Chinese whispers, genetic edition. This is a fascinating reminder that "genetic determination", at the level of organism behaviour, is not just about the genome inherited in the zygote, but about millions/billions of cells, each with a prob unique take on that foundational genome, working together.

Evoke trial of @novonordisk’s #semaglutide for AD fails to slow progression: www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-react... A second large #GLP1 agonist trial in neurodegeneration with another disappointing result. Why isn’t the promise (& hype) of observational data translating to trials?

This does feel like a major crossing of the Rubicon – the world's best-funded and in many ways most powerful public health agency is now actively pushing disinformation. I know there's a *lot* going on to care about at the moment, but this one really is significant, and matters well beyond the US.

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

My first post into the bsky void, the first preprint of my PhD! A novel task to bridge learning and effort decision-making. Of course, we find that effort choice is sensitive to prior learning, but this integration of beliefs into action is affected by anhedonia. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Fascinating and clinically important new paper. It highlights both reassuring and concerning findings on the cardiometabolic effects of #antidepressants. Should post-initiation monitoring focus more on #metabolic changes than QTc? www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Great review on The Genetics of Human Handedness: Microtubules and Beyond www.cell.com/trends/genet... - handedness is such an interesting phenotype!

Out today at Neuron, our experiments show that frontal cortical representation of economic variables is jointly determined by spatial organization and downstream connectivity of neurons, revealing a structured, multi-scale code for economic variables. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

1/ To explore or to exploit? I’m excited to share my new preprint with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social and @micahgallen.com, correlating variations in cortical microstructures with individual differences in exploration-exploitation behaviours, using a gamified task! 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

“Israeli Forces Kill 198 Palestinians in Gaza Over Three Days” It’s a genocide. Daily endless massacres, largely ignored in the West.

Familial confounding in the associations between maternal health and autism www.nature.com/articles/s41... - drawing causal conclusions from observational studies is not a good idea

BlueSky friends, forgive me for not posting much on here. I'm standing for President of the RCPsych in the elections next March. I'm still speaking and listening to friends and colleagues about what is important, but you can learn about what I would do if successful here: www.profrobhoward.com

New paper out in @journal_ad (led by Guy Gitlin-Leigh). @profrobhoward.bsky.social We conducted the first systematic review + meta-analysis on whether monoclonal antibody therapies for #Alzheimer’s (AD) & #Parkinson’s (PD) affect risk of depression. Link: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

Excited to share this new preprint on the Predictive Modelling of Depression Treatment Response using Individual Symptoms and Latent Factors with @clairegillan.bsky.social fresh up on @medrxivpreprint.bsky.social www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

Pretty sure the only large blinded RCTs of #GLP-1 agonists in psychiatry/neurology have been in #schizophrenia and #Parkinson’s disease—both found no core symptomatic benefit. Fantastic drugs for metabolic health, but current trial evidence for broader neuro/psych use sadly isn’t promising.

‘Maintaining share of #NHS spend on mental health, will be critical although it fell last year and will again this year. It likely will continue to do so over the next 3years. I hope I am wrong.’ Worrying times for NHS #mentalhealth care which barely featured in the 10yr plan…

In #DeepBrainStimulation the two major developments across the last decade have been 1. Adaptive DBS and 2. Connectomic DBS In a @natrevneurol.nature.com article with @julianneumann.bsky.social, we ask: Could the two be united into a common framework? www.nature.com/articles/s41... A 🧵

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Comparing a treatment to waitlist is an extremely low bar. Essentially it isn't even a bar as objectively ineffective treatments (e.g. homeopathy) outperforms waitlist. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

At last! Why did this take decades to introduce when most of Europe & the US rolled it out long ago? Especially important given emerging evidence linking VZV vaccination with protection against neurodegenerative disorders. #chickenpox www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

What's not to like about this image, presented at AAIC and touted as showing lasting and expanding (maybe, even clinically important) efficacy of lecanemab treatment through 48 months of treatment - but only if you start treatment early and don't stop?

Wonderful information about SEVERE limitations of "real world data". Telling in the RWD sphere is unwillingness of its practitioners to add a model parameter to represent unknown bias as exemplified in fharrell.com/post/hxcontrol => uncertainty intervals for treatment effects properly wider.

Obviously ridiculous from a ridiculous person — but this seems to reflect the consensus on social care across all major UK parties. AI has become the opium of a political class that is out of ideas and too fearful to face the real challenges of our time.

