#corticalthinning — Public Fediverse posts
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DATE: May 28, 2026 at 04:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: A virtual reality navigation test predicts Alzheimer’s risk in healthy adults
Struggling with spatial navigation in a virtual reality environment can predict actual brain shrinkage a year later in adults without memory problems. These navigation tests might offer a new way to spot the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s disease long before memory loss begins. The findings were recently published in the journal Alzheimer’s Research Therapy.
Alzheimer’s disease damages the brain for years before a person experiences noticeable memory decline. Some of the first brain areas to deteriorate are those responsible for spatial navigation. This is the ability to understand where you are in a given environment and how to get to your destination. Because these internal navigation centers degrade so early in the disease process, medical professionals are looking for ways to test a person’s navigation skills as a warning sign.
One specific navigation skill is called path integration. This is the brain’s ability to track a person’s current position and direction of movement by using internal cues. It relies on sensory feedback from balance, body movement, and visual flow rather than external landmarks. When you wake up in the dark and walk to the bathroom based entirely on your sense of distance and direction, you are using path integration.
When the brain networks supporting these spatial calculations begin to break down, people start making errors in their internal maps. A team of researchers wanted to see if these specific spatial errors could forecast physical changes in the brain over time. Kazuya Kawabata and Sayuri Shima, researchers at Fujita Health University in Japan, led the investigation. They worked alongside Hirohisa Watanabe and several other colleagues.
The research team set out to determine if subtle miscalculations in a virtual reality game could predict structural brain decline. They specifically wanted to study adults who currently show no signs of cognitive impairment. To answer this question, the researchers recruited 71 adults with healthy cognitive function. These participants underwent brain imaging at the beginning of the study and again about one year later.
During the initial visit, the participants also gave blood samples and completed a virtual reality navigation task. They wore a headset that placed them in a featureless circular arena designed to test spatial awareness. The virtual room was 20 virtual meters wide and bounded by blank walls to ensure participants could not rely on visual landmarks.
Using a hand-held controller for forward movement and a swivel chair for physical rotation, participants moved to two different checkpoints in the virtual room. The checkpoints were marked by colored flags. After reaching the second checkpoint, the visual markers disappeared from the virtual world. The participants then had to rely solely on their internal sense of direction to return to their original starting point.
The research team measured two types of mistakes during this return trip. The first was path integration error, which is the physical distance between where the participant stopped and the actual starting point. The second was angular error, which measured how far off their rotational direction was compared to the correct path back to the start.
The researchers then compared these behavioral errors to changes in the participants’ brain scans over the following year. They looked specifically at the thickness of the outer layer of the brain, known as the cortex, and the overall volume of different brain regions. A reduction in cortical thickness or volume indicates that brain cells are shrinking or dying off.
The results showed a clear pattern connecting virtual reality performance to structural brain health. Participants who made larger path integration errors at the start of the study experienced faster thinning and volume loss in specific parts of the brain. These physical reductions occurred in several areas, including the parahippocampal gyrus and the posterior cingulate cortex.
These specific brain regions are highly vulnerable to early damage from neurodegenerative diseases. The parahippocampal gyrus helps the brain encode new memories and process spatial locations. The posterior cingulate cortex acts as a central hub that connects memory processing to emotional regulation and spatial awareness. Experiencing tissue loss in these areas is often one of the earliest physical signs of cognitive decline.
Errors in rotational direction, or angular errors, showed a very similar relationship with brain shrinkage over the one-year period. The researchers noted that angular errors were not closely tied to the general chronological age of the participants. This suggests that rotational mistakes might be a specific indicator of disease related decline rather than a normal symptom of getting older.
The team also analyzed the baseline blood samples to look for specific proteins that act as biological markers for Alzheimer’s disease. They tested for tau proteins and glial fibrillary acidic proteins. Tau proteins can form destructive tangles inside brain cells, while glial proteins are structural components of support cells that leak into the blood when the brain is damaged.
Both the path integration errors and the angular errors were tied to higher levels of these proteins in the blood. This biological connection strongly supports the idea that the navigation mistakes reflect underlying disease processes. The distance errors proved to be highly accurate at identifying the specific individuals who experienced the fastest rate of brain thinning in the parahippocampal region.
“Our findings suggest that VR-PI performance captures both molecular (blood biomarker) and structural (MRI) signatures that emerge before overt clinical impairment,” says Dr. Kawabata. This dual connection to both blood proteins and brain imaging makes the virtual reality test a promising tool for early detection.
Despite the clear patterns, the researchers noted a few limitations to their work. While the virtual reality system requires people to physically rotate in a chair, it does not involve actual walking. This means it lacks the physical sensations of forward acceleration and leg movement that the brain normally uses for path integration. Virtual reality can only partially mimic the sensory experience of walking through the real world.
