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 »

(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 »

The 2011 Sharp­Brains Vir­tual Sum­mit (March 30th — April 1st) gath­ered more than 260 research and indus­try lead­ers from 16 coun­tries for 3 days to dis­cuss the chang­ing land­scape of Brain Health and Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness. It was a great suc­cess! Find the key lessons and take-home points from the Sum­mit in these 2 arti­cles by Drs. Jamie Wil­son and Luc Beau­doin, respec­tively: 10 Emerg­ing Themes:  Why Brain Health Sta­tus Quo is Not an Option and 7 Key Lessons from the Sharp­Brains Sum­mit.

Con­sider this: “Col­lab­o­ra­tion is emerg­ing in ways that were unthink­able only a few years ago. Researchers are open­ing up their data and method­olo­gies to gain insights from one another. Com­mer­cial orga­ni­za­tions are part­ner­ing via dig­i­tal chan­nels, con­tent syn­di­ca­tion and other areas of best prac­tice. Social entre­pre­neurs and local prac­ti­tion­ers are shar­ing  moti­va­tional tips and edu­ca­tional resources in their efforts to build pro­grams from the bot­tom up.  Open inno­va­tion is dri­ving a bet­ter mar­ket­place for con­sumers. All these col­lab­o­ra­tive efforts are the seeds of suc­cess­ful inno­va­tion, and despite still being in the foothills, it would seem bet­ter to go hand in hand, than tak­ing a lonely road.”

We hope the arti­cles of this free newslet­ter will help you think about the future and your own role in shap­ing it as a pro­fes­sional and/ or a life­long learner.

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Brain and Neu­ro­plas­ticity

Med­i­ta­tion and the Brain: This arti­cle by Greater Good Mag­a­zine dis­cusses how med­i­tat­ing can increase the den­sity of gray mat­ter in brain regions asso­ci­ated with mem­ory, stress, and empathy. 

The Ben­e­fits of a One-Time Cog­ni­tive Train­ing Pro­gram: They last but wane over time as shown in the 3-month follow-up results of the IMPACT study.

Can Direct Brain Stim­u­la­tion Boost Per­for­mance? The answer seems to be yes, accord­ing to three stud­ies using dif­fer­ent types of electrical/magnetic brain stimulation.

How the Brain of a Blind Per­son Rewires Itself: The brain areas devoted to vision in peo­ple with eye sight turn out to be respond­ing to speech in blind people.

How are Young Brains Affected by Stress? An inter­est­ing arti­cle from the Dana Foun­da­tion on the con­se­quences of early life stress.

Can weight loss boost mem­ory? The mem­ory of obese patients under­go­ing gastric-bypass surgery is shown to improve 12 weeks after surgery.

The Inner Savant In All of Us: Scott Kauf­man inter­views Dr. Tre­f­fert, expect on savan­tism and autism, tech­ni­cal con­sul­tant to the award-winning movie Rain Man, to dis­cuss the hid­den brain poten­tials that may lie dor­mant in all of us.

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Assess­ments and Remediation

Dri­ving Safely after a Stroke: Scores for 3 sim­ple cog­ni­tive tests were found to pre­dict the actual dri­ving eval­u­a­tion out­come of many peo­ple after a stroke.

Schiz­o­phre­nia Research is Lead­ing the Way: An inter­est­ing review of the dif­fer­ent cog­ni­tive reme­di­a­tion tech­niques used with peo­ple suf­fer­ing from schizophrenia.

Vir­tual Real­ity Games for Stroke Patients: Promis­ing results show that vir­tual real­ity and other video games involv­ing motion can enhance motor improve­ment after a stroke.

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Books

Children’s Self Con­trol and Cre­ativ­ity: Two Seeds of Intel­li­gence: An excerpt from the book Brain Rules for Baby, by John Med­ina, that pro­vides a good sum­mary of the cog­ni­tive sci­ence find­ings shed­ding light on how a baby’s brain grows from 0 to 5.

Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science, Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine: This book takes an in depth and hard look at the cur­rent sta­tus and future direc­tion of treat­ment pre­dic­tive mark­ers in Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine for the brain.

The Longevity Project: UC-Riverside researchers Howard Fried­man and Leslie Mar­tin draw key lessons from an eight-decade-long Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity Ter­man study of 1,500 people.

Exploit­ing Tech­nol­ogy and Col­lab­o­ra­tion to Enable Qual­ity Aging. In this essay, extracted from the book Longevity Rules, Joseph Cough­lin explores the role that tech­nol­ogy can play in aging well.

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Brain Teaser

Brain Games to Test Your Mem­ory: Dis­cover how well you can remem­ber ran­dom words and names.

We hope you enjoyed this edi­tion of the Sharp­Brains eNewslet­ter. Please do feel free to share this with friends and col­leagues. The more, the merrier!

An impres­sive recent ref­er­ence book on the future of brain care is Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science and Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine, edited by Evian Gor­don and Stephen H. Koslow (Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press; $89.95).

Book descrip­tion: This book takes an in depth and hard look at the cur­rent sta­tus and future direc­tion of treat­ment pre­dic­tive mark­ers in Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine for the brain from the per­spec­tives of the researchers on the cut­ting edge and those involved in health­care imple­men­ta­tion. The con­tents pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive text suit­able as both a pithy intro­duc­tion to and a clear sum­mary of the “sci­ence to solu­tions” con­tin­uum in this devel­op­ing field of Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine and Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science. The sci­ence includes both mea­sures of genes using whole genome approaches and SNIPS as well as BRAIN­mark­ers of direct brain func­tion such as brain imag­ing, bio­phys­i­cal changes and objec­tive cog­ni­tive and behav­ioral mea­sure­ments. More infor­ma­tion below.

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36-Hour Offer

Dr. Evian Gor­don will speak at the upcom­ing 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit: Retool­ing Brain Health for the 21st Cen­tury (March 30th — April 1st) and his firm, Brain Resource, is among Sum­mit Spon­sors. Thanks to his sup­port, we are pleased to announce the fol­low­ing offer: TEN pro­fes­sion­als who reg­is­ter to attend the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit over the next 36 hours, from now until Fri­day March 4th, 7pm US Pacific Time, will each receive a com­pli­men­tary hard­copy of the book Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science and Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine. If more than ten peo­ple reg­is­ter by then, we will select ten names at random.

We are also pleased to announce the addi­tion of 12 new Speak­ers and Mod­er­a­tors to the 2011 Sharp­Brains Sum­mit — the result­ing agenda is turn­ing out to be noth­ing short of spec­tac­u­lar (in our, yes, a bit biased judgment):

• Alexan­dra More­house, CMO, AAA North California
• Dr. Evian Gor­don, CEO, Brain Resource
• Kath­leen Herath, Asst Vice Pres­i­dent, Nation­wide Insurance
• Dr. David Tal, Direc­tor, A.G.E. Mat­ters Clinic
• Paula Psyl­lakis, Senior Pol­icy Advi­sor, Ontario Min­istry of Research and Innovation
• Veronika Litin­ski, Advi­sor, MaRS Life Sci­ences and Health Care
• Dr. Joshua Stein­er­man, Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor, Albert Ein­stein Col­lege of Medicine
• Dr. Jef­frey Kaye, Direc­tor, NIA — ORCATECH
• Dr. John Rep­pas, Pol­icy Direc­tor, Neu­rotech­nol­ogy Indus­try Organization
• Dr. Justin Mar­ley, Chair Men­tal Health Infor­mat­ics Group, UK Royal Col­lege of Psychiatrists
• Dr. David Darby, Chief Med­ical Offi­cer, Cogstate
• Dr. John Hart, Med­ical Sci­ence Direc­tor, Cen­ter for Brain Health at UT-Dallas

-> Learn More and Reg­is­ter to Par­tic­i­pate in the Sum­mit Here, and get a chance at get­ting a com­pli­men­tary copy of the book Inte­gra­tive Neu­ro­science and Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine!

Read the rest of this entry »