A landmark volume, The Handbook of Dopamine, is now online: www.sciencedirect.com/handbook/han... Big kudos to the editors, Stephanie Cragg and Mark Walton, for putting this together.

The replies to this post, even on here, even moreso on X, are so depressing to me. We live in a world where cities have never been safer and a minority of people are denying themselves a lot of delightful experiences because they’ve gone mad online.

US children's health has worsened from 2007 to 2023 across various indicators, including mortality, chronic conditions, and mental health. ja.ma/4lZnRxG #MedSky #PedSky

few outcomes, except for 99% of FDA-approved drugs, 174 recipients of 104 Nobel Prizes, training ~30K MDs and ~10K PhDs per year to enter the workforce, and a 34% reduction in age-adjusted cancer deaths since 1990 -- the largest decrease in history

Identifying reproducible biomarkers for microbiome association studies requires sample sizes of thousands www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New study out in Nature Medicine: Education does not protect against age-related decline of memory. Read more here: Reevaluating the role of education on cognitive decline and brain aging in longitudinal cohorts across 33 Western countries www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How insights from posttraumatic stress disorder can inform treatment of functional neurological disorder Perspective by Andrea Putica (@andreaputica.bsky.social), James Agathos (@agathosj.bsky.social) & Kim Felmingham (@drkimfelm.bsky.social) Web: go.nature.com/4kWkhmq PDF: rdcu.be/exKpC

Nature research paper: Mitochondrial origins of the pressure to sleep go.nature.com/40oC7Y4

On the same weekend a child dies of measles in the UK, with 16 others hospitalised in recent weeks, the Telegraph decide to profile someone who has repeatedly made misleading and debunked claims about vaccines...

In a new #ScienceReview, researchers provide a critical evaluation of research linking glymphatic dysfunction with Alzheimer’s disease. scim.ag/4lG54a0

Since Davies & Read review of 2019 Sameer Jauhar and I have been trying to get closer to the truth about AD discontinuation. It’s entered guidelines as FACT: 50% will experience difficulty stopping. So we completed the DEFINITITIVE meta-analysis of trial data. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Really proud to start the year by sharing our new review in @endosocjournals.bsky.social on the roles of GLP-1 in eating and obesity treatment, led by superstar postdoc @laurenjonesucl.bsky.social! academic.oup.com/endo/article... 🧪🧠📈 #neuroscience #neuroskyence #GLP-1 #obesity #wegovy #ozempic

It'ssssss PREPRINT THURSDAY! (Sadly not a thing). Approximately an era ago, I spent a *lot* of time discussing the assumptions that underpin the field of #ComputationalPskychiatry with the brilliant @jonroiser.bsky.social and @olijrobinson.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps...

V important meta-analysis doi.org/10.1001/jama...: Discontinuation symptoms 1 week post stopping antidepressants was below the threshold for clinically significant discontinuation syndrome. Later worse mood is likely depression relapse @jfhayes.bsky.social @sameerjauhar.bsky.social.

Excited to share our new review on how neuroimaging and computational models can help uncover how people see what they want to see, now out at @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! It was a blast writing this with Haena Kim and @iancballard.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

An #NHS mental health risk assessment as #art . Clinical forms being turned into creative forms at the @royalacademyarts.bsky.social Summer Exhibition.

Important study & big step forward for treatment-resistant #depression. 48-week RCT, #pramipexole showed a ~4-point QIDS-SR benefit over placebo. Less hype, but bigger effects than psychedelic trials, for a scalable option that’s already available to clinicians! www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

First paper from my lab @upenn.edu (open access) @ Biological Psychiatry w/ @emilyrperkins.bsky.social [email protected] We discuss the need to falsify theories of biology predicting syndromes vs. syndromes in ways that allow both to be true 🧵1/10 authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Worth a watch: Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

interesting work from Paul @paulmasset.bsky.social and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social see the commentary: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🍝 A package I love, {datapasta}, came up at #CascadiaRconf this weekend, so I wanted to share a little example of it in action. It's an addin (but also a pkg w/ some funcs), so showing is better than sharing code. Thanks for the awesome pkg, @milesmcbain.bsky.social! #rstats #databs

Here is Kim's (@ucsdcooperlab.bsky.social) well-read @dev-journal.bsky.social Review from last year's special issue on uncovering developmental diversity. If you would like your own copy of the special issue, you can pick one up now at #2025ICDB #2025SDB - booth #4.

Here are my thoughts on how one must demonstrate just the statistical validity of found clusters, before clinical validity is even attempted: www.fharrell.com/post/cluster... #Statistics