Diagnosing dementia is rarely straightforward, particularly early in the disease course. Alzheimer’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, and frontotemporal dementia can overlap clinically, while mixed pathology is common in older patients. This creates a major barrier for precision medicine: treatment selection, trial enrolment, prognosis, and patient counselling increasingly require a more biologically grounded diagnosis.
Blood biomarkers have already begun to change Alzheimer’s disease diagnostics, especially for detecting amyloid and tau pathology. But the field still lacks robust plasma tools for distinguishing Alzheimer’s disease from dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) or frontotemporal dementia (FTD).
Proteomics across dementia cohorts
A new study, published in Nature Aging, used proximity extension assay proteomics to profile plasma proteins across international dementia cohorts. In the discovery phase, researchers analyzed more than 1,300 plasma samples, including controls and individuals across preclinical, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia stages of Alzheimer’s disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, and frontotemporal dementia.
The analysis identified more than 200 dysregulated proteins across disease groups. For Alzheimer’s disease, glial fibrillary acidic protein, or GFAP, showed the strongest increase across the disease continuum. Neurofilament light chain also rose with clinical stage, while several other proteins declined as Alzheimer’s disease progressed. However, the authors emphasize that these proteomic markers did not outperform established plasma markers of amyloid and tau pathology for detecting Alzheimer’s disease.
The more clinically novel findings came from the non-Alzheimer’s dementias. In dementia with Lewy bodies, integrin alpha-V and integrin alpha-M were consistently reduced, including in analyses stratified by amyloid status and in autopsy-confirmed Lewy body disease. The same integrin-related signal was also seen in Parkinson’s disease data from the PPMI cohort, supporting a broader link to Lewy body pathology.
For frontotemporal dementia, neurofilament light chain remained one of the strongest markers, consistent with its role as a general marker of neuroaxonal injury. Lower GFAP helped distinguish frontotemporal dementia from Alzheimer’s disease, while proteins such as OSM appeared more relevant in earlier frontotemporal degeneration.
A 21-protein dementia panel
The researchers then refined these signals into a custom 21-protein plasma panel and tested it in an independent multicenter cohort. The panel showed its strongest value in differential diagnosis, helping separate dementia with Lewy bodies and frontotemporal dementia from both controls and Alzheimer’s disease dementia. Its performance was moderate to good across these comparisons, suggesting that plasma proteomics may be most useful as an added layer of biological stratification when clinical symptoms overlap.
These values are not sufficient to replace specialist clinical assessment, CSF testing, imaging, or established Alzheimer’s blood biomarkers. But they suggest that plasma proteomics could provide clinically useful support where diagnostic uncertainty remains high.
Toward biomarker-based dementia stratification
The immediate relevance is not simply another biomarker list. The study addresses a practical gap in dementia medicine: identifying scalable blood-based tools that help separate biologically different diseases with overlapping symptoms. That could improve referral pathways, enrich clinical trials with the right patient populations, and support future disease-modifying therapies beyond Alzheimer’s disease.
Important limitations remain. Many DLB and FTD diagnoses were clinical rather than autopsy-confirmed, prodromal groups were relatively small, and biomarker performance may depend on assay platform and cohort calibration. Mixed pathology, especially coexisting Alzheimer’s and Lewy body disease, remains a major challenge.
Even so, the study provides a strong proof of concept. Plasma proteomics may help move dementia diagnostics from broad syndromic categories toward molecular stratification, an essential step if precision neurology is to match the progress already seen in Alzheimer’s biomarker development.
The human brain continues developing beyond the teenage years, with crucial changes involving decision-making and emotional regulation extending into the mid-to-late 20s. Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine have identified a biological process in mice that offers new insight into how memory circuits mature during this period of brain development.
