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3 weeks ago | 
nature.com | Heather Wood
The Society for Equity Neuroscience (SEQUINS) was founded in 2024 to identify and address global inequities in brain health. Ahead of the inaugural SEQUINS conference in May 2025, we asked Founding President Bruce Ovbiagele about his expectations and aspirations for the conference and for the future of SEQUINS.
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2 months ago | 
nature.com | Heather Wood
As recently reported in Neuro-Oncology, a team led by John Liu at the University of California, San Francisco Brain Tumor Center has developed a CRISPR–Cas9-based epigenetic editing approach that sensitizes glioblastoma cells to standard chemotherapy drugs. This technology could improve the treatment of tumours that have developed resistance to these drugs.
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Mar 10, 2025 | 
nature.com | Heather Wood
An article recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine by Richard Finkel and colleagues reports the successful prenatal treatment of a child with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) type 1 — a severe motor neuron disease caused by loss of function of the survival motor neuron 1 (SMN1) gene.
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Mar 10, 2025 | 
nature.com | Heather Wood
A case–control study published in JAMA Psychiatry has found that lesions in a specific hippocampal circuit cause psychosis. This circuit could represent a novel therapeutic target for conditions such as schizophrenia. From a series of previously published cases, Andrew Pine and colleagues identified 153 patients with brain lesions that were considered to have caused psychosis. These individuals were compared with 1,156 control patients with non-psychosis-associated lesions.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
onlinelibrary.wiley.com | Jessica Yakeley |Felicitas Rost |Heather Wood |Safia Abid
DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author (JY) upon reasonable request.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
nature.com | Heather Wood
The presence of Lewy body (LB) pathology in addition to Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology is associated with acceleration of AD-related disease progression, according to new research. In a study involving 795 participants with mild cognitive impairment or dementia, individuals with AD+LB+ biomarker profiles in their cerebrospinal fluid showed more rapid cognitive decline and greater cortical hypometabolism than those with AD+LB–, AD–LB+ or AD–LB– profiles.
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Oct 14, 2024 | 
nature.com | Heather Wood
Two new studies have produced evidence of a prodromal phase that precedes the clinical onset of neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD). In the first study, Rotstein et al. reported an increase in health-care use by patients in the 5 years leading up to a clinical diagnosis of NMOSD, and in the second study, Lee et al. found that one in seven people with NMOSD presented with neurological symptoms at least 30 days before their first attack.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
nature.com | Heather Wood
MILESTONES 26 September 2024 The protein tau is identified as the core component of neurofibrillary tangles — nearly 80 years after the structures were spotted in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease.
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Sep 12, 2024 | 
nature.com | Heather Wood
Hyperphosphorylated tau (p-tau) is a well-established pathological hallmark of Alzheimer disease (AD) and other tauopathies, and new research published in Multiple Sclerosis and Related Disorders adds to growing evidence of altered tau phosphorylation in multiple sclerosis (MS). The findings suggest that levels of p-tau in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) could be linked to the disease course in MS.
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Jul 8, 2024 | 
nature.com | Heather Wood
Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) infection in adulthood is a well-established risk factor for multiple sclerosis (MS), and new research indicates that human herpesvirus 6A (HHV-6A) further increases the risk of developing the disease. Grut et al. tested serum samples from 670 presymptomatic individuals who subsequently developed MS and 670 matched control individuals.
