Medical Bulletin 31/July/2023

Overview

Here are the top medical news for the day:

Zuranolone a reliable drug for post partum depression

Most new mothersexperience postpartum "baby blues" after childbirth, which commonly include mood swings, crying spells, anxiety and difficulty sleeping. Baby blues usually begin within the first 2 to 3 days after delivery and may last for up to two weeks.

A pill for postpartum depression led to meaningful improvements in depression symptoms, according to a late-stage study published Wednesday in The American Journal of Psychiatry.

The pill, zuranolone, is not yet approved, but the Food and Drug Administration is expected to make its approval decision by Aug 5.

Reference: Kristina M. Deligiannidis,M.D., Samantha Meltzer-Brody et al; Zuranolone for the Treatment of Postpartum Depression, 26 Jul 2023 https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.20220785.

How breast milk boosts the brain

A new study by scientists at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA) at Tufts University suggests that a micronutrient in human breast milk provides significant benefit to the developing brains of newborns, a finding that further illuminates the link between nutrition and brain health and could help improve infant formulas used in circumstances when breastfeeding isn’t possible.

The study, published July 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), also paves the way to study what role this micronutrient might play in the brain as we age.

Researchers found that the micronutrient, a sugar molecule called myo-inositol, was most prominent in human breast milk during the first months of lactation, when neuronal connections termed synapses are forming rapidly in the infant brain. This was true regardless of the mother’s ethnicity or background; the researchers profiled and compared human milk samples collected across sites in Mexico City, Shanghai, and Cincinnati by the Global Exploration of Human Milk study, which included healthy mothers of term singleton infants.

Reference: How breast milk boosts the brain; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2221413120.

A wearable ultrasound scanner could detect breast cancer earlier

When breast cancer is diagnosed in the earliest stages, the survival rate is nearly 100 percent. However, for tumors detected in later stages, that rate drops to around 25 percent.

In hopes of improving the overall survival rate for breast cancer patients, MIT researchers have designed a wearable ultrasound device that could allow people to detect tumors when they are still in early stages. In particular, it could be valuable for patients at high risk of developing breast cancer in between routine mammograms.

The device is a flexible patch that can be attached to a bra, allowing the wearer to move an ultrasound tracker along the patch and image the breast tissue from different angles. In the new study, the researchers showed that they could obtain ultrasound images with resolution comparable to that of the ultrasound probes used in medical imaging centers.

Reference: A wearable ultrasound scanner could detect breast cancer earlier, Science Advances, DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adh5325