The study published in PLOS Biology titled, “Retrosplenial cortical reorganization during late adolescence introduces instability of contextual memory circuits,” found that a key memory region of the mouse brain undergoes a period of remodeling during late adolescence, causing memories formed earlier in life to become temporarily more difficult to retrieve before resurfacing with less precise detail. The findings identify a biological mechanism that may explain how access to memories changes during development.
The study focused on the retrosplenial cortex (RSP) and discovered that protective mesh-like structures, called perineuronal nets, stabilize memory circuits and unexpectedly diminish during late adolescence before rebuilding in adulthood. The changes were confined to the RSP and were not observed in the nearby hippocampus, another brain region essential for memory.
“We’ve known for years that the brain continues developing through adolescence and young adulthood,” said senior author Jelena Radulovic, MD, PhD, professor of neuroscience, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at Einstein. “Our findings begin to explain what that developmental process looks like in one of the brain’s memory circuits and how it can influence the way earlier experiences are recalled.
Previous studies suggested that the memory circuits reached maturity during early adolescence. Instead, results showed that an important stabilizing system temporarily weakened during late adolescence before recovering in adulthood.
The timing is notable because it corresponds to a period now recognized as one of continued brain maturation in humans. According to the National Institutes of Health, the brain continues developing and maturing into the mid-to-late 20s.
“The behavior matched the biology,” said lead author Hui Zhang, PhD, a research fellow at Einstein. “The retrosplenial cortex is responsible for older, more established memories. As its stabilizing structures declined, access to memories formed earlier in life became less reliable.”
To determine how these brain changes affected behavior, the researchers trained mice to associate a specific environment with a mild foot shock. The mice remembered the experience and froze when returned to the same chamber. Weeks later, many of the mice trained during early adolescence no longer showed that fear response, while mice trained during adulthood retained stable memories over the same period.
When the adolescent mice later experienced another test in a different environment, they once again responded to the original setting, demonstrating that the memories had become temporarily inaccessible rather than erased.
The researchers traced these changes to a decline in key structural proteins that help build and maintain perineuronal nets, along with reduced activity of growth factor, TGFβ2. When TGFβ2 activity was restored, the mice regained their ability to retrieve memories formed earlier in life.
By mid-adulthood, many of those memories resurfaced spontaneously, although they had become less precise. Rather than responding only to the original environment, the mice generalized their fear to unfamiliar settings. The researchers note that this pattern resembles the “reminiscence bump,” a well-known phenomenon in which adults disproportionately recall memories from adolescence and early adulthood while often remembering the emotional significance of an experience more readily than its specific details.
The findings may also have implications beyond memory. Schizophrenia and major depression often emerge in humans during late adolescence. The authors suggest that changes in this developmental process could contribute to vulnerability to psychiatric disorders in genetically susceptible individuals. Additional research is needed to evaluate whether similar mechanisms occur in humans.
It wasn’t too long ago that biopharma giants stayed away from developing psychedelic drugs—but positive clinical data plus a friendlier regulatory climate in Washington have prompted the largest drug developers to embrace the field.
The latest and most telling example of pharma embracing psych drugs came when Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) announced that it agreed to acquire AtaiBeckley (Nasdaq: ATAI) for up to $3.8 billion—of which Lilly will pay $2.8 billion upfront. The deal, set to close in the third quarter, expands Lilly’s neuroscience portfolio by adding the pipeline of AtaiBeckley led by BPL-003 (mebufotenin benzoate), a Phase III candidate for treatment-resistant depression (TRD) that is a synthetic form of 5-MeO-DMT administered intranasally. BPL-003 has been granted the FDA’s Breakthrough Therapy designation.
BPL-003 wowed analysts and others back in April after AtaiBeckley published positive data from a Phase IIa trial (NCT05660642) showing that a single intranasal dose of BPL-003 led to rapid and sustained reductions in Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) scores from baseline in 12 TRD patients who remained on stable SSRI therapy throughout the study. Both the six patients dosed at 10 mg and six at 12 mg showed a 66.7% antidepressant response rate (defined as ≥50% reduction from baseline MADRS score) at Day 2, with five of six participants in the 10 mg cohort (83%) and four of six in the 12 mg cohort (66.7%) maintaining their response at Week 12.
