Scientists from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have found a sexual dimorphism of depression based on the different expression of a molecule that could be developed as a therapeutic strategy. “There is a big sex difference in depression. Women are much more likely to have depression than men. They tend to have different subsets of symptoms. They tend to respond better to different antidepressants, and the depression tends to be more severe,” Orna Issler, the first author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told BioWorld. Their project, directed by Eric Nestler, a professor of neuroscience and director of the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, had the aim to understand the biology of these sex differences of depression and to find therapeutic targets for it.

Does cancer cause autoimmune disease or is it the other way around? In looking at the question of which comes first, the chicken or the egg, researchers at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia found that a genetic mutation that alters immune cells in leukemia is behind certain autoimmune disorders.

Stimulating the brain via implanted electrodes is used to treat both movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, and some psychiatric conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder. But researchers are also working on ways to make such implanted electrodes listen instead of talk – and translate neuronal signals for people that have lost the ability speak, or the ability to move.

Carrying the apolipoprotein E4 allele (APOE4), and not the APOE3 variant, is the strongest risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD). But the underlying mechanism has remained elusive. Now, researchers at MIT and Mount Sinai have found that in brains carrying the APOE4 allele, lipid and cholesterol processes were dysregulated in oligodendrocytes and that this effect reduced myelination.

Neurons are specialized cells with a high metabolic demand to fulfill their function, survive or keep a healthy half-life. In this sense, the anabolism and catabolism of proteins and lipids could be associated to different neurodegenerative diseases. At the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, scientists reported the latest discoveries on neuron metabolic needs at a session on 'Powering Thoughts: The Regulation of Neuronal Energy Metabolism and Mitochondria.'

Stimulating the brain via implanted electrodes is used to treat both movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, and some psychiatric conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder. But researchers are also working on ways to make such implanted electrodes listen instead of talk – and translate neuronal signals for people that have lost the ability speak, or the ability to move. At the Neurophysiology: Decoding and Neural Processing II session of the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego, researchers from the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering (Switzerland) presented a device implanted in the brain that allowed restoration of movement and speech.

X-chromosome inactivation (XCI) is not unique to female cells and may confer some survival advantage to male cancer cells, according to scientists at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard. The noncoding RNA XIST (acronym for X-inactive specific transcript), which in female mammals (of genotype XX) inactivates one of the X chromosomes, preventing the overexpression of the genes of the repeated chromosome from early stages of embryonic development, also acts somatically in some male cancers, compensating for the loss of the entire chromosome.

“We found that a small percentage of male cancers are expressing XIST, which normally is expressed in female cancers. And the percentage of male cancers that express XIST is variable depending on the cancer type,” Srinivas Viswanathan, researcher in the Department of Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard and assistant professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, told BioWorld.