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Time of India
19-06-2025
- Health
- Time of India
New study reveals infants feel pain before they can understand it
London: A groundbreaking study from University College London (UCL) has revealed that newborns are capable of sensing pain well before they can cognitively understand or emotionally react to it. The findings, published in the journal Pain, offer new insights into how infants' brains develop the ability to process pain and have significant implications for neonatal care, especially for preterm babies. The research, led by Professor Lorenzo Fabrizi of UCL's Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, explored how different components of pain perception emerge in early life. "Pain is a complex experience with physical, emotional, and cognitive elements," Fabrizi explained, adding, "In adults, the brain regions involved in pain, known collectively as the ' pain connectome ', work together to create the full experience. In newborns, this network is still maturing, which may mean their experience of pain is vastly different from ours." The team analysed brain scans from 372 infants, many born prematurely, using data from two of the largest infant brain imaging projects: the Developing Human Connectome Project and the Human Connectome Project. All infants were scanned within their first two weeks of life to ensure that the results reflected natural brain development rather than the influence of postnatal experiences. Researchers focused on three specific brain networks related to pain processing: Sensory-discriminative: Responsible for identifying and locating pain. Affective-motivational: Governs the emotional response to pain. Cognitive-evaluative: Handles the interpretation and judgment of pain. Findings showed that the sensory-discriminative network matures first, typically between 34 and 36 weeks after conception. This means that even premature infants can detect pain stimuli, though they may struggle to pinpoint where the pain is coming from. Next, the affective-motivational network, which gives pain its unpleasant emotional quality, reaches functional maturity around 36 to 38 weeks. However, the cognitive-evaluative network, crucial for understanding the significance of pain, doesn't fully mature until after 42 weeks, meaning that full-term newborns still lack the brain development needed for complete pain comprehension. These findings are especially relevant in medical settings. A prior study from the same team in 2023 found that premature infants do not show signs of habituating to repeated medical procedures; they continue to react as though the pain is new each time. This latest study suggests that the immaturity of certain brain networks could explain that phenomenon. "Our results suggest that preterm babies may be particularly vulnerable to painful medical procedures during critical stages of brain development," said Professor Fabrizi, adding, "This highlights the need for pain management strategies that are tailored to a baby's stage of neural development." The study was funded by the UK's Medical Research Council and involved collaboration with researchers from UCLH and King's College London. These findings could help reshape clinical protocols for neonatal care, especially for the most vulnerable infants, by encouraging more precise pain management and timing of interventions.
Indian Express
19-06-2025
- Health
- Indian Express
New study reveals infants feel pain before they can understand it
A groundbreaking study from University College London (UCL) has revealed that newborns are capable of sensing pain well before they can cognitively understand or emotionally react to it. The findings, published in the journal Pain, offer new insights into how infants' brains develop the ability to process pain and have significant implications for neonatal care, especially for preterm babies. The research, led by Professor Lorenzo Fabrizi of UCL's Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, explored how different components of pain perception emerge in early life. 'Pain is a complex experience with physical, emotional, and cognitive elements,' Fabrizi explained, adding, 'In adults, the brain regions involved in pain, known collectively as the 'pain connectome', work together to create the full experience. In newborns, this network is still maturing, which may mean their experience of pain is vastly different from ours.' The team analysed brain scans from 372 infants, many born prematurely, using data from two of the largest infant brain imaging projects: the Developing Human Connectome Project and the Human Connectome Project. All infants were scanned within their first two weeks of life to ensure that the results reflected natural brain development rather than the influence of postnatal experiences. Researchers focused on three specific brain networks related to pain processing: Sensory-discriminative: Responsible for identifying and locating pain. Affective-motivational: Governs the emotional response to pain. Cognitive-evaluative: Handles the interpretation and judgment of pain. Findings showed that the sensory-discriminative network matures first, typically between 34 and 36 weeks after conception. This means that even premature infants can detect pain stimuli, though they may struggle to pinpoint where the pain is coming from. Next, the affective-motivational network, which gives pain its unpleasant emotional quality, reaches functional maturity around 36 to 38 weeks. However, the cognitive-evaluative network, crucial for understanding the significance of pain, doesn't fully mature until after 42 weeks, meaning that full-term newborns still lack the brain development needed for complete pain comprehension. These findings are especially relevant in medical settings. A prior study from the same team in 2023 found that premature infants do not show signs of habituating to repeated medical procedures; they continue to react as though the pain is new each time. This latest study suggests that the immaturity of certain brain networks could explain that phenomenon. 'Our results suggest that preterm babies may be particularly vulnerable to painful medical procedures during critical stages of brain development,' said Professor Fabrizi, adding, 'This highlights the need for pain management strategies that are tailored to a baby's stage of neural development.' The study was funded by the UK's Medical Research Council and involved collaboration with researchers from UCLH and King's College London. These findings could help reshape clinical protocols for neonatal care, especially for the most vulnerable infants, by encouraging more precise pain management and timing of interventions.
