Zoom-In on Champalimaud: Ana Saraiva Ayash

Zoom-In on Champalimaud: Gonçalo Cotovio

I graduated from NOVA Medical School in 2014, before joining the Champalimaud Foundation’s Neuropsychiatry Unit (NPU) as a research intern the following year. Principally, I have been working on secondary bipolar disorder neuroimaging. 

Since then, I have been fortunate enough to train and work in a variety of institutions, including Centro Hospitalar de Lisboa Ocidental, Harvard Medical School, and since 2017 I have been completing my PhD through a FCT scholarship at the NPU.

Early diagnosis aims to detect cancer in its early stages when it is potentially curable. This can apply not only to people who already have symptoms of a given cancer, but also to those who, not having any symptom, are subject to known risk factors that justify this approach.

Mr. P. started to be followed at the smoking cessation consultation of the Champalimaud Foundation in mid-2018. He had been a smoker for 33 years, and in 2018, he smoked around one pack of cigarettes a day. His first attempt to quit failed, but Mr. P. never quit the consultation and never gave up on quitting smoking. He finally achieved his goal in mid-2020 through a multidisciplinary approach (including psychology and psychiatry consultations) – and, to this day, has never smoked again.

To know more about this research:

Digest

Scientific Article

Funded by the MCSA & Citizens action - RAISE is built around a concept of co-creation that will blend Researchers at Schools (RAS) activities with European Researchers’ Nights (ERN) public events over the next two years.

Zoom-In on Champalimaud: Charlotte (Charlie) Rosher

Before entering the Champalimaud Foundation, I studied Evolutionary Biology on a Master’s programme that rotated around universities in Uppsala (Sweden), Montpellier (France), Munich (Germany) and Boston (USA). I love seeing the world through the lens of evolution but I have always been focussed in some way on brains and behaviour. Now I am investigating emotions and defensive behaviours for my PhD in the Behavioural Neuroscience lab (Moita lab). 

In the USA, rTMS was cleared by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2008 to treat patients suffering from treatment resistant depression, or in other words, patients who do not respond to standard antidepressants. It has since been approved or recommended in several other countries. The main advantage of rTMS is that it is a non-invasive, drug-free, and safe alternative treatment that really works: up to half of the patients for whom other antidepressant strategies have not worked will respond to rTMS.

What do the terms incidence and prevalence stand for? What do they measure? What are they used for?

Incidence and prevalence are two statistical measures of disease frequency that apply to any and every disease, although here we’ll just be concerned with cancer.

Let's face it. As enticing as the idea of starting lunch with a chocolate cake might be, few would actually make that choice when it comes down to it. And yet, at the end of the meal, many would reach for that same cake without hesitation. 

The cause behind this phenomenon is the body's ever-changing internal states: by lunchtime, the body often needs protein, so the brain promotes that particular food choice. However, after the protein was ingested, carbs might be a nice extra for padding the body’s fat stores.