Loneliness in Older Age

The odds of loneliness age 50 and over were 1.24 times higher for people who rarely or never had comfortable friends in childhood compared to those who more often had friends. 

Image is in the public domain

Summary: A combination of personality traits and childhood circumstances account for why some older people experience loneliness more than others. Lonely adults over 50 were 1.24 times more likely to have rarely, or never, had comfortable friendships during childhood, and 1.34 times more likely to have had poor relationships with their mothers as children.

Source: PLOS

Life circumstances during childhood—including having fewer friends and siblings, low-quality relationships with parents, bad health and growing up in a poorer household—are all correlated with a higher rate of loneliness in older age, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Sophie Guthmuller of Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria.

Loneliness has been a growing topic of interest over the last decade, as it has been shown to be linked with ill health and to increase with age. Loneliness is correlated with a higher risk of developing mental conditions, a deterioration in physical health, and is linked to mortality and higher health care utilization.

In the new study, Guthmuller used data from the large cross-national Survey on Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), which collects information from individuals across Europe aged 50 and older on health, socioeconomic status, and social and family networks. Loneliness was measured with the R-UCLA Loneliness Scale.

Guthmuller found that while ill health is the main factor correlated with loneliness in older age, explaining 43.32% of the variance in loneliness, social support in older age also accounts for 27.05% of the variance, personality traits account for 10.42% and life circumstances during childhood account for 7.50%.  READ MORE...

Reversing Aging

Summary: Transplanting fecal microbiota from young mice to older mice reversed hallmark signs of aging in the gut, brains, and eyes. Transplanting the fecal microbiota from old to young mice had the reverse effect, inducing inflammation in the brain and depleting a key protein associated with healthy vision.

Source: University of East Anglia

In the search for eternal youth, poo transplants may seem like an unlikely way to reverse the aging process.

However, scientists at the Quadram Institute and the University of East Anglia have provided evidence, from research in mice, that transplanting fecal microbiota from young into old mice can reverse hallmarks of aging in the gut, eyes, and brain.

In the reverse experiment, microbes from aged mice induced inflammation in the brain of young recipients and depleted a key protein required for normal vision.

These findings show that gut microbes play a role in the regulating some of the detrimental effects of aging and open up the possibility of gut microbe-based therapies to combat decline in later life.

Prof Simon Carding, from UEA’s Norwich Medical School and head of the Gut Microbes and Health Research Program at the Quadram Institute, said: “This ground-breaking study provides tantalizing evidence for the direct involvement of gut microbes in aging and the functional decline of brain function and vision and offers a potential solution in the form of gut microbe replacement therapy.”

It has been known for some time that the population of microbes that we carry around in our gut, collectively called the gut microbiota, is linked to health. Most diseases are associated with changes in the types and behavior of bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microbes in an individual’s gut.  READ MORE...

Got Your Head in the Clouds?

The heavy mist seems to cling to everything. Walking through the haze makes any forward motion feel like a fruitless effort.

Any of this sound familiar? It may be because you’re languishing—a feeling of stagnation or emptiness. And naming it is a first important step, Penn’s Adam Grant, a professor of Management with the Wharton School, explained in a New York Times article. Once you can identify languishing, it can help bring clarity to one’s experiences.

Furthermore, charting our collective response to a disaster such as a global pandemic allows us to recognize where we are and how we can move forward. The American Psychiatric Association has identified emotional phases of disasters to understand how communities of people react over time.

A disaster event is followed by the heroic phase, where people come together—that lasts for a short time during the honeymoon period. This is followed shortly by disillusionment when reality sets in over what is actually happening and what it will take to recover. Languishing can occur during this period of disillusionment and recovery. Over time, recovery and reconstruction occur.

“When we talk about the amount of people who are languishing, we are talking about people who are not reaching their full potential,” said Lisa Bellini, MD, MACP, senior vice dean for Academic Affairs and a professor of Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.    READ MORE...

Psychedelics Maps Conscious Awareness

Graph showing relation between type of drug, descriptive words and neurotransmitter. 

Credit: Danilo Bzdok

Psychedelics are now a rapidly growing area of neuroscience and clinical research, one that may produce much-needed new therapies for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. Yet there is still a lot to know about how these drug agents alter states of consciousness.

In the world’s largest study on psychedelics and the brain, a team of researchers from The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) and Department of Biomedical Engineering of McGill University, the Broad Institute at Harvard/MIT, SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and Mila—Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute have shown how drug-induced changes in subjective awareness are anatomically rooted in specific neurotransmitter receptor systems.

The researchers gathered 6,850 testimonials from people who took a range of 27 different psychedelic drugs. In a first-of-its-kind approach, they designed a machine learning strategy to extract commonly used words from the testimonials and link them with the neurotransmitter receptors that likely induced them.

The interdisciplinary team could then associate the subjective experiences with brain regions where the receptor combinations are most commonly found—these turned out to be the lowest and some of the deepest layers of the brain’s information processing layers.

Using thousands of gene transcription probes, the team created a 3D map of the brain receptors and the subjective experiences linked to them, across the whole brain. While psychedelic experience is known to vary widely from person to person, the large testimonial dataset allowed the team to characterize coherent states of conscious experiences with receptors and brain regions across individuals. This supports the theory that new hallucinogenic drug compounds can be designed to reliably create desired mental states.  READ MORE...

Stress Changes Brain

Did math problems make you stressed at school? That’s what happened to participants in a study of the brain’s reaction to stress.

For the first time, researchers looked at the entire duration of such a situation. They found not only changes in the communication of brain regions, but also a dynamic process: Different networks behaved differently during acute stress.

From this, the scientists were able to determine how susceptible a person is to negative mood and how much this increased their risk of mental illness.

Until now, experts knew little about the dynamic processes in the brain during acute stress. Research has usually focused on the brain areas that are active at a given time. Now, however, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry (MPI) and the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Tübingen University Hospital have observed what happens in the brain over the entire period of a stressful situation, such as while solving a tricky math problem.

“Our study shows not only where changes occur, but how different brain regions interact and how their communication changes over the course of the situation,” summarizes first author Anne Kühnel from the MPI.

The results of the study were recently published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

The participants were asked to solve math problems under time pressure while inside a magnetic resonance imaging scanner. No matter how well they did, they only received negative feedback—a stressful situation. The dynamic response of the brain’s networks differed in the study participants.

The scientists were able to relate the responses to how anxious or depressed the participants were. It is known that the more negative a person’s basic temperament is, the higher their risk of mental illness.

“The altered communication between brain regions supports the theory that mental disorders are network diseases in which the interaction of neural units is disturbed,” says MPI Director Elisabeth Binder and continues, “The new findings are important for developing more individualized diagnoses and personalized therapies.”  READ MORE...