Use of powerful medications linked to elevated risk of serious adverse outcomes including heart failure

Doctors are being urged to reduce prescribing of antipsychotic drugs to dementia patients after the largest study of its kind found they were linked to more harmful side-effects than previously thought.

The powerful medications are widely prescribed for behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia such as apathy, depression, aggression, anxiety, irritability, delirium and psychosis. Tens of thousands of dementia patients in England are prescribed them every year.

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More consensual touch helps ease or buffer against mental and physical complaints, meta-analysis shows

Whether it is a hug from a friend or the caress of a weighted blanket, the sensation of touch appears to bring benefits for the body and mind, researchers say.

The sense of touch is the first to develop in babies and is crucial in allowing us to experience the environment around us as well as communicate. Indeed, the loss of touch from others during the Covid pandemic hit many hard.

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More than 50 clinics will offer tests to about 5,000 people who are worried about their memory in five-year trial

Thousands of people across the UK who are worried about their memory will receive blood tests for dementia in two trials that doctors hope will help to revolutionise the low diagnosis rate.

Teams from the University of Oxford and University College London will lead the trials to research the use of cheap and simple tests to detect proteins for people with early stages of dementia or problems with cognition, with the hope of speeding up diagnosis and reaching more people.

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New research into the dying brain suggests the line between life and death may be less distinct than previously thought

Patient One was 24 years old and pregnant with her third child when she was taken off life support. It was 2014. A couple of years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a disorder that caused an irregular heartbeat, and during her two previous pregnancies she had suffered seizures and faintings. Four weeks into her third pregnancy, she collapsed on the floor of her home. Her mother, who was with her, called 911. By the time an ambulance arrived, Patient One had been unconscious for more than 10 minutes. Paramedics found that her heart had stopped.

After being driven to a hospital where she couldn’t be treated, Patient One was taken to the emergency department at the University of Michigan. There, medical staff had to shock her chest three times with a defibrillator before they could restart her heart. She was placed on an external ventilator and pacemaker, and transferred to the neurointensive care unit, where doctors monitored her brain activity. She was unresponsive to external stimuli, and had a massive swelling in her brain. After she lay in a deep coma for three days, her family decided it was best to take her off life support. It was at that point – after her oxygen was turned off and nurses pulled the breathing tube from her throat – that Patient One became one of the most intriguing scientific subjects in recent history.

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Elite athletes and professional gamers may have higher than average visual temporal resolution, scientists say

If you have wondered why your partner always beats you at tennis or one child always crushes the other at Fortnite, it seems there is more to it than pure physical ability.

Some people are effectively able to see more “images per second” than others, research suggests, meaning they’re innately better at spotting or tracking fast-moving objects such as tennis balls.

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App-based cognitive tests found to be proficient at detecting frontotemporal dementia in those most at risk

A smartphone app could help detect a leading cause of early-onset dementia in people who are at high risk of developing it, data suggests.

Scientists have demonstrated that cognitive tests done via a smartphone app are at least as sensitive at detecting early signs of frontotemporal dementia in people with a genetic predisposition to the condition as medical evaluations performed in clinics.

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Are growing rates of anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, Alzheimer’s and motor neurone disease related to rising temperatures and other extreme environmental changes?

In late October 2012, a category 3 hurricane howled into New York City with a force that would etch its name into the annals of history . Superstorm Sandy transformed the city, inflicting more than $60bn in damage, killing dozens, and forcing 6,500 patients to be evacuated from hospitals and nursing homes. Yet in the case of one cognitive neuroscientist, the storm presented, darkly, an opportunity.

Yoko Nomura had found herself at the centre of a natural experiment. Prior to the hurricane’s unexpected visit, Nomura – who teaches in the psychology department at Queens College, CUNY, as well as in the psychiatry department of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai – had meticulously assembled a research cohort of hundreds of expectant New York mothers. Her investigation, the Stress in Pregnancy study , had aimed since 2009 to explore the potential imprint of prenatal stress on the unborn. Drawing on the evolving field of epigenetics, Nomura had sought to understand the ways in which environmental stressors could spur changes in gene expression, the likes of which were already known to influence the risk of specific childhood neurobehavioural outcomes such as autism, schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

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A failing memory can be frustrating, but it may be a sign your brain is working exactly as it should

Every day, people across the planet ask themselves this question, myself included. When we are desperately searching for our glasses, wallet or keys, we might wish to have a photo­graphic memory, but the truth is we are designed to forget.

In fact, the majority of what we experience in a given day is likely to be forgotten in less than 24 hours. And that is a good thing. Think of all the passing encounters with people you will never see again, the times you spend waiting in a queue at the supermarket, and those awkward times when you find yourself looking at the floor while stuck in a crowded elevator. If our brains hoarded away every moment of every experience, we would never be able to find the information we need amid an ever-increasing pile of detritus.

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