Could the blockbuster GLP-1 meds like Wegovy and Ozempic have a role to play in helping people cut down on problem drinking? A new study suggests so. Researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland report that obese folks with drinking issues who took the drugs to shed pounds had an up to 56% reduction in re-occurrence of alcohol use disorder over one year later, compared to those not using the meds. “This is very promising news in that we may have a new therapeutic method to treat alcohol use disorder,” said lead researcher Rong Xu. She’s a professor of biomedical informatics at the Case Western’s School of Medicine. Prior data has suggested that something about GLP-1 diabetes/weight-loss drugs can have the effect of curbing excess drinking. And the Case Western team have already shown that semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) can have other unexpected health benefits. “In January we showed that semaglutide is associated with a decrease in suicidal thoughts, and in March, we demonstrated that semaglutide is also associated with a reduction in both new diagnoses and recurrence of cannabis use disorder,” Xu noted in a university news release. So what about alcohol intake? In the new study, Xu’s team pored over the electronic health records of nearly 84,000 patients with obesity.  Compared to people who weren’t taking semaglutide, those who took the med saw a…  read on >  read on >

Ozempic and Wegovy might help lower the risk of pancreatitis in patients with obesity and type 2 diabetes, a new study says. Up to now, doctors have been cautious about prescribing semaglutide to patients with a history of pancreatitis, because they feared the drug could worsen the condition, said lead researcher Dr. Mahmoud Nassar, a fellow in endocrinology, diabetes, and metabolism at the University of Buffalo in New York. In fact, the drug’s prescribing information even warns about this potential side effect, Nassar noted. “Our research highlights the safety and the potential for GLP-1 receptor agonists [like semaglutide] to reduce the risk of acute pancreatitis recurrence in individuals with obesity and type 2 diabetes, challenging previous concerns and offering new hope for effective disease management,” Nassar said. For the study, researchers analyzed data on more than 638,000 patients with a history of pancreatitis. The patients were located across 15 countries, but they were mainly from the United States. Researchers tracked how many patients developed pancreatitis again within 15 years of starting either semaglutide or other drugs for diabetes and obesity. The other drugs included SGLT2 inhibitors, which decrease blood sugar levels by preventing glucose from being absorbed in the kidneys, and DPP4 inhibitors, which help the pancreas release insulin. About 15% of patients taking semaglutide had wound up suffering a recurrence of pancreatitis, compared with…  read on >  read on >

Nerve surgery can reduce the number of headache days for people who suffer frequent migraines, a new review finds. The procedure also can decrease the frequency and intensity of migraine attacks, according to results published in the June issue of the journal Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. “Our study adds new evidence that headache surgery improves both sets of measures, providing a more comprehensive assessment of the results of headache surgery,” said researcher Dr. Jeffrey Janis, a professor of plastic surgery, surgery, neurosurgery and neurology at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. Migraine surgery seeks to relieve nerve compression at trigger sites in the head and neck, researchers explained. This pressure is thought to contribute to headaches. Neurologists assessing migraine treatments tend to focus on whether they reduce the number of days a person has a headache, Janis said. On the other hand, plastic surgeons performing headache surgery typically use an index that evaluates the frequency, intensity and duration of migraines, Janis added. “This discrepancy is one reason why some headache specialists have been slow to recognize the growing body of evidence showing the effectiveness of headache surgery,” Janis noted in a journal news release. For this review, researchers decided to consider both ways of assessing the effectiveness of migraine surgery, so that both groups of professionals could find common ground regarding the procedure. The…  read on >  read on >

Cerebral aneurysms: For most people, the word signals a sudden, fatal brain bleed that seemingly comes out of nowhere. However, an expert at Penn State Health says that in many cases these brain blood vessel ruptures are spotted early, before they rupture. And even when they do occur, they are not uniformly fatal. What is a cerebral aneurysm? “An aneurysm is like a blister on a water hose,” explained Dr. Scott Simon, a neurosurgeon at Penn State Health’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. “They can happen on any blood vessel in the body.” The trouble is, as they form in the brain in their earliest stages, most people have no idea they’re in any danger. Sometimes, a doctor may spot one in a brain scan conducted for other reasons, Simon said. If a cerebral aneurysm does rupture, about half of the time the event proves fatal, Simon said. Among those who survive, 68% will experience permanent neurological damage. According to Simon, cerebral aneurysms take the lives of half a million people around the world each year. Cerebral aneurysm causes and risk factors According to Simon, the simple answer as to what causes a cerebral aneurysm is, “We don’t know.” Certain risk factors do seem to come into play, however. “We know that they can run in families,” he said in a Penn State news release.…  read on >  read on >