The automated software used to measure brain thickness from the magnetic resonance imaging scans can also introduce slight measurement variations. The team also mentioned that their participant group was relatively small and consisted entirely of adults in Japan. Because spatial navigation strategies can differ across cultural and educational backgrounds, the results might not perfectly apply to global populations.
Future research will need to include larger and more diverse groups of people to see if these patterns hold true across different demographics. Scientists also need to use more advanced imaging techniques to look closer at the earliest signs of brain shrinkage in these specific spatial navigation centers. The researchers hope future studies will track participants for longer than one year to see how their cognitive health changes over a longer timeline.
Still, connecting a simple behavioral test to both biological proteins and physical brain shrinkage offers a promising path forward. Testing navigation skills could eventually become a standard part of routine checkups for older adults. Spotting these problems early gives doctors a much better chance to intervene before severe memory loss takes hold.
“Our approach may allow earlier identification of risk of neurodegenerative diseases, including AD. Over the longer term, it may contribute to a shift toward earlier detection, potentially enabling timely therapeutic interventions at preclinical stages and delaying disease progression, thereby preserving cognitive function and quality of life,” concludes Dr. Kawabata.
The study, “VR-based path integration predicts individual risk of rapid cortical decline: a one-year longitudinal study in cognitively unimpaired adults,” was authored by Kazuya Kawabata, Sayuri Shima, Reiko Ohdake, Epifanio Bagarinao, Yasuaki Mizutani, Harutsugu Tatebe, Riki Koike, Atsushi Kasai, Akihiro Ueda, Mizuki Ito, Junichi Hata, Shinsuke Ishigaki, Hiroshi Toyama, Takahiko Tokuda, Akihiko Takashima, and Hirohisa Watanabe.
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #VRpathintegration #AlzheimersPrediction #spatialnavigation #corticalthinning #neurodegeneration #bloodbiomarkers #tauproteins #VRinmedicine #earlydetection #cognitivehealth
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DATE: May 23, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Brain development patterns predict if childhood ADHD symptoms will fade or persist
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-signatures-identify-which-teens-will-outgrow-adhd-symptoms/
Children experiencing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder face symptoms that can persist, emerge, or fade away completely as they grow older. A recent study published in Nature Mental Health revealed that these different symptom paths are physically reflected in how the brain develops during adolescence, specifically in the growth and thinning of certain brain regions. The research highlights the potential for using brain scans to predict future symptom changes and emphasizes the need for long-term monitoring even after medical treatment begins.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD, affects around five percent of children and adolescents worldwide. This developmental condition often results in varying clinical outcomes as children grow into teenagers and young adults. Some individuals continue to experience symptoms into adulthood, while others go through a remitting phase where their symptoms largely fade. Still, others follow an emergent path where behavioral issues actually worsen over time.
Predicting which adolescents will follow which path remains extremely difficult. A central reason for this difficulty is a lack of long-term brain imaging data showing exactly how adolescent brains mature. The physical development of the brain during these transitional years involves intense structural changes, including a major biological process called synaptic pruning.
During synaptic pruning, the brain naturally eliminates unused neural connections to increase mental efficiency. This normal trimming process causes the outer layer of the brain, known as the cerebral cortex, to thin over time. Variations in how quickly or slowly this thinning occurs can fundamentally impact how a person processes information, pays attention, and regulates their emotions later in life.
Qiang Luo, a researcher at Fudan University in China, led an international team of scientists to explore how typical brain maturation maps onto attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The team wanted to know if specific physical brain changes corresponded to different developmental symptom paths. They also evaluated whether standard medications prescribed for the condition altered those physical brain development paths.
The research team examined longitudinal data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study. This massive ongoing project tracks thousands of youth in the United States over many years, measuring environmental, physical, and mental health factors. The team focused on a diverse overarching group of 7,436 adolescents who received initial brain scans at roughly ten years of age.
The researchers categorized the adolescents into four distinct groups based on behavioral assessments provided over a subsequent two-year period. A massive control group experienced no elevated psychiatric symptoms. A much smaller persistent group showed high symptom levels at the beginning and the end of the two years. A remitting group started with high symptoms that eventually faded below the diagnostic threshold. Finally, an emergent group started with low symptoms that eventually worsened to clinical levels.
Assessments of the brain scans over time revealed distinct physical signatures for each group. The persistent group exhibited a faster rate of cortical thinning in certain frontal areas of the brain compared to the healthy control group. These specific frontal regions are typically associated with executive functions like complex decision making and cognitive control. An accelerated thinning is linked to deficits in these daily cognitive abilities.
