Blarcamesine for the treatment of Early Alzheimer's Disease: Results from the ANAVEX2-73-AD-004 Phase IIB/III trial.

Background: There are no approved oral disease-modifying treatments for Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Objectives: The objective of this study was to assess efficacy and safety of blarcamesine (ANAVEX®2-73), an orally available small-molecule activator of the sigma-1 receptor (SIGMAR1) in early AD through restoration of cellular homeostasis including autophagy enhancement.

Design: ANAVEX2-73-AD-004 was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, 48-week Phase IIb/III trial.

Long-term effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection in patients with and without chemosensory disorders at disease onset: a psychophysical and magnetic resonance imaging exploratory study.

A preserved sense of smell and taste allows us to understand many environmental "messages" and results in meaningfully improvements to quality of life. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear how important these senses are for social and nutritional status and catapulted this niche chemosensory research area towards widespread interest. In the current exploratory work, we assessed two groups of post-COVID-19 patients who reported having had (Group 1) or not (Group 2) a smell/taste impairment at the disease onset.

Automatic segmentation of white matter hyperintensities: validation and comparison with state-of-the-art methods on both Multiple Sclerosis and elderly subjects.

Different types of white matter hyperintensities (WMH) can be observed through MRI in the brain and spinal cord, especially Multiple Sclerosis (MS) lesions for patients suffering from MS and age-related WMH for subjects with cognitive disorders and/or elderly people. To better diagnose and monitor the disease progression, the quantitative evaluation of WMH load has proven to be useful for clinical routine and trials. Since manual delineation for WMH segmentation is highly time-consuming and suffers from intra and inter observer variability, several methods have been proposed to automatically segment either MS lesions or age-related WMH, but none is validated on both WMH types.

Structural plasticity of the social brain: Differential change after socio-affective and cognitive mental training.

Although neuroscientific research has revealed experience-dependent brain changes across the life span in sensory, motor, and cognitive domains, plasticity relating to social capacities remains largely unknown. To investigate whether the targeted mental training of different cognitive and social skills can induce specific changes in brain morphology, we collected longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data throughout a 9-month mental training intervention from a large sample of adults between 20 and 55 years of age. By means of various daily mental exercises and weekly instructed group sessions, training protocols specifically addressed three functional domains: (i) mindfulness-based attention and interoception, (ii) socio-affective skills (compassion, dealing with difficult emotions, and prosocial motivation), and (iii) socio-cognitive skills (cognitive perspective-taking on self and others and metacognition).

Non-Local Means Inpainting of MS Lesions in Longitudinal Image Processing.

In medical imaging, multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions can lead to confounding effects in automatic morphometric processing tools such as registration, segmentation and cortical extraction, and subsequently alter individual longitudinal measurements. Multiple magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) inpainting techniques have been proposed to decrease the impact of MS lesions in medical image processing, however, most of these methods make the assumption that lesions only affect white matter. Here, we propose a method to fill lesion regions using the patch-based non-local mean (NLM) strategy.