Our new review in Molecular Psychiatry: www.nature.com/articles/s41... #Depression affects a third of people with #Alzheimer's or #Parkinson's disease, yet current #antidepressants have little benefit. We review disease-specific mechanisms and emerging treatments.

Depression in neurodegenerative disease: neurobiological mechanisms and emerging treatments - Molecular Psychiatry

Molecular Psychiatry - Depression in neurodegenerative disease: neurobiological mechanisms and emerging treatments

nature.com

This is the kind of almost magic-like payoff we get from decades of basic and applied research by thousands of scientists across the globe. This is why we do it.

WAFB@wafb.com · last mo.

New Orleans man becomes first in Louisiana functionally cured of sickle cell disease: https://www.wafb.com/2026/06/23/new-orleans-man-becomes-first-louisiana-functionally-cured-sickle-cell-disease/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=bluesky_

Closing in two days!

Prof Rick Adams@drrickadams.bsky.social · 3mo ago

📢PhD job alert! A exciting PhD project that involves using MEG and biophysical modelling to try to predict effects of a glutamatergic treatment for psychosis... plus you can develop your own side project. Join our great team! www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Super excited by this manuscript led by the amazing @brissend.bsky.social By combining fMRI, TMS, and modeling, we finally have causal evidence that the cerebellum is contributing to brain-wide working memory representations and recall performance! 1/n

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Cerebellar perturbation impairs human working memory and degrades spatial tuning throughout cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.14.724968v1

Real privilege to play a small part in this project (led by Jennifer Foley & Alison Cartier) and collaborate with such brilliant clinicians, artists, and patients living with young-onset #Parkinsons. Hopefully demonstrates the potential power of creative interdisciplinary collaboration.

UCL Grand Challenges@uclgrandchallenges.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🎶Graphic Scores brings together young people living with Parkinson’s to co-create visual representations of music. Watch the impact below 👇 https://bit.ly/4cNez4C @uclbrainscience.bsky.social @drharrycostello.bsky.social #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek #MentalHealth #UCLMentalHealth

Excited to share new work now published in @cp-iscience.bsky.social Using single-neuron recordings in humans, we show that dopamine neurons encode reward expectations derived from past experience––giving us a new look into how reward learning unfolds in the human brain 🧵👇

Do you think that the canonical cortical circuit is complicated? It's so much worse than that! Overlayed on top of the wired connectome, there are *18* different signal-carrying peptides in cortex! Their range is ~similar to the size of a cortical column elifesciences.org/articles/47889 1/

📄NEW PAPER📄 Dopamine underpins both effort💪 and reward learning⭐. Here, we show it also supports their interaction! w A Huynh, D Obawede, J Coxon @coxon.bsky.social, M Bellgrove, and T Chong @trevorchong.bsky.social #dopamine #learning #effort @plosbiology.org journals.plos.org/plosbiology/... 1/5

This is so, so well-articulated.

Minas Karamanis@minaskar.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Hey, I wrote a thing about AI in astrophysics ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...

I’ve spent 15 years challenging a flawed explanation for an infant’s death. Credit to The New Yorker for patient investigative journalism that corrected the record when institutions did not.

The New Yorker@newyorker.com · 6mo ago

A paper by a renowned toxicologist argued for the first case of opioid overdose by breast milk in history. But in the years that followed, researchers began to suspect that the science was bunk. newyorkermag.visitlink.me/AUASqK

Does early autonomic burden in prodromal Parkinson’s disease predict later cognitive (thinking) impairment? Martinez Nunez and colleagues describe in a new paper in Movement Disorders how early autonomic symptoms in prodromal Parkinson’s disease may be linked to later cognitive (thinking) decline.

I'm starting a thread on misunderstandings about the role of APOE in Alzheimer's disease / dementia, from the POV of epidemiology / statistical genetics. I will add to this sporadically over time... #endalz #episky #medsky

I lost my job, my kids have measles, and Trump's personal Gestapo is randomly executing American citizens. But at least now there won't be any non-binary characters on the new Paw Patrol spin-off.

Chinese whispers, genetic edition. This is a fascinating reminder that "genetic determination", at the level of organism behaviour, is not just about the genome inherited in the zygote, but about millions/billions of cells, each with a prob unique take on that foundational genome, working together.

