Neuroscientist, Mama Bear
Birmingham, AL
Joined October 2013
- Tweets6.3K
- Following3.2K
- Followers3.5K
- Likes26.1K
Eat, Pray, Love was the worst movie ever. Example of horrible selfishness. How could the main character just ditch her husband like that? True happiness comes from commitment and discipline.
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
People may not know this, but I started my neurology career at a large practice dedicated to #multiplesclerosis. As a young neurologist at the time, freshly out of my Mayo Clinic neurology training, I quickly realized that a significant subset of patients that I was seeing at that practice did not qualify for the MS diagnosis and instead had other diagnoses that were associated with white matter changes on MRI of the brain and a clinical picture suggestive of MS. Quite a few of those patients (I should've done a study on the prevalence back then! 😀) had small fiber neuropathy, #Dysautonomia and elevated markers of inflammation and/or autoimmunity.
✔️ Misdiagnosis with MS is common
✔️ It doesn't mean that you're healthy or have anxiety, stress or FND if MS is not your diagnosis
✔️ Many patients with misdiagnosed MS have systemic autoimmunity, small fiber neuropathy and #dysautonomia.
✔️ Our recent paper calls for expanding the field of neuroimmunology to include disorders other than MS, which have been traditionally left out of this subspecialty.
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…
Christina Applegate reveals she was misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“This may come as great news, but to me, I’m back at square one. It’s hard to say that [my doctor] came into my room and she said, ‘Congratulations, you don’t have MS'... You don’t get misdiagnosed and then all of the sudden I’m better. I haven’t gotten better … If anything, I’ve gotten worse in some ways. So I’m back at square one, that I don’t know what’s going on with me... there’s a pretty damn high number of misdiagnoses with MS. It’s clear now that they’re finding something different. Something else is going on... It’s this weird feeling because I became this poster child for MS. I had a reason. I had a f*cking reason as to why my day sucked every day. And now I don’t have a reason and it’s very unnerving and it’s really confusing for me.”
variety.com/2026/tv/news/chr…
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
Honestly, Elon Musk is the only pioneer left who makes you truly inspired & amazed by innovation. Landing rockets backwards, driving cars upside down...it feels like our great American pioneer spirit went dormant since the Apollo missions, and we've felt stuck in time, but he's reawakened it...and for the first time in decades people are actually asking "what else is possible?" instead of this gloomy malaise of stagnation and planned obsolescence. Just the dumbest thing imaginable to bet against this guy.
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
Beautiful Fall hiking weather in the ‘hood this afternoon in between grant reviews 😍
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
The best reason to read ancient history isn't to memorize dates. It is to realize that human nature hasn't changed at all. The arrogance, jealousy, power struggles, and public anxiety we experience on screens today were all documented thousands of years ago.
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
Look at these gorgeous, dynamic, orange mitochondria surrounding the blue nucleus.
A view of life from beneath a cell monolayer in a parti dish. Whatever angle you look at it, life is always dynamic and pretty special.
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
Now do medicine.
A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life.
At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday."
He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy.
Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system.
He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting.
He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way."
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
1/13 Today’s coverage of our letter to the Health Secretary raises an important question: should the NHS introduce the first disease-modifying antibody treatments for Alzheimer’s disease? Yes I think we should explore this again, here I recap the basis for my views.
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
Excited to share our discovery of a cognitive resilience sentinel in aging (Nature Neuroscience, Open Access nature.com/articles/s41593-0…) led by a terrific postdoc Cinzia Vicidomini PhD, other members of the Sahay lab and terrific collaborators.
Background
Healthy cognitive aging depends on a balance of resilience and vulnerability factors that dictate the tempo of synapse loss, lipid dysregulation, excitation-inhibition imbalance, ferroptosis, and neuroinflammation. Disruption of this balance accelerates cognitive decline and increases risk for MCI and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Cognitive reserve theory posits the existence of compensatory factors in the aging brain that offset pathophysiological alterations; however, the identities of such factors have remained elusive.
The discovery
We discovered a secreted phospholipase, Pla2g2f, in a screen for synapse loss-induced genes in the Dentate Gyrus region of the hippocampus. We found that Pla2g2f expression is increased during perforant path synapse loss in aging and in aged cognitively resilient individuals with AD pathology. To study the functions of Pla2g2f, we employed genetic and viral approaches to bidirectionally manipulate levels of Pla2g2f in the hippocampus of aging mice. We found that Pla2g2f loss exacerbates aging-associated synapse loss, inflammatory microglia, reactive gliosis, impaired neurogenesis, lipid dysregulation, lipid droplet accumulation in neurons and microglia, and memory loss. Conversely, boosting levels of Pla2g2f during aging in mice is sufficient to prevent these pathophysiological alterations and protect memory. Remarkably, increasing Pla2g2f levels in middle-age prophylactically modified the trajectory of cognitive decline. In a human model system, we showed that neuronal PLA2G2F signaling reduced lipid droplet accumulation and cholesterol ester load in microglia, both signatures of AD (Alois Alzheimer, 1907).
Impact and Translation
Neuroinflammation is driven by pathological buildup of lipid droplets in microglia which impairs phagocytosis, debris clearance and synapse pruning, and produces toxic cytokines. Compensatory PLA2G2f upregulation confers neuroprotection through mobilization of lipid droplets, phospholipid remodeling, lipid signaling and potentially, ferroptosis suppression (Jiang lab, MSKCC). Much like EPO’s compensatory role in maintaining blood oxygen levels, we think that PLA2G2F is a sentinel to detect and protect synapses during aging. Boosting Pla2g2f levels in aging-sensitive knock-in AD models reduces lipid droplet accumulation in microglia, amyloid plaques and improves memory (preprint, unpublished, Sahay lab). Ongoing efforts are aimed at derisking therapeutic modalities to increase Pla2g2f expression in aging and AD to prevent memory decline.
Big thanks to our terrific collaborators @chopralab, @LabSalta, Li-Huei Tsai and @MatBVictor, Shannan Ho Sui, Murakami and @SimonsFdn (The Simons Collaboration on Plasticity and the Aging Brain) for funding.
#aging #cognition #resilience #healthspan
Feedback and questions are welcome.
Thank you Grok for correcting me. It is F1, not J1. What I was told was wrong-should have done more research before posting and I apologize. From now on I will stop commenting on X (still believe hard working immigrants who appreciate the U.S. should be able to come here)! 🤦♀️
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
My PhD advisor once told me to think bigger. Six months later, he suggested narrowing the scope. This was my introduction to academic leadership.
It now costs universities $70,000 to support a J1 VISA. No one can afford this. The United States is shooting itself in the foot by making it hard for talented legal immigrants to work here. More work=more productivity=more innovation=more jobs for everyone.
We tried several PD "targets" predicted by machine based learning. None of them worked in real life experiments. Biology has a mind of her own. We must do lab work to confirm predictions.
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
A brief story on why this is wrong-headed and doomed to fail:
My lab is currently studying the regulation of a gene. We think the gene is doing a surprising amount of stuff, and it has some regulatory features that we are interested in from prior work. 1/11
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
It’s so much better for kids to make ‘em pedal—for many reasons. Old school FTW, again.
Laura Volpicelli 🇺🇸 retweeted
Unpopular opinion:
I don't go out of my way to build relationships with students.
I intentionally maintain professional distance.
I've found that when I focus on teaching well, maintaining boundaries, and creating a productive classroom environment, the relationships take care of themselves.