Unintended consequences for patients of future personalized pharmacoprinting.

Manufacturing pharmaceuticals by the use of 3D printing is a promising way to achieve more personalized drug treatment. To effectively use this technology, patients need to continuously measure their health, and new decisions have to be taken, for example, regarding the number of daily drugs including how many active pharmaceutical substances these should contain along with decisions around size, shape and color. Positive as well as negative effects of pharmacoprinted medicine on patients are likely to occur.

Social aspects in additive manufacturing of pharmaceutical products.

Additive manufacturing (AM) techniques, such as drug printing, represent a new engineering approach that can implement the concept of personalized medicine via on-demand manufacturing of dosage forms with individually adjusted doses. Implementation of AM principles, such as pharmacoprinting, will challenge the entire drug distribution chain and affect the society at different levels. Areas covered: This work summarizes the concept of personalized medicine and gives an overview of possibilities for monitoring patients' health.

General sale of non-prescription medicinal products: Comparing legislation in two European countries.

Background: The number of non-prescription medicines (NPMs) available for self-medication is increasing within the European Union (EU). This can enhance the autonomy of individuals but is also connected with risks. Under an existing EU Directive, Sweden has only recently deregulated and made NPMs available in non-pharmacy outlets; The United Kingdom (UK) is a more established NPM market; both are guided by the same EU directives.

Longer leukocyte telomere length is associated with smaller hippocampal volume among non-demented APOE ε3/ε3 subjects.

Telomere length shortens with cellular division, and leukocyte telomere length is used as a marker for systemic telomere length. The hippocampus hosts adult neurogenesis and is an important structure for episodic memory, and carriers of the apolipoprotein E ε4 allele exhibit higher hippocampal atrophy rates and differing telomere dynamics compared with non-carriers. The authors investigated whether leukocyte telomere length was associated with hippocampal volume in 57 cognitively intact subjects (29 ε3/ε3 carriers; 28 ε4 carriers) aged 49-79 yr.

Longitudinal structure-function correlates in elderly reveal MTL dysfunction with cognitive decline.

By integrating behavioral measures and imaging data, previous investigations have explored the relationship between biological markers of aging and cognitive functions. Evidence from functional and structural neuroimaging has revealed that hippocampal volume and activation patterns in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) may predict cognitive performance in old age. Most past demonstrations of age-related differences in brain structure-function were based on cross-sectional comparisons.

Longitudinal evidence for diminished frontal cortex function in aging.

Cross-sectional estimates of age-related changes in brain structure and function were compared with 6-y longitudinal estimates. The results indicated increased sensitivity of the longitudinal approach as well as qualitative differences. Critically, the cross-sectional analyses were suggestive of age-related frontal overrecruitment, whereas the longitudinal analyses revealed frontal underrecruitment with advancing age.

Personality traits predict response to novel and familiar stimuli in the hippocampal region.

Current evidence from genetic, neurochemical, and clinical research supports the notion that a combination of high novelty seeking and low harm avoidance traits (NS-ha) is reliably dissociable from the opposite personality profile (i.e., low novelty seeking and high harm avoidance, ns-HA).

Parietal cortex activation predicts memory decline in apolipoprotein E-epsilon4 carriers.

Apolipoprotein E-epsilon4 is the main known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. Functional abnormalities in the parietal cortex have been reported for Alzheimer's disease patients and also for those at risk. Hence, a critical question is whether measurements of parietal cortex integrity may predict negative outcome among at-risk persons.

Reduced functional brain activity response in cognitively intact apolipoprotein E epsilon4 carriers.

The apolipoprotein E epsilon4 (APOE epsilon4) is the main known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease. Genetic assessments in combination with other diagnostic tools, such as neuroimaging, have the potential to facilitate early diagnosis. In this large-scale functional MRI (fMRI) study, we have contrasted 30 APOE epsilon4 carriers (age range: 49-74 years; 19 females), of which 10 were homozygous for the epsilon4 allele, and 30 non-carriers with regard to brain activity during a semantic categorization task.

Reduced hippocampal volume in non-demented carriers of the apolipoprotein E epsilon4: relation to chronological age and recognition memory.

Apolipoprotein E epsilon4 (APOE epsilon4) is the main known genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Some previous studies have reported structural brain changes as well as cognitive deficits in non-demented APOE epsilon4 carriers, but the pattern of results is inconsistent and studies with larger sample sizes have been called for. Here we compared hippocampal volume and recognition-memory performance between AD-symptom-free carriers (N=30) and non-carriers (N=30) of the APOE epsilon4 (age range: 49-79 years).

Structure-function correlates of cognitive decline in aging.

To explore neural correlates of cognitive decline in aging, we used longitudinal behavioral data to identify two groups of older adults (n = 40) that differed with regard to whether their performance on tests of episodic memory remained stable or declined over a decade. Analysis of structural and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) revealed a heterogeneous set of differences associated with cognitive decline. Manual tracing of hippocampal volume showed significant reduction in those older adults with a declining memory performance as did DTI-measured fractional anisotropy in the anterior corpus callosum.