Mint
19-06-2025
- Health
- Mint
New study reveals infants feel pain before they can understand it
London [UK], June 19 (ANI): A groundbreaking study from University College London (UCL) has revealed that newborns are capable of sensing pain well before they can cognitively understand or emotionally react to it. The findings, published in the journal Pain, offer new insights into how infants' brains develop the ability to process pain and have significant implications for neonatal care, especially for preterm babies. The research, led by Professor Lorenzo Fabrizi of UCL's Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology, explored how different components of pain perception emerge in early life. "Pain is a complex experience with physical, emotional, and cognitive elements," Fabrizi explained, adding, "In adults, the brain regions involved in pain, known collectively as the 'pain connectome', work together to create the full experience. In newborns, this network is still maturing, which may mean their experience of pain is vastly different from ours." The team analysed brain scans from 372 infants, many born prematurely, using data from two of the largest infant brain imaging projects: the Developing Human Connectome Project and the Human Connectome Project. All infants were scanned within their first two weeks of life to ensure that the results reflected natural brain development rather than the influence of postnatal experiences. Researchers focused on three specific brain networks related to pain processing: Sensory-discriminative: Responsible for identifying and locating pain. Affective-motivational: Governs the emotional response to pain. Cognitive-evaluative: Handles the interpretation and judgment of pain. Findings showed that the sensory-discriminative network matures first, typically between 34 and 36 weeks after conception. This means that even premature infants can detect pain stimuli, though they may struggle to pinpoint where the pain is coming from. Next, the affective-motivational network, which gives pain its unpleasant emotional quality, reaches functional maturity around 36 to 38 weeks. However, the cognitive-evaluative network, crucial for understanding the significance of pain, doesn't fully mature until after 42 weeks, meaning that full-term newborns still lack the brain development needed for complete pain comprehension. These findings are especially relevant in medical settings. A prior study from the same team in 2023 found that premature infants do not show signs of habituating to repeated medical procedures; they continue to react as though the pain is new each time. This latest study suggests that the immaturity of certain brain networks could explain that phenomenon. "Our results suggest that preterm babies may be particularly vulnerable to painful medical procedures during critical stages of brain development," said Professor Fabrizi, adding, "This highlights the need for pain management strategies that are tailored to a baby's stage of neural development." The study was funded by the UK's Medical Research Council and involved collaboration with researchers from UCLH and King's College London. These findings could help reshape clinical protocols for neonatal care, especially for the most vulnerable infants, by encouraging more precise pain management and timing of interventions. (ANI)
Mint
09-06-2025
- Health
- Mint
Sonam made Raja wear ₹10L worth gold; sharp wounds on body: Chilling details emerge in Meghalaya honeymoon murder case
Using an algorithm they call the Krakencoder, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine are a step closer to unraveling how the brain's wiring supports the way we think and act. The study, published June 5 in Nature Methods, used imaging data from the Human Connectome Project to align neural activity with its underlying circuitry. Mapping how the brain's anatomical connections and activity patterns relate to behavior is crucial not only for understanding how the brain works generally but also for identifying biomarkers of disease, predicting outcomes in neurological disorders and designing personalized interventions. The brain consists of a complex network of interconnected neurons whose collective activity drives our behavior. The structural connectome represents the physical wiring of the brain, the map of how different regions are anatomically connected. The other piece of the puzzle is the functional connectome, which represents patterns of neuronal activity between different parts of the brain, highlighting regions that activate together during specific tasks or at rest. Surprisingly, scientists have found that regions that are "wired together" don't always "fire together." "But we're still just scratching the surface of how brain networks relate to the tasks of everyday life, like solving a math problem, having a conversation with a friend or driving a car," said senior author Amy Kuceyeski, professor of mathematics in radiology and in neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine. While many researchers are modeling the relationship between functional and structural connectomes, they come up with different maps. "Everybody uses different methods to take pictures of the brain's networks," Kuceyeski explained. For example, when using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for brain scans, different methods for processing the same raw images can generate different connectomes. Kuceyeski likens this patchwork approach to examining an elephant in a dark room, where one person is touching the trunk, somebody a leg, someone else an ear. "Our fundamental assumption is that each set of choices in the imaging and processing pipelines provides a different view of the same underlying system," said Keith Jamison '04, '06, the study's first author and a research associate in Kuceyeski's lab. To get a more comprehensive representation, Kuceyeski and her team built a tool that could take the structural and functional connectomes produced by all of these disparate approaches and collapse them together to produce a more unified interpretation. "In my head, I saw it as some sort of monster with multiple arms that could reach out and grab different brain representations and digest and congeal them into one unified connectome," Jamison said. The resulting program, an autoencoder that compresses and reconstructs more than a dozen different "flavors" of input data, thus came to be called the Krakencoder. The team trained the Krakencoder on data collected from over 700 subjects who participated in the National Institutes of Health's Human Connectome Project. As part of that study, volunteers underwent extensive structural and functional MRI scanning. The researchers found that the Krakencoder allowed them to take an individual's structural connectome and correctly predict that person's functional connectome about 20 times more accurately than previously published approaches. The Krakencoder's combined and compressed representation also predicted the individual's age, sex and their cognitive performance scores received on tests which had been administered along with their imaging scans. Such scores, Kuceyeski noted, are notoriously difficult to gauge based on brain imaging alone. Being able to map functions like cognition to specific brain networks is key to understanding how anatomy and physiology give rise to our behaviors and abilities - and how diseases and injuries can impair our performance. In the future, Kuceyeski and her colleagues plan to combine the Krakencoder with a network modification tool they call NeMo that will allow them to examine the connectomes of people whose brains have been damaged by diseases. Christie Gillies, a Ph.D. student in the Kuceyeski lab, is using this approach to map outcomes following stroke. "She's comparing the functional connectome produced by the NeMo and Krakencoder pipeline, based only on MRIs regularly collected in the clinic, to the actual functional MRI of a person. We found that our functional connectomes do a better job at predicting an individual's motor scores and language scores at follow-up," said Kuceyeski. These tools could also identify brain network connections associated with improved cognitive or motor performance in individuals. Boosting the activity of these circuits - for example, through transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate nerve cells in the brain - could strengthen those connections and hasten recovery. This research was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Ann S. Bowers Foundation, the National Institute on Aging and the National Science Foundation. Karen Hopkins is a freelance writer for Weill Cornell Medicine.