“Especially with progress on BPL-003, we see the company as positioning itself well to becoming a significant player in the mental health therapeutics space,” Sumant Kulkarni, a senior analyst covering biotechnology with Canaccord Genuity, wrote on news of the positive data, adding: “We also still see this space as large enough to accommodate multiple approaches/competitors.”
$3.7B in projected peak sales
Kulkarni also raised Canaccord Genuity’s peak unadjusted U.S. sales forecast for BPL-003 to $3.7 billion by 2036 from $2 billion, after revising the firm’s model by raising the list price from $20,000 to $30,000 per annual treatment course (not accounting for insurance coverage), about the same price as Spravato® (esketamine), also a nasal spray marketed by Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) for TRD plus some depressive symptoms in adults with major depressive disorder (MDD).
Spravato, a noncompetitive N-methyl D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist, crossed the $1 billion sales threshold during the second quarter, as it generated $584 million, up 25% quarter-over-quarter from $464 million in Q1—and up 43% from $734 million in the first half of 2025.
“Sales are tracking to reach annual sales guidance of $3-3.5B+ by 2027–28,” Jefferies equity analyst Andrew Tsai wrote in a research note focused on J&J’s second-quarter results. “Spravato’s trajectory supports the notion psychedelics can be commercially viable in hard-to-treat mental health disorders, by leveraging JNJ’s infrastructure.”
Given the data for BPL-003, Lilly got a bargain, Tsai wrote in a separate note on the Lilly-AtaiBeckley acquisition.
“We think the deal heavily favors LLY, as ATAI’s lead asset BPL-003 (intranasal 5-MeO-DMT) should have multibillion dollar peak sales potential,” Tsai wrote, rather than the $1 billion-plus that he thinks was implied by the deal price.
Tsai and Jefferies had previously forecast peak sales of between $1 billion and $2 billion—a range he said was “arguably conservative” since BPL-003 could, if it aces its Phase III trial, show superiority to Spravato, which is on track to reach up to $5 billion-plus in peak sales.
Positive implications
“At the same time, we appreciate LLY has significantly more resources to maximize the long-term value of ATAI’s psychedelic assets. In any case, the deal has (+) [positive] implications for the entire psychedelic space,” Tsai added.
Among pharma giants joining J&J in embracing psychedelic drug development in recent years:
AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV), which last year acquired the lead pipeline program of privately held Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals, the moderate-to-severe MDD candidate bretisilocin (GM-2505), for up to $1.2 billion.
Otsuka Holdings (Tokyo Stock Exchange: 4578), which in 2023 acquired Mindset Pharma, a Canadian psych drug developer focused on psychiatric and neurological disorders, for C$80 million ($56 million).
With its deal for AtaiBeckley, Lilly becomes the latest pharma giant to perceive the positive implications Tsai cited.
“Treatment-resistant depression persists even after multiple treatments have failed. Millions of people are still searching for relief and desperately need a therapy that works,” Carole Ho, executive vice president and president, Lilly Neuroscience, said in a statement. “Advancing AtaiBeckley’s investigational therapies gives us a real chance to change that.”
Investors agreed with Lilly, giving the pharma a 1% increaseThursday, the day the acquisition was announced, from $1,156.63 to $1,169.17—no small feat since buyers typically stay flat or see their shares slide after announcing an acquisition. And not surprisingly, AtaiBeckley investors were enthusiastic about the deal, as its stock leaped 33% from $5.36 to $7.15. On Friday, Lilly inched up 0.8% to $1,178.58 while AtaiBeckley rose 1% to $7.22.
The AtaiBeckley buyout is Lilly’s eighth announced acquisition of a smaller biopharma this year.
