Pre­dict­ing How Patients Respond to Ther­apy (press release):

“A new study led by MIT neu­ro­sci­en­tists has found that brain scans of patients with social anx­i­ety dis­or­der can help pre­dict whether they will ben­e­fit from cog­ni­tive behav­ioral therapy…Social anx­i­ety is usu­ally treated with either cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­apy or med­ica­tions. How­ever, Read the rest of this entry »

Time for Sharp­Brains’ Feb­ru­ary 2012 eNewslet­ter, fea­tur­ing in this occa­sion mul­ti­ple and com­ple­men­tary per­spec­tives on how to har­ness neu­ro­plas­tic­ity: with enthu­si­asm, BOTH phys­i­cal AND cog­ni­tive exer­cise, and (once tools become bet­ter stan­dard­ized and widely avail­able) brain-based per­son­al­ized medicine.

Fea­tured Per­spec­tives:

• To Har­ness Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity, Start with Enthu­si­asm, by Dr. Helena Popovic
• Q&A with Dr. Yaakov Stern on Brain Reserve, Exer­cise, Cog­ni­tive Train­ing, Angry Birds, YMCA and more
• 3-part series writ­ten by Dr. Evian Gor­don to sum­ma­rize and build on the Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine World Con­gress 2012:
1. The State of Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine: The Role of Biomarkers
2. Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine in Psy­chi­a­try: from DSM to brain-based RDoC, iSPOT-D and biomarkers
3. Work­ing with Health­care Stake­hold­ers towards Brain-Based Per­son­al­ized Medicine

• To Be (Your Con­nec­tome), or Not to Be (Your Genome), by Dr. Sebas­t­ian Seung
• Enhance Metacog­ni­tion and Problem-Solving by Talk­ing Out Loud to Your­self, by Dr. Judith Tingley
• Final Meet­ing Report @ 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit: Retool­ing Brain Health for the 21st Cen­tury, by Alvaro Fer­nan­dez, Dr. Luc Beau­doin, Muki Hansteen-Izora, Mar­garet Mor­ris, Dr. Joshua Stein­er­man, Dr. Peter Whitehouse.
• (Want to con­tribute arti­cles like these? Learn details here)

What’s New and Mean­ing­ful:

• Learn­ing to Cope with Google/ Infor­ma­tion Overload
• An Emerg­ing Era of Big Data (in Men­tal Health too)
• When and Why Should Dri­vers with Cog­ni­tive Impair­ment Stop Driving
• Diag­nos­ing early Alzheimer’s and Mild Cog­ni­tive Impairment
• Global Pop­u­la­tion Age­ing: Peril or Promise? (New WEF eBook)
• Luria Con­gress on Mod­ern Neuropsychology

Sharp­Brains News:

• Syl­labus for online course, How to Be Your Own Brain Fit­ness Coach (starts March 7th)
• Save The Date (June 7-8th, 2012), 28 Con­firmed Speak­ers: 2012 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit — Opti­miz­ing Health through Neu­ro­plas­tic­ity & Dig­i­tal Innovation

Finally, let us men­tion that Brain Aware­ness Week is approach­ing (March 12-18th, 2012), and that you can now add com­ments to Sharp­Brains arti­cles via Face­book (see below). Look­ing for­ward to a great month of March!

(Editor’s Note: this is Part 3 of the new 3-part series writ­ten by Dr. Evian Gor­don draw­ing from his par­tic­i­pa­tion at the Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine World Con­gress on Jan­u­ary, 23, 2012 at Stan­ford University.)

Work­ing with Health Care Indus­try Stake­hold­ers: Clin­i­cians, Pharma/Biotech, Pay­ers, PBMs, Lawyers, Medicare, FDA

Clin­i­cians seek clear val­i­dated “rules of thumb” that can be eas­ily imple­mented and fit into their work­flow and reim­burse­ment regime. Many are explor­ing “Clin­i­cal Deci­sion Sup­port (CDS)” tools on the web and solu­tions linked to “Elec­tronic Health Records” (EHR’s). CDC and EHR’s are seed­ing the ground for clin­i­cians to adopt robust Bio­mark­ers that are shown to be unam­bigu­ously clin­i­cally relevant.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: this is Part 2 of the new 3-part series writ­ten by Dr. Evian Gor­don draw­ing from his par­tic­i­pa­tion at the Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine World Con­gress on Jan­u­ary, 23, 2012 at Stan­ford University.)

