal ones. Overall, while both types of sperm cells appeared similar, their behaviors are quite different and at crucial stages.
The findings offer additional insights into the nature of reproduction.
It’s been long established that sperm from different males vary in their characteristics because of the genetic differences between the males. This study established that different sperm from the same male vary in their characteristics because they differ in their genetic cargo.
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Materials provided by New York University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

In an analysis of more than 2,400 women, about 1 in 10 without a history of blood pressure issues were diagnosed with high blood pressure in the year after childbirth, according to a research article published today in Hypertension, an American Heart Association journal. Nearly a quarter of the women were diagnosed more than six weeks after delivery — a time when many women have stopped receiving follow-up care.
“The findings of our study have implications for postpartum care, particularly among women without a history of high blood pressure,” said lead study author Samantha Parker, Ph.D., an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health. “We were surprised at the number of cases captured more than six weeks after delivery, a period that falls well outside of routine postpartum follow-up. Monitoring during this period could mitigate severe postpartum and long-term cardiovascular complications.”
High blood pressure after childbirth, called postpartum hypertension, is typically discovered within six weeks of delivery — either immediately after childbirth or during a woman’s last postpartum clinic visit at 4-6 weeks after delivery. Data is limited for the time beyond 6 weeks since most studies have relied on blood pressure measurements during delivery or hospitalization, which includes just the first few days postpartum and captures only the most severe cases.
In severe cases, postpartum hypertension is associated with life-threatening complications, including stroke, heart failure, kidney failure and more. And, while it is well established that women with high blood pressure before or during pregnancy are at risk for cardiovascular disease later in life, very few studies have assessed cardiovascular risk for women who develop high blood pressure for the first time, or new-onset hypertension, after childbirth.
“Understanding more about high blood pressure beyond 6 weeks after delivery may provide insight into the alarming racial disparities in maternal health,” said Parker. “Previous research has shown that new-onset hypertension after childbirth may be up to 2.5 times more common among non-Hispanic Black women compared to white women.”
The study aimed to estimate how common new-onset postpartum hypertension is among a racially diverse population. The researchers also wanted to determine contributing factors so healthcare professionals can identify pregnant patients at risk. Researchers evaluated medical records from 8,374 deliveries with a pregnancy length of at least 20 weeks from 2016-2018 at Boston Medical Center, a large, central, urban safety-net hospital in Boston. Safety-net hospitals tend to have a higher percentage of patients with low household income, and they are more likely to have no health insurance or rely on Medicaid for health care coverage.

A study undertaken by management experts at Kingston University’s Business School and Maynooth University in Ireland has shown people in the early stages of their careers were more likely to be impacted by workplace stress during the Covid-19 pandemic than senior colleagues.
The pandemic had been widely reported to impact negatively on the mental health of whole populations, particularly younger people, researcher Dr Christina Butler, an associate professor from Kingston Business School, said. In response, the study aimed to understand how individuals at different stages of their lives and careers were affected and what resources had a positive impact on their wellbeing.
The research focused on people at five career stages — from early on when they were finding themselves vocationally to pre-retirement, when there was less emphasis on career advancement. They found differences in how those groups reacted to the continued pandemic-related disruptions of 2020 and adjusted over time.
The researchers first surveyed people in 30 different countries in April 2020, shortly after the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic, then at fortnightly intervals for eight weeks.
The resulting paper, Covid-19 Pandemic Disruptions to Working Lives: A Multi-level Examination of Impacts across Career Stages, which has been published in the Journal of Vocational Behaviour, revealed that people at the start of their careers were most likely to feel stressed, Dr Butler said.
“Work and personal lives underwent enormous disruption during the pandemic, with people working from home experiencing increased loneliness and a range of mental health issues. Under normal circumstances, the younger generations of workers need additional support from their managers and that was exacerbated during the pandemic, when we saw that relative newcomers to the workforce did not cope as well under the pressures of remote working,” Dr Butler said.

