Publishing Now
Now Publishing Online
Brain Health publishes articles online as soon as they are accepted and produced, with the online release date serving as the official publication date. The five articles below are live and citable now. They open the journal with the conviction that organizes its scope: brains are sustained as well as treated, and the science of how brains stay well deserves a dedicated venue.
Editorial
The astrocyte and the plastic spoon: Welcoming Brain Health, a journal of lifelong brain resilience
Ma-Li Wong
The inaugural editorial sets out what Brain Health intends to be and what it does not. The journal opens by holding two faces of brain resilience side by side: the astrocyte arriving late in adult life and weaving itself into hippocampal circuits, and the polymer leaving the bloodstream through clinical removal. Brain health, in this framing, is regenerative and corrective, additive and subtractive, and the journal will publish both.
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Innovators & Ideas: Rising Star
Luisa Pinto: Rethinking depression through the lens of neuron-glia plasticity
Luisa Alexandra Meireles Pinto
A Genomic Press Interview with Luisa Pinto, principal investigator at the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute, University of Minho. Pinto traces her path from stem-cell work at the Karolinska Institute through doctoral training with Magdalena Götz to an independent program centered on adult hippocampal cytogenesis. Her finding that newborn astrocytes, alongside newborn neurons, are required for sustained remission from depressive-like states reframed a literature long focused on neurons alone.
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Perspective
The human microplastic burden and brain health: From measurement to pathophysiology and removal
Licinio J, Steenblock C, Fabiano N, Bornstein SR, Wong M-L
A Perspective on what is now measurable, what is not, and what the field must do next. Decedent human brain tissue carries microplastic concentrations seven to thirty times higher than liver or kidney, with the heaviest loads in donors with dementia. Ultra-processed foods are the principal delivery vehicle. The authors argue that population-scale exposure reduction, polymer-specific risk stratification, and clinical removal strategies including therapeutic apheresis define the immediate research agenda.
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Viewpoint
From lesions to brain health: Causal circuits in psychiatry
Cotovio G, Oliveira-Maia AJ
A Viewpoint on what causal network mapping reveals about psychiatric disorders. Across depression, mania, psychosis, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, lesions, deep brain stimulation targets, and transcranial magnetic stimulation targets converge on shared circuits. The authors argue that brain health is best understood as the capacity of distributed networks to sustain adaptive regulation of emotion, cognition, and behavior, and that perturbation studies offer the strongest available causal evidence in human neuroscience.
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Obituary
In memory of J. Craig Venter (1946-2026): The scientist who dared challenge the impossible and won
Julio Licinio
Brain Health remembers J. Craig Venter, who died on 29 April 2026. The obituary traces his career across genomics, synthetic biology, and ocean science: the first complete genome of a free-living organism, the parallel pursuit of the human sequence, the global ocean expedition, the construction of the first synthetic cell, and his sustained advocacy for ocean health and the removal of plastic from the seas. Word impossible appeared often in his career, almost always coming from someone else, who was subsequently proved wrong.
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