Lilly is acquiring three infectious diseases vaccine developers—Vaccine Company for up to $1.55 billion, Curevo for up to $1.5 billion, and LimmaTech Biologics for up to $780 million—as well as in vivo chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR T) developer Kelonia Therapeutics for up to $7 billion); JAK inhibitor developer Ajax Therapeutics for up to $2.3 billion; next-generation dual-payload antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) developer CrossBridge Bio for up to $300 million; and nonviral DNA delivery-focused drug developer Engage Biologics for up to $202 million cash.
The deal spree reflects Lilly’s desire to capitalize on the billions of dollars it is generating from sales of its obesity and diabetes drugs based on glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) receptor agonists alone or in tandem with a glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP).
“If we see great ideas that we think we can use to help people that need them, of course we’ll do deals,” Daniel M. Skovronsky, MD, PhD, Lilly’s chief scientific and product officer and president of Lilly Research Laboratories, said on CNBC.
“Positive development”
David Risinger, a senior managing director and senior research analyst covering diversified biopharmaceuticals at Leerink Partners, said his firm viewed Lilly’s buyout of AtaiBeckley “as a positive development because it enhances LLY’s pipeline of potential neuroscience blockbuster candidates.”
That pipeline is led by five Phase III programs involving four drugs, none of them a psychedelic. Two of the programs belong to brenipatide, a dual agonist of both the GIP and GLP-1 receptors. Brenipatide is being developed for both MDD and alcohol use disorder.
Also in Lilly’s late-stage neuroscience pipeline are:
Donanemab, which binds to deposited amyloid plaque in the brain and is being studied for the treatment of cognitively unimpaired Alzheimer’s disease.
Ixoberogene Soroparvovec (Ixo-Vec), an intravitreal gene therapy being studied as a single one-time treatment for vision loss associated with neovascular (wet) age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
Remternetug (LY3372993), which also binds to deposited amyloid plaque in the brain and is under study as a treatment of cognitively unimpaired/mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease, with potential for subcutaneous delivery.
In addition, AtaiBeckley “would provide differentiated exposure in psychiatry and reinforce [Lilly’s] broader effort to diversify beyond its cornerstone cardiometabolic franchise,” observed Evan David Seigerman, a managing director and head of healthcare research at BMO Capital Markets, as reported by Reuters.
AtaiBeckley was formed last November by the merger of atai Life Sciences and Beckley Psytech. The company’s stock has nearly doubled,soaring 98% over the past six months from $3.64 on January 16.
“Going mainstream”
“Psychedelic Medicine is going mainstream,” declared Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of Future Ventures, in a post on X. Jurvetson and Future were among early investors, along with Peter Thiel in atai Life Sciences.
AtaiBeckley is one of numerous psychedelic drug developers to show significant six-month gains since January: As of Friday’s closing bell, Compass Pathways (Nasdaq: CMPS) shares jumped 68% to $12.35, GH Researchballooned 69% to $28.71, while Definium Therapeutics (Nasdaq: DFTX) nearly tripled, zooming 194% to $44.29.
Interestingly, those three companies did not get a solid bounce from AtaiBeckley’s acquisition by Lilly. Since the deal was announced Thursday, Compass fell 7% from $13.31 pre-announcement, Definium dipped 3% from $45.66. GH rose 8% Thursday from $26.92 to $29.13, before sliding 1.4% the following day.
Bucking the trend was Cybin, d/b/a Helus Pharma(Nasdaq: HELP), which has climbed 11% since the Lilly-AtaiBeckley announcement, from $6.51 to $7.25. Its shares have slumped 6% since January—but soared 58% over the past month on positive news, such as the 88%+ enrollment rate of patients in Helus’ Phase III APPROACH pivotal trial (NCT06564818) of HLP003 in MDD, on track for topline data readout in Q4 2026.
“We see the potential for 150–200% upside [jump in stock price] if Phase III data in 4Q26 are positive,” Kulkarni wrote, making it the largest potential jump among psychedelic drug developers.
