It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, May 05, 2026
Updated alcohol warning labels may prompt people to cut back: Study
PISCATAWAY, NJ – Although the United States requires a warning label on alcoholic beverages, alcohol-related deaths have risen steadily over the past two decades. However, new labels warning of specific disease risks, including cancer and liver disease, could better motivate reduced drinking, according to a new study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.
The warning label currently required on alcohol containers in the United States has not changed since its adoption in 1988, despite new evidence linking alcohol to several diseases. The label states the risks of drinking during pregnancy and while driving or operating machinery and warns generally that drinking alcohol “may cause health problems.” The label often goes unnoticed and unremembered by consumers.
“We wanted to test whether new warnings could better inform consumers about alcohol’s harms and better encourage people to consider cutting back on their drinking,” says lead author Anna H. Grummon, Ph.D., M.S.P.H., assistant professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The study was conducted as part of a larger project co-led with Marissa G. Hall, Ph.D., associate professor at the University of North Carolina.
Designed to compare the effects of differently worded and designed warning labels, the study recruited a nationally representative sample of 1,036 adults of legal drinking age (21 and older) who reported drinking at least once a week.
Participants viewed 10 messages -- one control, eight new warning labels, and the current U.S. warning label -- in random order. They then rated each message on how well it encouraged them to drink less alcohol, reminded them of alcohol’s harms, and informed them of something new.
“Each participant rated multiple warnings covering a range of health harms -- such as cancer, liver disease, hypertension, and dementia, among others -- so we could make direct, apples-to-apples comparisons between them,” says Grummon.
All the new alcohol warnings in the study outperformed the current U.S. warning label, but those highlighting cancer risk were particularly effective. This finding is notable as policymakers in the United States and abroad debate whether to adopt a cancer warning on alcohol products.
“Ireland, for example, is set to require cancer warnings on alcohol containers in the coming years, and Alaska already requires a cancer warning to be posted in bars, restaurants, and liquor stores where alcohol is sold,” says Grummon. “Our findings suggest these policies could help people understand the risks of drinking and potentially reduce consumption.”
Study participants also rated the effectiveness of warning icons and label design. Triangles and octagons were perceived as more effective and attention-grabbing than other icons, such as a magnifying glass.
More research is underway. Grummon and Hall are currently running a randomized trial to test whether new alcohol warnings effectively lead people to drink less. The study will also measure whether the warnings improve knowledge of alcohol-related harms over time.
“We know from tobacco control that well-designed warnings can inform consumers and encourage healthier choices,” says Grummon. “Given that alcohol-related deaths are increasing, we hope policymakers will consider whether updating alcohol warnings should be part of a broader strategy to address alcohol-related harms.” ----- Grummon, A. H., Lee, C. J. Y., Campos, A. D., Lazard, A. J., Brewer, N. T., Whitesell, C., Ruggles, P. R., Greenfield, T. K., & Hall, M. G. (2026). New alcohol warnings outperform the current U.S. warning in a national survey experiment. Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 87(3), 433-443. https://doi.org/10.15288/jsad.25-00226
New alcohol warnings outperform the current U.S. warning in a national survey experiment
Article Publication Date
5-May-2026
Lesions as a window into cause: a psychiatrist bets that circuits, not regions, explain psychiatric disorders
Gonçalo Cotovio of the Champalimaud Foundation is mapping the networks that produce psychiatric symptoms and using them to personalize brain stimulation.
LISBON, PORTUGAL, 5 May 2026 – If a small stroke in one corner of the brain can tip a previously healthy person into mania or set off obsessions and compulsions where none existed before, then the circuit connected to that lesion is telling us something rare in psychiatry. It is telling us about the cause. Gonçalo Cotovio, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist and clinical researcher at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, has built his early career on that premise and is using it to push the field beyond a century of descriptive diagnosis toward treatments targeting the networks that actually produce symptoms.
A Bet on Causality in a Field Built on Correlation
Psychiatry is a field saturated with associations. Brain region X lights up in depression, connectivity pattern Y differs in schizophrenia, and yet the causal arrows usually remain unresolved. Cotovio approaches that problem by looking at patients in whom the arrow is, in a sense, already drawn. In the Genomic Press interview published this week in Brain Medicine, he frames the logic with unusual clarity.
“If a focal brain lesion can precipitate a syndrome such as mania or obsessive-compulsive symptoms, the connected network may reveal something fundamental about disease mechanisms,” he says. The technique at the heart of this work is lesion network mapping, which traces the broader functional circuit linked to each small area of injury. Symptoms that look scattered across the brain when viewed one patient at a time often converge onto a shared network when viewed across many.