Not all diabetes is the same, and it goes well beyond the two main classifications, type 1 and type 2. Monogenic diabetes refers to forms of diabetes caused by single genetic variations. Maturity-onset diabetes of the young (MODY) is the most common clinical subdivision of monogenic diabetes, with diabetes typically arising in young adulthood.
Now, an international team of researchers have discovered a new variant of the HNF1A gene, which can cause MODY that accounts for almost seven percent of all cases of diabetes in Greenland and is found nowhere else in the world.
“We were excited to make this discovery of a new genetic variant that is responsible for close to seven percent all cases of diabetes in Greenland. Discoveries like these, which was made possible thanks to a generous collaboration with the Greenlandic people, help us better understand the complexity of diabetes” says Professor Torben Hansen from the Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research at the University of Copenhagen. He led the research together with Professors Anders Albrechtsen and Ida Moltke from the Department of Biology at the University of Copenhagen.
Potential for precision medicine
People with HNF1A-MODY are often misdiagnosed with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes and given medication that is not effective. Instead, HNF1A-MODY is most effectively treated with tablet therapy with sulphonylurea, which is rarely used today in the treatment of type 2 diabetes. Therefore, researchers are hopeful that this discovery will pave the way for precision treatment in Greenland. As monogenic diabetes is inherited, genetic tests can reveal if other family members also have the same type of diabetes.
“This discovery is good news for the treatment of diabetes in Greenland, because most people with MODY can be treated with a simple and cheap tablet treatment and avoid insulin and other more complex forms of diabetes treatment. Therefore, we now offer genetic testing for MODY to all our patients with diabetes, and when we find people with HNF1A-MODY, we systematically offer that family members are also tested,” says senior physician and professor Marit Eika Jørgensen at the Steno Diabetes Center Greenland. Marit Eika Jørgensen coordinated the research in Greenland, which involved more than 4,000 Greenlanders.
Monogenic diabetes more common in Greenland than in Western populations
Together with a previously described high-impact variant TBC1D4 variant, close to 1 in 5 Greenlanders with diabetes are carriers of common high-impact variants. Monogenic diabetes is, therefore, far more frequent in Greenland than in Western populations, where monogenic diabetes is estimated to account for only around 1 in 50 cases of diabetes.
“This discovery clearly demonstrates how common diseases are much more complex than we previously thought. Thanks to the breakthroughs in genetic research and data science capabilities, many people around the world may benefit from new personalized medicine approaches that take ancestral, genetic, and environmental backgrounds into account,” says PhD Student Anne Cathrine Baun Thuesen from CBMR, who was co-first author together with Frederik Filip Stæger from the Department of Biology at the University of Copenhagen.
This research is a collaboration between researchers at the University of Copenhagen, University of Greenland, Steno Diabetes Center Greenland, Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen, the University of Bergen, Haukeland University Hospital Bergen, Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research, Helmholtz Zentrum München, University of Southern Denmark, TUM School of Medicine Münich, and the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.

Adults who frequently worry about being rejected or abandoned by those closest to them are more prone to having false memories when they can see who is conveying the information, a new study suggests.
The authors, SMU’s Nathan Hudson and Michigan State University’s William J. Chopik, found that adults with attachment anxiety tend to remember details incorrectly more often than people with other personality types, like neuroticism or attachment avoidance.
However, attachment-anxious adults were more likely to get the facts wrong only when they could see the person relaying the information — not when they read or heard the same information, reveals a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Some participants in the study were randomly assigned to watch a 20-minute video of a woman either talking about her tumultuous breakup with a man or another topic — like a shopping trip or the ecology of California wetlands. Other participants got the same information from audio only or by reading a transcript. All groups took a memory test immediately after receiving the information, regardless of how it was delivered.
Hudson, a psychology professor at SMU (Southern Methodist University), said seeing the speaker might be a factor in memory distortion because highly attachment-anxious people tend to be hypervigilant in monitoring facial expressions. They also tend to misjudge the perceived emotional states of others, he said.
“We believe that highly attachment-anxious individuals are likely intensively analyzing what is being said in the videos we showed them,” Hudson said. “Their own thoughts and feelings about the video may have gotten ‘mixed up’ with the actual video contents in their minds. Thus, they experienced false memories when we gave them a test regarding the video’s contents.”
These findings, Hudson said, illustrate how our personalities can potentially affect our memory abilities.