In addition to favorable data, the stock surges also reflect actions by President Donald J. Trump’s administration to encourage psychedelic drug development. In April, President Trump signed Executive Order 14401, directing the FDA and other federal agencies to accelerate research and improve access to psychedelic drugs, citing their potential as promising treatments for serious mental illnesses.
And on July 13, the FDA published “Psychedelic Drugs: Considerations for Clinical Investigations,” a final guidance designed to provide general considerations for developers of psych drugs, with recommendations for how to conduct clinical trials for the treatments.
“Rather than providing specific recommendations on study design, this guidance will present foundational constructs that all sponsors studying the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs, including sponsors without commercial drug development as primary interest (e.g., academic researchers), should consider,” the FDA wrote in the final guidance. “Sponsors are encouraged to request meetings with FDA for advice on a specific drug development program.”
Leaders and laggards
Q32 Bio (Nasdaq: QTTB) shares nearly doubled, leaping 91% from $11.21 to $21.38 July 13 after the autoimmune and inflammatory disease drug developer announced positive 36-week topline results from Part B of the Phase IIa SIGNAL-AA trial (NCT06018428) assessing bempikibart in patients with severe or very severe alopecia areata. Q32 said it saw clinically meaningful efficacy data on the primary endpoint of mean percent change from baseline in SALT score, with a reduction from baseline of 35.3% in the prespecified modified intent to treat (mITT) analysis. The company also reported that 40.0% of patients (10/25) achieved SALT-20 response at Week 36 in the mITT analysis, while 30.3% of patients (10/33) achieved SALT-20 response at Week 36 in the ITT analysis of all enrolled patients.
Veradermics (NYSE: MANE) shares yo-yoed this past week, climbing 12% from $110.17 to $123.70 Wednesday after the pattern hair loss drug developer announced positive topline results from its open-label Phase II Study 207 trial (NCT06527365) assessing VDPHL01, an extended-release oral minoxidil formulation, in women with mild-to-moderate pattern hair loss. Veradermics said most study participants reported improved hair coverage at Month 2, with approximately 88.9% of patients dosed once daily and 90.0% dosed twice daily reporting “improved” or “much improved” outcomes at Month 6. Participants dosed once daily showed amean increase in non-vellus target area hair count (TAHC) of 22.7 hairs/cm² at Month 6, an average that rose to 23.3 hairs/cm² in twice daily dosed patients. The mini surge was short-lived, however, as investors more than gave back the gain, selling off shares to send them tumbling 14% to $105.83 Thursday amid possible investor questions about whether the good clinical news was already reflected in the stock price.
IntroductionDigital technologies are central to university students’ academic, social, and personal lives, offering opportunities for learning and connection while also introducing challenges such as distraction, emotional strain, and difficulties with self-regulation. Despite increasing interest in digital well-being, there is a lack of comprehensive, psychometrically sound instruments specifically designed to assess digital well-being among university students. This study developed and validated the Digital Well-Being Scale (DWS) for use in higher education.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted among 1,533 undergraduate and postgraduate students from a public university in Ghana. Scale development involved literature review, expert evaluation, pilot testing, and psychometric validation. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to identify the underlying factor structure, followed by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to evaluate construct validity. Reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and measurement invariance across gender were also assessed.ResultsEFA supported a six-factor solution comprising Task Interference, Digital Safety and Responsible Use, Perceived Control and Satisfaction, Digital Life Balance, Emotional Regulation, and Digital Dependence and Frustration. Following CFA-based refinement, a 41-item scale was retained. The six-factor first-order model demonstrated excellent fit to the data and outperformed a higher-order model. The DWS showed satisfactory internal consistency, convergent validity, and discriminant validity across all dimensions. Measurement invariance analyses supported configural and metric invariance across gender, although scalar invariance was only partially supported.DiscussionThe DWS provides a theoretically grounded and psychometrically robust multidimensional measure of digital well-being among university students. The findings suggest that digital well-being encompasses behavioural, emotional, cognitive, self-regulatory, and responsible dimensions of digital engagement rather than representing a single, unidimensional construct. The scale offers a valuable tool for research, screening, and intervention aimed at understanding and promoting digital well-being and digital mental health in higher education settings.