About one in eight U.S. seniors will be treated for a traumatic brain injury, typically during a fall, a new study finds. Medicare data shows that about 13% of seniors suffered a severe concussion during an average follow-up period of 18 years, researchers report. Although these injuries can be treated, they increase the risk of serious conditions like dementia, Parkinson’s disease, seizures, heart disease, depression and anxiety, they added. “The number of people 65 and older with TBI is shockingly high,” said senior researcher Dr. Raquel Gardner, a neurologist with the Sheba Medical Center in Israel. For the study, researchers tracked about 9,200 Medicare enrollees with an average age of 75. Women, white people, the healthier and the well-off appear at higher risk of concussion, according to the data — a finding that runs counter to prior research. For example, about 64% of people who had a traumatic brain injury were female, even though women represented 58% of the total group studied, researchers said. Likewise, about 84% of people in the total group were white, but whites represented 89% of concussions, results show. About 31% of those with traumatic brain injury were in the top 25% of wealth, while 22% were in the lowest quarter, researchers said. Seniors with concussion also were less likely to have lung disease or to struggle with activities of daily…  read on >  read on >

California skateboarder Jared Hager has become the first person to receive a transparent skull replacement, which allows doctors to better view the function of his brain. The window has allowed doctors to both monitor his progress and test new and better scanning methods for assessing brain health. Hager, 39, of Downey, Calif., sustained a traumatic brain injury from a skateboarding accident at a Palm Springs reservoir in April 2019. “I just went down this hill without even looking at it, which is like a really dumb thing to do,” Hager told ABC News. During emergency surgery, half of Hager’s skull was removed to relieve pressure on his brain. Doctors had planned to replace the skull bone once Hager recovered, but the pandemic derailed those plans. Elective surgeries were halted, leaving Hager with just skin and connective tissue protecting his brain for two years. “Even if a stick hits my head, it’s just my brain right here. It’s just my brain.” Hager recalled. But the timing made Hager a perfect candidate to receive an experimental skull implant made of a material that resembles plexiglass. Through this “window,” doctors have tested new ultrasound and CT techniques that produce high-resolution brain images. These brain imaging scans collect data on brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow or electrical impulses. They can provide key insights into how the…  read on >  read on >

Stuttering is a neurological condition, not a psychological one, and scientists in Finland now believe they’ve found the disrupted network in the brain that may cause it. “These findings explain well-known features of stuttering, such as the motor difficulties in speech production and the significant variability in stuttering severity across emotional states,” said senior study author Juho Joutsa, a professor of neurology at the University of Turku. His team published its findings May 27 in the journal Brain. According to the researchers, anywhere from 5% to 10% of children will develop a stutter, and 1% of adults also struggle with stuttering. President Joe Biden has been open about his lifelong management of his own stuttering. “Stuttering was once considered a psychological disorder,” Jpoutsa said in a university news release. “However, with further research, it is now understood to be a brain disorder related to the regulation of speech production.” But just where in the brain a person’s stutter might originate has been unknown. In the study, Joutsa’s group first focused on 20 adults (ranging in age from 45 to 87) who all developed a stutter after suffering a stroke. Although the location in the brain where the stroke occurred varied between patients, the strokes did all seem to affect one particular brain network — unlike strokes that did not bring on stuttering. These networks connected…  read on >  read on >

A bilingual brain implant has allowed a stroke survivor to communicate in both Spanish and English, scientists report. Turning to an AI method known as a neural network, researchers trained the patient’s implant to decode words based on the brain activity produced when he tried to articulate those words, and then display those words and sentences on a screen. This method allows the brain implant to process data in a way that is similar to the human brain. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco’s Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses have labored for years to design a decoding system that could turn the patient’s brain activity into sentences in both languages. In a report published May 20 in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, the scientists share the details of their effort. “This new study is an important contribution for the emerging field of speech-restoration neuroprostheses,” Sergey Stavisky, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study, said in a journal news release. Even though the study included only one patient and more research is needed, “there’s every reason to think that this strategy will work with higher accuracy in the future when combined with other recent advances,” Stavisky added. The saga of the bilingual brain implant first began five years ago. At age 20, a man identified…  read on >  read on >

Near-infrared light pulsing into a person’s skull appears to boost healing in patients with a severe concussion, a new study finds. Patients who wore a helmet emitting near-infrared light displayed a greater change in connectivity between seven different pairs of brain regions, researchers report. “The skull is quite transparent to near-infrared light,” explained co-lead researcher Dr. Rajiv Gupta, a radiologist with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “Once you put the helmet on, your whole brain is bathing in this light.” For the study, researchers tested near-infrared light therapy on 17 patients who’d suffered an injury to the head serious enough to affect their thinking or be visible on a brain scan. Patients put on the light therapy helmet within 72 hours of receiving a traumatic brain injury, and researchers used brain scans to gauge the effects of the treatment. Another 21 patients put on the helmet but didn’t receive light therapy. The researchers focused on the brain’s resting-state function connectivity, or the communication that occurs between brain regions when a person is at rest and not engaged in a specific task. Researchers took brain scans a week after injury, two to three weeks post-injury and three months after injury. “There was increased connectivity in those receiving light treatment, primarily within the first two weeks,” said researcher Nathaniel Mercaldo, a statistician with Massachusetts General Hospital. “We…  read on >  read on >