Dana Foundation Blog

Dana Newsletter: April

Below is the latest Dana email newsletter. You can sign up to receive this (and other Dana email alerts and/or print publications) by going here.

Diagnosing a Crisis: Psychiatric Drug Development

by Steven E. Hyman, M.D.

When it comes to funding drug research to treat depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, and other psychiatric disorders, the global pharmaceutical industry prefers to invest its research dollars in cancer, metabolism, autoimmunity, and other disease areas. This comes despite the fact that one in five Americans currently take at least one psychiatric drug and that mental disorders are recognized worldwide. The author traces the evolution of psychiatric drug development, the reasons for its retreat, and what needs to change to meet the growing demand. From Cerebrum, our online magazine of ideas.

Briefing Paper: One Molecule for Love, Trust, and Morality?

Amidst an explosion of oxytocin research, neuroscientists express cautious enthusiasm about the hormone's potential applications, but also warn of misperceptions brought on by oversimplified reporting.

Helen Mayberg Wins Psychiatry Award

Helen Mayberg, M.D., a professor of psychiatry, neurology, and radiology at Emory University School of Medicine, has been awarded the fifth annual Joan and Stanford Alexander Award in Psychiatry. Each year, Baylor College bestows the honor upon “a mental health professional who has made significant contributions in research, education and clinical or community service for people suffering from severe and persistent mental illness.” Past award winners include Dana Alliance members Nora Volkow, M.D., and Eric Kandel, M.D.

Mayberg is being recognized for her pioneering work using deep brain stimulation (DBS) for patients with treatment resistant depression. The Dana Foundation funded her research in this area, which was described in a 2012 Dana grantee interview.

--Ann L. Whitman

Creativity and Dyslexia

What do actor Henry Winkler, Connecticut governor Dan Malloy, paleontologist Jack Horner, and New York student Skye Lucas have in common? Dyslexia and success. In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Melinda Beck argues that many experts believe dyslexia does not influence intelligence and that many dyslexic individuals have thrived by utilizing creative talents, the ability to think differently, and by working harder than their peers.

From the WSJ article: “As many as one in five Americans has some degree of dyslexia, according to Yale research, although only about 5% of children have been formally diagnosed. And it clearly runs in families; six gene variations have been linked to the condition to date. Dyslexia was long thought to be a vision-related problem, but there’s a growing consensus that dyslexics instead have difficulty associating letters with spoken sounds and blending them together fluidly to make words.”

Brain Awareness Week 2013 Recap

Last week was Brain Awareness Week (BAW), and there was a lot to absorb. Five hundred and twenty eight registered partners held a total of 942 events in 58 countries and 42 U.S. states. Six out of seven continents were represented in this mix, as seen in our Across the Continents blog posts.

To spotlight the great work and the diversity of our BAW partners, we posted a new partner interview each weekday to our homepage. These Q&As offer a lot of practical advice, useful to current partners and to those planning to participate next year. Among the things we learned this year were the value of volunteers and how to recruit them; why middle school students are an important demographic to target during the week, and what types of activities they enjoy; and that how you present is just as important as what you present, particularly when your event is child-focused.

Perhaps BAW future partners, high school seniors Charltien Long and Jordan Meltzer were awarded first and second-place for the Dana Design a Brain Experiment competition. Long proposed to test the effectiveness of acteylcholinesterase inhibitors in treating hallucinations in schizophrenia on both a clinical and neurobiological level. Meltzer proposed to map the development of myelin-generating neural progenitor cells. Really impressive work from both students. 

Falling Down on the Job

At Rockefeller University, the message from a Brain Awareness Week panel of four that focused on how the media communicates neuroscience and psychiatric disorders was loud and clear: vast improvement is badly needed–and there is little reason to think things will change.

Brain awareness often means delving into complex issues, and the media is programmed for sound bites rather than nuance, was the consensus. Maia Szalavitz, an author and contributor to Time's Healthland, made the not-so-uplifting point that understaffed magazines and newspapers in a downsizing print industry often assign a single writer to cover several stories a day. This can translate into over simplification, shoddy reporting, and inferior sources when matters of the brain are addressed.

Neuro-oncologist and Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives member Robert B. Darnell, M.D., Ph.D., is troubled by the media’s need to “dumb down” neuroscience concepts to “a seventh-grade reading level,” which too often translates to inaccuracies or misleading stories. Darnell, who is president and scientific director of the New York Genome Center, believes he and other scientists have an obligation to explain their work, but “science can be extremely complicated, and at times it’s difficult and inappropriate to simplify the science beyond what is a reasonable representation,” he said. Darnell also feels that since we are now capable of detecting the probability of future diseases and disorders through gene sequencing in children, the media needs to better tell the cost/benefits and ethical side of the story. Enormous implications are at stake, he believes.