Mark James Adams@markjamesadams.bsky.social · 8mo ago

One for the heredity scolds: construct a multi-tissue GRM where people are differentially related to themselves. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Evoke trial of @novonordisk’s #semaglutide for AD fails to slow progression: www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-react... A second large #GLP1 agonist trial in neurodegeneration with another disappointing result. Why isn’t the promise (& hype) of observational data translating to trials?

Harry Costello@drharrycostello.bsky.social · last yr.

The first phase III trial of a #GLP-1 drug (Exenatide) for a neurodegenerative disease (#Parkinson's disease) found no effect: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan... Epidemiological studies had shown large effects. Potential implications for the repurposing of GLP-1 drugs in other conditions?

This does feel like a major crossing of the Rubicon – the world's best-funded and in many ways most powerful public health agency is now actively pushing disinformation. I know there's a *lot* going on to care about at the moment, but this one really is significant, and matters well beyond the US.

Miranda Yaver@mirandayaver.bsky.social · 9mo ago

The CDC website now disseminates disinformation about vaccines, claiming erroneously that infant vaccines might cause autism, when we know conclusively that they do not. It is difficult to overstate just how dangerous this is. www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safe...

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

My first post into the bsky void, the first preprint of my PhD! A novel task to bridge learning and effort decision-making. Of course, we find that effort choice is sensitive to prior learning, but this integration of beliefs into action is affected by anhedonia. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Effort choices are sensitive to prior learning

Motivated behaviour relies on both learning and effort-based decision-making, yet these processes are often studied in isolation. We developed a novel paradigm combining probabilistic associative lear...

doi.org

Fascinating and clinically important new paper. It highlights both reassuring and concerning findings on the cardiometabolic effects of #antidepressants. Should post-initiation monitoring focus more on #metabolic changes than QTc? www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

The effects of antidepressants on cardiometabolic and other physiological parameters: a systematic review and network meta-analysis

We found strong evidence that antidepressants differ markedly in their physiological effects, particularly for cardiometabolic parameters. Treatment guidelines should be updated to reflect differences...

thelancet.com

Great review on The Genetics of Human Handedness: Microtubules and Beyond www.cell.com/trends/genet... - handedness is such an interesting phenotype!

Genetics of human handedness: microtubules and beyond

Handedness (i.e., the preference to use either the left or the right hand for fine motor tasks) is a widely investigated trait. Handedness heritability is consistently estimated to be 25%. After decad...

cell.com

Out today at Neuron, our experiments show that frontal cortical representation of economic variables is jointly determined by spatial organization and downstream connectivity of neurons, revealing a structured, multi-scale code for economic variables. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

1/ To explore or to exploit? I’m excited to share my new preprint with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social and @micahgallen.com, correlating variations in cortical microstructures with individual differences in exploration-exploitation behaviours, using a gamified task! 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

“Israeli Forces Kill 198 Palestinians in Gaza Over Three Days” It’s a genocide. Daily endless massacres, largely ignored in the West.

Israeli Forces Kill 198 Palestinians in Gaza Over Three Days - News From Antiwar.com

Israeli attacks have killed at least 198 Palestinians and wounded 786 in the Gaza Strip over 72 hours, according to death toll updates released by Gaza's Health Ministry, as Israel continues its US-ba...

news.antiwar.com

Familial confounding in the associations between maternal health and autism www.nature.com/articles/s41... - drawing causal conclusions from observational studies is not a good idea

Familial confounding in the associations between maternal health and autism - Nature Medicine

Using national registry data from Denmark, 30 maternal diagnoses linked to offspring autism were identified with most associations attributable to family-level factors rather than direct causal effects of maternal diagnoses.

nature.com

BlueSky friends, forgive me for not posting much on here. I'm standing for President of the RCPsych in the elections next March. I'm still speaking and listening to friends and colleagues about what is important, but you can learn about what I would do if successful here: www.profrobhoward.com

New paper out in @journal_ad (led by Guy Gitlin-Leigh). @profrobhoward.bsky.social We conducted the first systematic review + meta-analysis on whether monoclonal antibody therapies for #Alzheimer’s (AD) & #Parkinson’s (PD) affect risk of depression. Link: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

Excited to share this new preprint on the Predictive Modelling of Depression Treatment Response using Individual Symptoms and Latent Factors with @clairegillan.bsky.social fresh up on @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Predictive Modelling of Depression Treatment Response using Individual Symptoms and Latent Factors

Machine learning models have increasingly been used to identify predictors of treatment response in depression, and it is hoped that they may eventually help with clinical decision making. However, th...

medrxiv.org

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature

Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

nature.com