<strong>Background:</strong> The application of immersive technologies, particularly virtual reality, has expanded rapidly across health care domains, including mental health, rehabilitation, and education. These technologies enable the creation of controlled, interactive, and ecologically valid environments that can support therapeutic interventions, skill development, and behavioral assessment. Within forensic mental health services (FMHS) and prison settings, where individuals often present with complex psychological needs in restrictive and highly regulated environments, immersive technologies offer potential advantages such as safe simulation of real-world scenarios, enhanced engagement, and personalized intervention delivery. However, despite increasing interest, the evidence base remains fragmented, and questions persist regarding effectiveness, ethical implications, and feasibility of implementation in secure and resource-constrained contexts. <strong>Objective:</strong> Interest in immersive technologies in FMHS and prison settings is growing, yet their role remains unclear. This scoping review mapped current uses, highlighted opportunities, and identified key gaps and considerations for future implementation. <strong>Methods:</strong> A scoping review of English-language publications (2010-2025) was conducted using the Scopus, PubMed, and CINAHL databases. Data extraction followed the Joanna Briggs Institute framework, and thematic analysis explored benefits, drawbacks, and implementation barriers. <strong>Results:</strong> Thirty sources were identified. Primary research focused mainly on virtual reality for therapy, skill training, education, and assessment. There was evidence suggesting benefits such as increased engagement, emotional regulation, skill acquisition, autonomy, and improved clinician-patient dialogue. However, the studies were small, heterogeneous, and inconsistently reported, with limited long-term follow-up. Implementation barriers included institutional, ethical, and technical constraints and limited personalization and end user involvement. Co-design and participatory approaches surfaced as key enablers of acceptability, relevance, and safe use. <strong>Conclusions:</strong> The existing evidence base is preliminary and exploratory but indicates that immersive technologies may have potential value in FMHS and prison contexts. Current findings should be interpreted cautiously because studies are small, heterogeneous, and rarely include long-term follow-up. More robust evidence, careful implementation, and meaningful end user input are needed to support safe, relevant, ethical, and effective use. The emphasis on coproduction and guidance for safe, user-centered implementation is a novel contribution.
By Mai El Shoush, Partnership Campaign Manager, SNF Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute
Few events unite the world quite like the FIFA World Cup, demonstrating soccer’s unique ability to connect people across cultures and communities. As millions tune in, the moment offers a timely reminder on how sports can reach young people far beyond the field. This belief underpins the work of Grassroot Soccer, a valued partner of the SNF Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute. They utilize the power of soccer to advance youth mental health — and have reached more than 25 million young people around the world through this approach.
The partnership incorporates three interconnected areas:
Building capacity for frontline workers
Generating evidence
Contributing to thought leadership on child and adolescent mental health in low-resource settings
The 2026 Men’s World Cup in North America and the upcoming 2027 Women’s World Cup in Brazil present an important opportunity for the organization to take its mental health programming from sub-Saharan Africa and adapt it to the U.S. context.
We spoke with Grassroot Soccer’s Mental Health Specialist Charmaine Nyakonda about the organization’s approach, the impact of their collaboration with SNF, and the growing role of sports in improving the mental health of young people and communities globally.
Grassroot Soccer’s Mental Health Specialist, Charmaine Nyakonda
As international attention increasingly turns towards soccer’s global reach with the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, what role can sports play in advancing youth mental health care across diverse communities?
Soccer is the most popular and accessible sport in the world. From the largest global stages like the World Cup to the most remote rural villages, it’s played everywhere on the planet. As the World Cup shows, soccer has the power to captivate across geographies, cultures, and time zones.