New research led by the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center sheds light on the connection between exposure to environmental toxins in utero and the later development of anxiety during adolescence.
Lead author Jeffrey Strawn, MD, and his colleagues recently published the study in the journal Depression & Anxiety.
Strawn said researchers are increasingly interested in learning more about risk factors for anxiety and depression in children, particularly since there has been a surge of these symptoms during the pandemic. Even prior to the pandemic, anxiety disorders were among the most prevalent and earliest presenting mental health conditions for children, he said.
“We know a lot about early risk factors, including psychological risk factors, temperament, behaviors and family relationships,” said Strawn, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience in UC’s College of Medicine and a UC Health child and adolescent psychiatrist. “But we know incredibly little about the effects of environmental factors like air pollution and other environmental toxicants on anxiety.”
The study focused on a class of chemicals called polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) that were used as flame retardants for products like furniture foam padding, wire insulation, rugs, upholstery, computers and appliances. Exposure to PBDEs during early brain development has been associated with cognitive deficits, reduced language skills and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and the chemicals were banned in the United States in 2004.
Despite the ban, Strawn said exposure to PBDEs remains common, but its effect on anxiety symptoms had not been previously studied.

Children with a severe form of epilepsy should be vaccinated against the flu due to the high risk of seizures being triggered by an influenza infection, according to a new study.
The research, led by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and the University of Melbourne, found the safe administration of the seasonal influenza vaccine should be a priority in those with SCN1A-postive Dravet syndrome given the likelihood of severe neurological symptoms and complications such as worsening seizures, deteriorating language and motor skills and even death after catching the flu.
Paediatric neurologist, Dr Katherine Howell from the Murdoch Children’s said the decision for parents to vaccinate children with this syndrome was complex because seizures could be triggered by both infection and vaccination. Dr Howell said despite the syndrome being associated with high rates of prolonged seizures during infections, the impact of influenza had not been previously studied.
The research, published in Neurology, involved children with SCN1A-positive Dravet syndrome who had a confirmed influenza infection at The Royal Children’s and Austin Hospital. Researchers found 21 children caught influenza 24 times, with brain complications reported in 88 per cent of cases. All presented to hospital with 75 per cent recovering quickly but death or long-term brain complications occurred in one in five infections. Between them they received 60 influenza vaccinations with most tolerating the vaccine well.
“Concerns about giving the flu vaccine and incomplete routine immunisations are common in this patient group due to the risk of seizures after vaccination,” Dr Howell said. However, because this syndrome is also associated with a high risk of seizures during infections, it highlights the critical need to protect patients from the complications of vaccine-preventable infections like the flu. Our research highlights that the benefits of flu vaccines for these children far outweighs the risks of seizures being triggered following vaccination.”
SCN1A-postive Dravet syndrome, the most common severe form of genetic epilepsy, occurs in one in 15,000 children.

