Closer Look
For a few with dementia, artistic expression explodes
Courtesy Ann Adams/UCSF Memory and Aging Center
Of all the ways the brain is bewildering, this ranks among the oddest. And perhaps the most beautiful. For a small percentage of people with frontotemporal dementia, as the neurodegenerative disease saps them of their ability to reason or even to speak, they have an explosion of artistic creativity. A flourishing interest in art can show up as a sudden affinity, a dramatic change in the type or style of art they produce, or simply the enormous amount of time dedicated to art.
The brain disease can manifest in sometimes remarkably different ways, depending on which side of the brain it starts. Anne Adams' artwork (above) reflected her passions. After FTD robbed the biologist of her speech, she painted symmetrical patterns of biological creatures, a color-by-number representation of the first 1,500 digits of pi in honor of her mathematician husband, and visual interpretations of classical music. STAT's Bree Iskandar has more.
long covid
How SARS-CoV-2 disrupts mitochondria could explain some of long Covid, study suggests
Scientists know the virus that causes Covid has tentacles reaching throughout the body, but a new study maps out just how SARS-CoV-2 hijacks mitochondria, the power plants in our cells, and may lead to long Covid. Building on previous work, the Science Translational Medicine paper defines the genetic mechanism damaging mitochondria in the lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, and brain. Senior author Douglas Wallace wasn't surprised to see this activity, but "we were amazed at how sophisticated the virus is in achieving that goal."
To Eric Topol of Scripps, that cements the case for mitochondria as one of the root causes of long Covid and its symptoms from fatigue to brain fog. (He reminded me Wallace is a world authority on mitochondria, so "this is not just some kind of rookie group. This is the all-stars.") What's next? "We have hypothesized that that is an important factor in long Covid," Wallace told me. "But we don't have the funds to pursue that research." Read more.
pandemic
WHO says the risk is low from the latest SARS-CoV-2 subvariant spreading in the U.S.
Here's a Covid update from STAT's Helen Branswell: A SARS-CoV-2 subvariant that is gaining ground in the U.S. has been designated a variant of interest by the WHO, which bumped up the Omicron-based sublineage EG.5 yesterday from its previous status as a variant under monitoring. While EG.5 seems to have a growth advantage over previous versions of the virus, it does not appear to be more dangerous. For example, there's no evidence it triggers more severe disease, the report said. And it has the same amino acid profile as XBB.1.5, which this fall's Covid boosters target.
"Based on the available evidence, the public health risk posed by EG.5 is evaluated as low at the global level," the agency's risk assessment stated, though it acknowledged that some of its conclusions about EG.5 are based on sparse evidence because global Covid surveillance has declined dramatically. It's one of several subvariants currently circulating in different regions. "There is no one variant that is dominant anywhere," said Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO's team lead for Covid, who urged countries to continue to sequence and submit data on SARS-2 viruses.
No comments