DOCTORS’ NOTES
L continued from p3
“ An important implication of these results is also that it’ s not just patients who were influenced by the unconventional press conference,” says Michael Barnett, MD, a professor of health services, policy, and practice at Brown.“ Their doctors were either influenced themselves or pushed by patients to adopt a new practice.”
At the briefing, administration officials claimed that acetaminophen use during pregnancy may be linked to an increased risk of autism. They also suggested that leucovorin, a folate-based drug approved for certain cancer-related uses and metabolic conditions, could be used to treat autism. Though leucovorin has been studied in small clinical trials for autism with mixed and still preliminary results, it is not included in standard autism treatment guidelines.
Using electronic health record data from more than 1,600 hospitals and 37,000 clinics across the US, the researchers analyzed weekly prescribing trends before and after Sept. 22.
After the press conference, acetaminophen use among pregnant women treated in emergency rooms declined by about 10 percent compared with what researchers would have expected based on prior trends. In the first month, the decline was as low as 20 percent below expected levels.
At the same time, outpatient prescriptions for leucovorin rose approximately 71 percent among children ages 5 to 17; during the first month, they as much as doubled compared with what researchers would have predicted. Almost three-quarters of the leucovorin prescriptions were written for children with autism diagnoses, a group that accounts for only 4 percent of the pediatric population in the dataset.
The authors say the findings highlight the broader impact of public health communications and illustrate how high-profile federal messaging can influence clinical decisionmaking across the country.
Theresa Desrochers conducts studies in Brown’ s MRI Research Facility
One Thing After Another
Differences in how brain regions work together during sequential cognitive tasks could inform OCD treatments. BY GRETCHEN SCHRAFFT
Researchers found differences in how brain regions work together during certain cognitive tasks, which may help clinicians more effectively treat and assess obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The study, which was conducted in the lab of Theresa Desrochers, PhD, an associate professor of brain science, and published in Imaging Neuroscience, examined potential links between abstract sequencing and OCD for the study.
“ We started looking into OCD because symptoms of the condition suggest that patients lose track or get stuck where they are while performing sequences,” says Hannah Doyle, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate at Brown.
For the study, participants performed a sequential cognitive task while in an MRI, naming the color or shape of an object in a specific order. Doyle found that while people with OCD were able to perform the sequence as well as people who were not diagnosed with OCD, the MRI scans revealed differences in brain regions connected to motor and cognitive task control, working memory, and object recognition.
“ Their behavior looked similar, but the brains of the participants with OCD recruited more brain regions than the people in the control group,” Doyle says. Some of the regions hadn’ t previously been linked to OCD, she adds.
Nicole McLaughlin, PhD, an associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior, says the findings may lead to new treatment targets for OCD, especially when involving transcranial magnetic stimulation. TMS, which uses magnetic pulses to stimulate brain regions involved in a psychiatric disorder, leads to improvement in about 30 to 40 percent of OCD patients; McLaughlin says it might be even more effective if the newly identified regions are targeted.
The researchers are testing the possibility of using the sequence task itself as an assessment tool.
“ We are planning to use the task between treatments,” McLaughlin says.“ If we start to see OCD patients’ brains looking more like control participants when they perform the task, that could help indicate that TMS treatment may be effective for symptom reduction.”
PHOTOGRAPY: GRETCHEN SCHRAFFT.
4 HEALTH DISCOVERIES @ BROWN l FALL 2026