Water — which makes up the majority of every cell in the body — plays a key role in how proteins, including those associated with Parkinson’s disease, fold, misfold, or clump together, according to a new study.
When attempting to discover potential treatments for protein misfolding diseases, researchers have primarily focused on the structure of the proteins themselves. However, researchers led by the University of Cambridge have shown that a thin shell of water is key to whether a protein begins to clump together, or aggregate, forming the toxic clusters which eventually kill brain cells.
Using a technique known as Terahertz spectroscopy, the researchers have shown that the movement of the water-based shell surrounding a protein can determine whether that protein aggregates or not. When the shell moves slowly, proteins are more likely to aggregate, and when the shell moves quickly, proteins are less likely to aggregate. The rate of movement of the shell is altered in the presence of certain ions, such as salt molecules, which are commonly used in the buffer solutions used to test new drug candidates.
The significance of the water shell, known as the hydration or solvation shell, in the folding and function of proteins has been strongly disputed in the past. This is the first time the solvation shell has been shown to play a key role in protein misfolding and aggregation, which could have profound implications in the search for treatments. The results are reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie International.
When developing potential treatments for protein misfolding diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, researchers have been studying compounds which can prevent the aggregation of key proteins: alpha-synuclein for Parkinson’s disease or amyloid-beta for Alzheimer’s disease. To date however, there are no effective treatments for either condition, which affect millions worldwide.
“It’s the amino acids that determine the final structure of a protein, but when it comes to aggregation, the role of the solvation shell, which sits on the outside of a protein, has been overlooked until now,” said Professor Gabriele Kaminski Schierle from Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, who led the research. “We wanted to know whether this water shell plays a role in protein behaviour — it’s been a question in the field for a while, but no one has been able to prove it.”
The solvation shell slides around on the surface of the protein, acting like a lubricant. “We wondered whether, if the movement of water molecules was slower in the solvation shell of a protein, it could slow the movement of the protein itself,” said Dr Amberley Stephens, the paper’s first author.

Scientists from Oxford University and the University of Birmingham have made the first bone marrow ‘organoids’ that capture the key features of human bone marrow. This technology, which is the subject of a patent application filed by University of Birmingham Enterprise, will allow for the screening of multiple anti-cancer drugs at the same time, as well as testing personalised treatments for individual cancer patients.
A study, published in the journal Cancer Discovery, describes the new method, which results in an organoid that faithfully models the cellular, molecular and architectural features of myelopoietic (blood cell producing) bone marrow.
The research also showed that the organoids provide a micro-environment that can accept and support the survival of cells from patients with blood malignancies, including multiple myeloma cells, which are notoriously difficult to maintain outside the human body.
Dr Abdullah Khan, a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow at the University of Birmingham’s Institute of Cardiovascular Sciences and first author of the study, said “Remarkably, we found that the cells in their bone marrow organoids resemble real bone marrow cells not just in terms of their activity and function, but also in their architectural relationships — the cell types ‘self-organize’ and arrange themselves within the organoids just like they do in human bone marrow in the body.”
This life-like architecture enabled the team to study how the cells in the bone marrow interact to support normal blood cell production, and how this is disturbed in bone marrow fibrosis (myelofibrosis), where scar tissue builds up in the bone marrow, causing bone marrow failure. Bone marrow fibrosis can develop in patients with certain types of blood cancers and remains incurable.
Senior study author Professor Bethan Psaila, a haematology medical doctor as well as a research Group Leader at the Radcliffe Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, said “To properly understand how and why blood cancers develop, we need to use experimental systems that closely resemble how real human bone marrow works, which we haven’t really had before. It’s really exciting to now have this terrific system, as finally, we are able to study cancer directly using cells from our patients, rather than relying on animal models or other simpler systems that do not properly show us how the cancer is developing in the bone marrow in actual patients.”
Dr Khan also added, “This is a huge step forward, enabling insights into the growth patterns of cancer cells and potentially a more personalised approach to treatment. We now have a platform that we can use to test drugs on a ‘personalised medicine’ basis.
“Having developed and validated the model is the first crucial step, and in our ongoing collaborative work we will be working with others to better understand how the bone marrow works in healthy people, and what goes wrong when they have blood diseases.”
Dr Psaila added “We hope that this new technique will help accelerate the discovery and testing of new blood cancer treatments, getting improved drugs for our patients to clinical trials faster.”
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Materials provided by University of Birmingham. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.