Most Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine research in Psy­chi­a­try using mol­e­c­u­lar mea­sures alone have failed to repli­cate. Whilst dis­ap­point­ing, this is not sur­pris­ing, since 80% of human 25,000 genes have some effect on the brain.

There are there­fore grow­ing efforts expand­ing Genomic Bio­mark­ers in Psy­chi­a­try to Neu­roimag­ing (all Brain-based bio­log­i­cal and cog­ni­tive mea­sures). Some approaches tar­get Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: this is Part 1 of the new 3-part series writ­ten by Dr. Evian Gor­don draw­ing from his par­tic­i­pa­tion at the Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine World Con­gress on Jan­u­ary, 23, 2012 at Stan­ford University.)

On aver­age, the med­ica­tions pre­scribed for brain-related con­di­tions ben­e­fit approx­i­mately 50% of patients. But which 50%?

Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine seeks to move away from the cur­rent “1 size fits all, trial and error” approach that has been nec­es­sary because of a lack of evi­dence. Instead, it focuses on Read the rest of this entry »

“On aver­age, the med­ica­tions pre­scribed for brain-related con­di­tions ben­e­fit approx­i­mately 50% of patients.  But which 50%?.”

“We need unam­bigu­ous bio­mark­ers that are clin­i­cally rel­e­vant and scal­able at rea­son­able cost. They already exist in Can­cer.   But they do not yet exist in the Brain.” What may change that? Read the rest of this entry »

Time for the Sep­tem­ber edi­tion of the monthly Sharp­Brains eNewslet­ter, start­ing with a good brief New Sci­en­tist arti­cle, Maker of cog­ni­tive train­ing game seeks FDA approval: Imag­ine walk­ing away from a doctor’s office with a pre­scrip­tion to play a video game. Brain Plas­tic­ity, the devel­oper of a cog­ni­tive train­ing game, has begun talks with the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion (FDA) to mar­ket the game as a ther­a­peu­tic drug.

A Course Cor­rec­tion for Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­ogy: A Review of Mar­tin Seligman’s Lat­est Book: As pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion in 1998, Mar­tin Selig­man chal­lenged the psy­cho­log­i­cal com­mu­nity to rad­i­cally change its approach. For too long, he charged, psy­chol­ogy had been pre­oc­cu­pied solely with reliev­ing symp­toms of men­tal ill­ness; instead, he believed it should explore how to thrive in life, not just sur­vive it.

Study: Cog­ni­tive Mark­ers or Bio­mark­ers to man­age Cog­ni­tive Health across the Lifes­pan? Mea­sur­ing people’s changes in cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties is a bet­ter pre­dic­tor of Alzheimer’s dis­ease than changes in bio­mark­ers, researchers from the Ben­ito Menni Com­plex Assis­ten­cial en Salut Men­tal, Barcelona, Spain, reported in Archives of Gen­eral Psy­chi­a­try, a JAMA journal.

Brain Train­ing for Babies: Hope, Hype, Both? We should expect that the brain of a baby could be eas­ily trained. This is what Wass and his col­leagues recently demon­strated in a new study with 11-month-old babies.

Brain Devel­op­ment Through Bilin­gual Edu­ca­tion and Activ­i­ties Requir­ing Self-Control: Kids who learn two lan­guages young are bet­ter able to learn abstract rules and to reverse rules that they’ve already learned.

Who Says This is The Class­room of the Future? What if we ques­tioned the very premise behind nam­ing some class­rooms the “class­rooms of the future” sim­ply because they have been adding tech­nol­ogy in lit­er­ally mind­less ways?

AARP’s Best Brain Fit­ness Books: We are hon­ored to announce that AARP has included our very own book The Sharp­Brains Guide to Brain Fit­ness (182 pages; $14.95) in its new List of Best Books on Brain Fitness.

Inter­ac­tive Human Brain in 3D: Here’s a cool inter­ac­tive Human Brain in 3D you can play with.

Have a great month of Octo­ber and, as always, feel free to share this enewslet­ter with friends and colleagues.

PS: Did you miss the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit: Retool­ing Brain Health for the 21st Cen­tury (Mar 30 — Apr 1, 2011)? Here you can learn more about how to access the recordings.