Soccer (and sport in general) is a powerful tool that teaches youth important life skills and character-building lessons like resiliency, hard work, courage, trust, and teamwork. On top of this, soccer’s universal appeal across diverse communities means using the language of the game can also be an effective way to break through the stigma around sensitive but pressing topics like mental health. This is why Grassroot Soccer uses soccer as a teaching tool for mental health.
Grassroot Soccer has successfully touched the lives of millions of young people across settings worldwide. What has the team learned about the universal role that sports can play in supporting mental health, resilience, and social connection?
Across our programs, soccer serves as a universal entry point that hooks young people and meets them where they are. From there, our play-based activities use soccer games and metaphors to make learning about mental health fun and engaging. They break down stigma and create safe spaces where young people can feel comfortable opening up and being vulnerable. This drives exceptional participation and completion rates.
Importantly, our signature soccer-based mental health promotion and prevention program, called MindSKILLZ, is guided by core mental health design principles. This includes grassroots co-creation, trauma-informed practice, relationship-centered delivery, and strengths-based learning — which ensures that programs are ethical, culturally grounded, and safe for adolescents in both stable and crisis-affected settings.
“Soccer (and sport in general) is a powerful tool that teaches youth important life skills and character-building lessons like resiliency, hard work, courage, trust, and teamwork.”
What elements of Grassroot Soccer’s approach do you believe could serve as a transferable blueprint for other organizations seeking to improve outcomes for young people in different sectors and communities?
Our commitment to co-design with young people: We believe that young people are the experts on their lives and needs, so we intentionally apply the principle of “Nothing about us without us” to our work. We put this into practice by engaging young people at every point in the program life cycle to ensure our work meets their needs, from design to implementation to evaluation.
In 2023, Grassroot Soccer officially launched a Youth Advisory Committee (YAC) composed of young leaders that serves as an internal advisory and advocacy body for the organization. The Committee consists of SKILLZ Coaches, Master Coaches, and trainers between the ages of 18 to 30 from the communities we serve.
Mental health integration: Mental health promotion and prevention must be woven into every service that young people access. Mental health is both a driver and an outcome of young people’s overall well-being. Unaddressed mental health challenges undermine progress in HIV, sexual and reproductive health, education, and other youth development areas. And those same factors profoundly shape young people’s mental health in return.
What has made the partnership with the SNF Global Center particularly valuable, and what role do cross-sector and multidisciplinary partnerships play in expanding support and opportunities for young people?
The diverse cultural perspectives from Greece, Brazil, the United States, and South Africa — and especially youth voices — have enriched our understanding of the barriers young people face, the values that motivate them, and the creative solutions they come up with when it comes to mental health.
We’ve also benefited tremendously from the scientific and clinical expertise at the SNF Global Center. We were able to co-develop an open-access, near-peer emotional support online training that aims to enhance the capacity of frontline workers to identify, refer, and support common mental health problems among children and adolescents. This is especially important in low-resource settings.
Additionally, through thought leadership and advocacy collaboration, this partnership has been valuable in contributing to an important shift in the global conversation to framing low-resource settings (the Global South) as sources of innovation that can positively impact the Global North.
Over the years, what has most reinforced your belief in the power of soccer to support youth mental health, and what examples best bring that impact to life?
We’ve seen a few powerful stories of impact in humanitarian settings, where the need for mental health care is at its greatest but resources are at its most limited.
For example, in 2024, relentless downpours following a tropical cyclone caused rivers in Malawi’s Nkhotakota and Karonga districts to overflow, leading to widespread flooding impacting over 150,000 people and forcing many displaced residents to seek refuge in makeshift internally displaced person (IDP) camps.
In the camps, people had no access to mental health and psychological support services or safe spaces, and youth were not attending school. The Malawi Ministry of Health identified a major gap in mental health support for adolescents and young people and called on Grassroot Soccer to deliver MindSKILLZ to respond to this need.
