Meditation as a tool to prevent dementia and improve the mental health and well-being of elderly people is one of the avenues explored by the European Medit-Ageing research program, coordinated by Inserm. As part of this program, researchers from Inserm and Université de Caen Normandie, in collaboration with French and European teams, observed the impact of 18 months of meditation training on certain brain structures involved in regulating attention and...
Children born prematurely have a higher risk of not just cognitive and sensory disorders, but also infertility in adulthood. In a new study, a team of researchers from Inserm, University Hospital Lille and Université de Lille at the Lille Neuroscience and Cognition laboratory has opened up interesting avenues for improving their prognosis. By conducting research into a rare disease known as congenital hypogonadotropic hypogonadism, the scientists have discovered the...
An Inserm team at the Lille Neuroscience & Cognition laboratory (Inserm/Université de Lille, Lille University Hospital) has joined forces with its counterparts at Vaudois University Hospital (CHUV, Lausanne) to test the efficacy of GnRH injection therapy in order to improve the cognitive functions of a small group of patients with Down syndrome. First the scientists revealed a dysfunction of the GnRH neurons in an animal model of Down syndrome...
A research team from Inserm, University Hospital Lille, and Université de Lille within the Lille Neuroscience & Cognition laboratory looked at the impact of cultural differences on the performances on two of the neurocognitive tests most used worldwide, comparing the results of around 600 healthy participants across 12 countries.
On July 18, 2022, France’s minister for Higher Education and Research Sylvie Retailleau announced an unprecedented psychiatry research effort in the form of 80 million euros allocated over five years to the precision-psychiatry project-program PROPSY, led by Inserm and CNRS as part of the Priority Research and Resources Programs (PEPRs).
The cerebellum is essential for sensorimotor control but also contributes to higher cognitive functions including social behaviors. An international research consortium uncovered how dopamine in the cerebellum modulates social behaviors via its action on D2 receptors (D2R). These new findings pave the way to determine whether socially related psychiatric disorders, such as autism spectrum disorders (ASD), bipolar mood disorder, or schizophrenia, are also associated with altered dopamine receptors expression...
In a new study analyzing data from all previous research in the field, researchers show that not only are positivity and confirmation biases present even in the simplest human and animal cognitive processes, but also that incorporating them into learning algorithms would enhance their performance.
With previous findings having highlighted the role of our social environment as one of the key factors behind the expansion of the cerebral cortex, researchers went one step further in elucidating this link. They were more specifically interested in a species of macaques whose brain architecture is comparable to that of humans. By observing these non-human primates in their natural state and by analyzing images of their brains, they...
Scientists from the Institut Pasteur (a partner research organization of Université Paris Cité), Inserm and the CNRS have discovered that hypothalamic neurons in an animal model directly detect variations in bacterial activity and adapt appetite and body temperature accordingly. These findings demonstrate that a direct dialog occurs between the gut microbiota and the brain, a discovery that could lead to new therapeutic approaches for tackling metabolic disorders such as...
Researchers have identified 75 regions of the genome that are associated with Alzheimer's disease. Forty-two of these regions are novel, meaning that they have never before been implicated in the disease. The findings bring new knowledge of the biological mechanisms at play and open up new avenues for treatment and diagnosis.