Medscape
27-05-2025
- Health
- Medscape
Vitamin D Especially Important for Women's Brain Health
LOS ANGELES — Vitamin D is important for brain health, but this might be particularly true for women but doesn't appear to have this beneficial effect in men, early research suggested. The large study showed an association between greater plasma vitamin D levels in females and better memory and larger subcortical brain structures. 'We found that vitamin D for women was correlated with better cognitive outcomes, but we need to do more research to find out what role vitamin D actually plays at a mechanistic level,' study investigator Meghan Reddy, MD, Psychiatry Resident, UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, Los Angeles, told Medscape Medical News . The findings were presented here at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) 2025 Annual Meeting. Protective Effects This latest study added to the growing body of literature of research on vitamin D and brain health. Previous studies have shown that vitamin D may influence cognition and brain function in older adults, potentially through its anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and neuroprotective effects. Research also suggested it may promote brain health by increasing neurotrophic factors and aiding in the clearance of amyloid from the brain. Recent findings published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggested that vitamin D may also affect biological aging by preserving telomeres — the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes that shorten with age. Other research has also shown telomere length may help protect against brain diseases, including a study previously reported by Medscape Medical News , which linked longer leukocyte telomere length to a lower risk for stroke, dementia, and late-life depression. Meghan Reddy, MD In the current study, Reddy and colleagues used data from the multisite Human Connectome Project to track individuals over time to understand age-related changes in brain structure, function, and connectivity. They are investigating various biomarkers that might correlate with aging, including hemoglobin, creatine, glycated hemoglobin (for blood glucose levels), high-density lipoprotein, and low-density lipoprotein, in addition to vitamin D. The idea, said Reddy, is to track cognitive health using biomarkers in addition to brain imaging and cognitive testing. The study included 1132 individuals, 57% of whom were women and 66% of whom were White. The average age was approximately 62 years, with participants ranging from 36 to 102 years old. Participants underwent neuropsychological testing to assess short-term memory and fluid intelligence — the capacity to reason and solve problems, which is closely linked to comprehension and learning. They also provided blood samples and underwent MRI scans. Researchers divided participants into two age groups: those younger than 65 years and those 65 years or older. The investigators found a significant association between vitamin D levels and memory in women ( P = .04). Sex Differences 'What's interesting is that when we looked specifically at memory, higher vitamin D levels were linked to better memory performance — but only in women, not men,' said Reddy, adding that she found this somewhat surprising. In women, investigators found a significant association between vitamin D levels and the volume of the putamen ( P = .05) and pallidum ( P = .08), with a near-significant trend for the thalamus. In contrast, studies show that in men, higher vitamin D levels were associated with smaller volumes of the thalamus, putamen, and pallidum. There were no differences in the impact of vitamin D by age group. Sex differences in the relationship between vitamin D, cognition, and brain volume warrant further investigation, Reddy said. She also noted that the study is correlational, examining memory, brain volume, and vitamin D levels at a single timepoint, and therefore it can only offer a hypothesis. Future studies will include multiple time points to explore these relationships over time. The results did not determine an ideal vitamin D plasma level to promote brain health in women. Commenting on the research for Medscape Medical News , Badr Ratnakaran, MD, a geriatric psychiatrist in Roanoke, Virginia, and chair of the APA's Council on Geriatric Psychiatry, said the finding that women may get more brain benefits from vitamin D than men is 'key' because dementia is more prevalent among women since they tend to live longer. Other research has shown vitamin D may help manage depression in older women, which makes some sense as dementia and depression 'go hand in hand,' he said. Ratnakaran recommended that women take a vitamin supplement only if they're deficient, as too much vitamin D can lead to kidney stones and other adverse side effects.
