A Personalized 12-week "Brain Fitness Program" for Improving Cognitive Function and Increasing the Volume of Hippocampus in Elderly with Mild Cognitive Impairment.

Reducing cognitive decline in patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) may slow their progression to develop dementia. In this 12-week single-arm intervention trial, elderly patients (n = 127, age 70.69 +/-10.53, 63% female) with a diagnosis of MCI were enrolled in a multi-disciplinary Brain Fitness Program. The main outcome measure was changes in a battery of 10 cognitive domains. Each patient received weekly personalized cognitive stimulation, neurofeedback training, and brain coaching/counseling for eating a Mediterranean diet, taking omega-3 supplements, increasing fitness, and practicing mindfulness meditation. The post-program testing showed 84% of the patients experienced statistically significant improvements in their cognitive function (p< 0.05). Among the random sample of 17 patients who had a post-program quantitative MRI, 12 patients had either no atrophy or an actual growth above the baseline volume of their hippocampus. These preliminary findings support the concept that a personalized Brain Fitness Program can improve cognitive function and either reverse or grow the volume of hippocampus in elderly with MCI.

Population structure of Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar L.): a range-wide perspective from microsatellite DNA variation.

Atlantic salmon (n = 1682) from 27 anadromous river populations and two nonanadromous strains ranging from south-central Maine, USA to northern Spain were genotyped at 12 microsatellite DNA loci. This suite of moderate to highly polymorphic loci revealed 266 alleles (5-37/locus) range-wide. Statistically significant allelic and genotypic heterogeneity was observed across loci between all but one pairwise comparison. Significant isolation by distance was found within and between North American and European populations, indicating reduced gene flow at all geographical scales examined. North American Atlantic salmon populations had fewer alleles, fewer unique alleles (though at a higher frequency) and a shallower phylogenetic structure than European Atlantic salmon populations. We believe these characteristics result from the differing glacial histories of the two continents, as the North American range of Atlantic salmon was glaciated more recently and more uniformly than the European range. Genotypic assignment tests based on maximum-likelihood provided 100% correct classification to continent of origin and averaged nearly 83% correct classification to province of origin across continents. This multilocus method, which may be enhanced with additional polymorphic loci, provides fishery managers the highest degree of correct assignment to management unit of any technique currently available.

Clonal stability and mutation in the self-fertilizing hermaphroditic fish, Rivulus marmoratus.

Previous investigations of natural populations of the hermaphroditic, self-fertilizing fish species Rivulus marmoratus demonstrated a surprising amount of interclonal differentiation among highly polymorphic "DNA fingerprint" loci. The genetic differentiation observed among clones was thought to be the effect of extreme population mixing because of high rates of migration and population extinction. It was demonstrated that mutation rates at hypervariable loci would have to exceed 10(-4) on average to alone account for the observed interclonal differences. The present study reports that, among laboratory lines of this species, mutation rates at the most unstable set of hypervariable loci are not greater than 3.52 x 10(-4), and are probably lower. Mutation rates at several other sets of loci are even lower. A field transplantation study demonstrated complete clonal stability over several generations. These results suggest that the high interclonal differences observed in natural populations of this species is not caused by a generally higher rate of mutation at these specific loci.