Liquid Biopsy in Neuropsychiatric Disorders: A Step Closer to Precision Medicine.

Psychiatric disorders are among the leading causes of disease burden worldwide. Despite their significant impact, their diagnosis remains challenging due to symptom heterogeneity, psychiatric comorbidity, and the lack of objective diagnostic tests and well-defined biomarkers. Leveraging genomic, epigenomic, and fragmentomic technologies, circulating cell-free DNA (ccfDNA)-based liquid biopsies have emerged as a potential non-invasive diagnosis and disease-monitoring tool.

Autophagy regulates the release of exercise factors and their beneficial effects on spatial memory recall.

Exercise promotes learning and memory recall as well as rescues cognitive decline associated with aging. The positive effects of exercise are mediated by circulatory factors that predominantly increase Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) signaling in the hippocampus. Identifying the pathways that regulate the release of the circulatory factors by various tissues during exercise and that mediate hippocampal expression will allow us to harness the therapeutic potential of exercise.

Exercise and Dietary Factors Mediate Neural Plasticity Through Modulation of BDNF Signaling.

The term "neural plasticity" was first used to describe non-pathological changes in neuronal structure. Today, it is generally accepted that the brain is a dynamic system whose morphology and function is influenced by a variety of factors including stress, diet, and exercise. Neural plasticity involves learning and memory, the synthesis of new neurons, the repair of damaged connections, and several other compensatory mechanisms.