In the emergent group, the brain also showed altered developmental rates. Individuals whose symptoms worsened over time demonstrated a slower rate of cortical thinning in the right posterior cingulate cortex. This region is a key component of the brain’s default mode network, which helps regulate mind-wandering and internal thoughts. By retaining connections that would typically be pruned away, the developing brain might struggle to shift focus outward when required in a classroom or social setting.
The remitting group, on the other hand, displayed a completely different biological signature. Adolescents whose symptoms faded experienced a faster physical volume expansion of the left hippocampus. The hippocampus is a deeper, primitive brain structure heavily involved in memory formation and emotion regulation. As this region grew faster, the adolescents showed corresponding behavioral improvements in school engagement, prosocial behaviors, and sleep quality.
To understand why these structural brain changes were happening, the researchers compared their localized brain maps to spatial gene expression databases. They analyzed which genes are naturally highly active in these specific changing brain regions. They found a strong overlap with genes responsible for organizing cellular synapses and managing chemical messengers like dopamine and serotonin.
This genetic overlap provides a deep biological foundation for the outward behavioral changes observed. It suggests that the physical volume shifts seen on the brain scans are tied to the fundamental cellular processes governing how local neurons communicate with one another. Tracking these physical parameters essentially allows scientists to view genetic activity playing out on a large scale.
The researchers then investigated the role of ongoing medication use in these developmental outcomes. They matched adolescents with similar symptom severity at the start of the study who either received or did not receive medical treatments. The analysis showed that taking prescribed medication initially was not statistically significant in predicting an individual’s eventual entry into the remitting trajectory.
This lack of association between medication and sustained remission is an unexpected finding. Medical treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are widely recognized as highly effective at managing immediate behavioral symptoms. However, they might not fundamentally alter the underlying physical development of the brain over the long term. The researchers noted that individuals experiencing symptom remission still exhibited some persisting sleep problems and emotional regulation issues.
Following their initial physical analysis, the team tested whether these newly discovered brain signatures could forecast future behaviors. They fed the baseline brain scan data and behavioral scores into a machine learning computer model. The model accurately predicted symptom severity in the participants three years later at age thirteen. The physical brain measurements improved the accuracy of the predictions beyond using simple behavioral checklists alone.
The team subsequently validated their predictive model using completely separate groups of research participants. One validation group consisted of young adults aged twenty-three in a European neuroscience study. The researchers successfully replicated the specific link between hippocampal expansion and fading symptoms across both the young adult group and two other independent clinical samples. Observing this exact same brain expansion pattern in differing age groups bolsters the reliability of the initial finding.
The current study possesses some limitations to keep in mind. Because the research is observational, it cannot prove that the physical changes in the cortex and hippocampus directly cause symptom improvements or deteriorations. The findings only demonstrate a strong correlation between particular physical brain development rates and changing symptom paths over time.
Additionally, the different datasets used varying questionnaires to measure participant behavioral symptoms, which makes exact comparisons across the separate groups slightly complicated. The available information regarding the participants’ complete medication dosing histories was also somewhat limited. The researchers caution against drawing definitive conclusions about long-term drug impacts based purely on parental reports of recent medication usage.
Moving forward, scientists will need to conduct more frequent brain scans over longer periods to capture the true fluid dynamics of brain development. Focusing on lifestyle interventions that naturally influence continuous hippocampus growth, such as consistent aerobic exercise, might aid in creating new non-pharmacological therapies. By identifying the physical brain markers for these symptom paths, researchers have established a biological roadmap for developing targeted interventions aimed at bringing about long-lasting symptom remission.
The study, “Cortical thinning and hippocampal expansion as brain signatures of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptom trajectories,” was published in Nature Mental Health and was authored by Wenjie Hou, Daqian Zhu, Barbara J. Sahakian, Samuele Cortese, Christelle Langley, Lizhu Luo, Qingyang Li, Zixin Gu, Luolong Cao, Gareth J. Barker, Arun L. W. Bokde, Rüdiger Brühl, Sylvane Desrivières, Herta Flor, Hugh Garavan, Penny Gowland, Antoine Grigis, Andreas Heinz, Jean-Luc Martinot, Marie-Laure Paillère Martinot, Eric Artiges, Frauke Nees, Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos, Luise Poustka, Michael N. Smolka, Sarah Hohmann, Nathalie Holz, Nilakshi Vaidya, Henrik Walter, Robert Whelan, Gunter Schumann, Li Yang, Tobias Banaschewski, Qiang Luo, and the IMAGEN Consortium.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-signatures-identify-which-teens-will-outgrow-adhd-symptoms/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ADHDdevelopment #Brain maturation #Corticalthinning #Hippocampalexpansion #Synapticpruning #Executivefunction #Neuroimaging #NatureMentalHealth #ADHDpredictivemodel #Longtermoutcomes