Grassroot Soccer’s response team focused heavily on play, coping skills development, and trauma-informed support, creating critical psychological and physical safe spaces for youth within the camp environment.
Looking ahead, how would you like to see the conversation evolve at the intersection of sports, youth well-being, and mental health?
Firstly, we would like to see the conversation move beyond asking whether adolescent girls and young women like to play sports and instead asking, “What can we unlock when they do?”
For too long, sports (and soccer in particular) have been understood as primarily a significant part of adolescent boys’ and young men’s lives only. That assumption has shaped who gets access, who feels welcome, and whose well-being is centered. Grassroot Soccer’s own programming challenges this directly — we have reached more adolescent girls than boys, and in doing so have created space for girls to reconstruct gendered ideas about soccer. The conversation on sports, youth, and mental health needs to evolve to view sports games like soccer as universal tools that can transcend gender norms, age, and socio-economic background to support young people.
At the same time, we want to see the conversation take adolescent boys’ mental health more seriously, not less. Qualitative insights from Grassroot Soccer show that rigid masculine norms remain a profound barrier for boys.
More broadly, we ultimately want to see the conversation shift from individual resilience to multi-systemic access and inclusive enabling environments. Young people need culturally grounded, safe environments that work for them — and include them in design and delivery to help them develop into healthy adults who carry that capacity forward.
What do you see as the greatest opportunities for the next generation of young people, and what must we do collectively to help make that future possible?
With the largest generation of adolescents coming of age, their ability to live healthy and productive lives will have a profound impact on not just their own life trajectories, but also on the world. Tackling critical global issues from poverty to climate change will require a generation of young people who are strong, healthy, and empowered — and their mental health is central to all this.
At Grassroot Soccer, we are committed to investing in youth mental health to realize a world where mental health challenges have been normalized. We want young people to understand their own mental health, have practical coping skills to deal with frustration and aggression, and recognize the value in seeking support from others. This will help develop a population with reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety, as well as overall improved mental well-being. Then we can collectively realize our vision for a better future.
Through the SNF Global Center, the Child Mind Institute partners with organizations around the world to strengthen child and adolescent mental health systems by combining scientific expertise, local leadership, evidence-based innovation and youth voices. Grassroot Soccer is one example of how cross-sector partnerships can expand access to mental health support in communities where young people already learn, connect, and thrive.
Approximately 40% of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) experience cognitive impairment (CI), which is strongly associated with increased mortality. CI is driven by multiple factors, including vascular injury, accumulation of uremic toxins, disruption of the blood–brain barrier, and chronic inflammation. Recent evidence suggests that kidney disease and neurocognitive decline are mechanistically linked through dysregulated tryptophan metabolism. Tryptophan is metabolised through three main pathways: the kynurenine, indole, and serotonin pathways, each producing bioactive metabolites with distinct neurophysiological effects. The hallmarks of CKD include chronic inflammation, gut microbial dysbiosis, and impaired renal clearance, all of which alter tryptophan metabolism. Inflammation drives tryptophan metabolism towards the kynurenine pathway, increasing the formation of neurotoxic compounds that promote oxidative stress, excitotoxicity, and neuronal injury. However, reduced availability of tryptophan for serotonin synthesis impairs serotonergic signalling and neurotransmission, as well as melatonin biosynthesis, thereby contributing to circadian rhythm disturbances and impaired glymphatic clearance. Concurrently, gut dysbiosis and reduced renal clearance promote the accumulation of indole-derived uremic toxins, leading to endothelial dysfunction, neuroinflammation, and disruption of the blood–brain barrier. This review highlights the current evidence of dysregulated tryptophan metabolism in CKD and its impact on the pathogenesis of neurocognitive complications. The review also discusses potential biomarkers and therapeutic strategies, including kynurenine pathway inhibitors, gut microbiota modulation, uremic toxin adsorption, melatonin supplementation and personalised medicine to mitigate cognitive impairment in CKD.