The method has produced striking findings in mania and, more recently, in lesional obsessive-compulsive disorder, two syndromes Cotovio has worked on directly. He is now extending the strategy to disordered feeding behaviour. His ambition is modest in tone and immodest in substance: to identify the networks that are not merely correlated with psychiatric symptoms but capable of producing them, and to use those networks as targets for intervention.
Dinner-Table Conversations, Then a Lifetime of Them
Born in Lisbon and still working there, Cotovio traces his interest in the brain to a household where the adult conversation rarely strayed from behaviour and emotion. His father is a psychiatrist. The questions that surface at a family dinner when one parent treats psychiatric illness for a living tend to shape a child, and in this case they shaped a career. Medicine drew him in because it sits where human stories meet biology and decision-making. Psychiatry held him because it demanded all of those at once.
He earned his medical degree at NOVA Medical School in 2014, joined the Champalimaud Foundation as a research intern in 2015, completed his PhD in Biomedicine in 2023, and finished his psychiatry residency in 2024. Under the mentorship of Albino J. Oliveira-Maia, head of the Neuropsychiatry Unit, he trained across clinical psychiatry, neuroimaging, and translational neuroscience, with further periods at Harvard Medical School alongside Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Michael D. Fox and Daniel Press. That combination, he says, taught him how to move between the clinic and the laboratory. It also explains why he refuses to let one displace the other.
From Causal Maps to Personalised Stimulation
The second strand of Cotovio's work picks up where the first leaves off. Once a causal circuit has been identified, how should it be engaged? His answer, in practice, is magnetic resonance imaging and connectivity-informed transcranial magnetic stimulation. Rather than applying a standard coil position to every patient, Cotovio aims to explore the use each person's own connectivity profile to individualise targeting. A third strand studies cortical excitability and functional connectivity as candidate biomarkers that might one day help clinicians decide which patient should receive which intervention.
Cotovio is careful about the gap between promise and proof. “The most interesting questions usually demand patience, nuance, and a willingness to revise one’s assumptions,” he says, a line that reads as both scientific temperament and something like a working motto. He levels the same demand at the field itself: “Elegant methods are not enough. The field should stay accountable for whether our research helps explain suffering and improve people’s lives.”
The Part That Does Not Fit on a CV
Asked about his greatest pride, he does not name a paper. He names his family. Asked which living person he most admires, he names his father. His motto, given in Portuguese and translated almost apologetically into English, is concentração, descontração e vamos para a frente, which he renders as focus, calmness, and keep moving forward. Running is where he thinks most clearly. Long meals and quiet evenings at home are where he refuels. For a clinician-scientist whose subject is the circuitry that produces human suffering, the balance seems less like a luxury than a professional tool.
What Cotovio is building in Lisbon is, in the end, a quiet argument. It says that psychiatry can be mechanistic without being reductive, that causality can be pursued in human beings and not only in mice, and that non-invasive stimulation guided by the right map has a chance to do something that symptom-based prescribing cannot. The work is early. The bet is not.
Gonçalo Cotovio’s Genomic Press interview is part of a larger series called Innovators and Ideas that highlights the people behind today’s most influential scientific breakthroughs. Each interview in the series offers a blend of cutting-edge research and personal reflections, providing readers with a comprehensive view of the scientists shaping the future. By combining a focus on professional achievements with personal insights, this interview style invites a richer narrative that both engages and educates readers. This format provides an ideal starting point for profiles that explore the scientist’s impact on the field, while also touching on broader human themes. More information on the research leaders and rising stars featured in our Innovators and Ideas – Genomic Press Interview series can be found on our interview website: https://interviews.genomicpress.com/.
The Genomic Press Interview in Brain Medicine titled “Gonçalo Cotovio: Mapping causal brain circuits to personalize neuromodulation in psychiatry,” is freely available via Open Access, starting on 5 May 2026 in Brain Medicine at the following hyperlink: https://doi.org/10.61373/bm026k.0033.
About Brain Medicine: Brain Medicine (ISSN: 2997-2639, online and 2997-2647, print) is a peer-reviewed medical research journal published by Genomic Press, New York. Brain Medicine is a new home for the cross-disciplinary pathway from innovation in fundamental neuroscience to translational initiatives in brain medicine. The journal’s scope includes the underlying science, causes, outcomes, treatments, and societal impact of brain disorders, across all clinical disciplines and their interface.
NEW YORK, New York, USA, 5 May 2026 — There was a boy on a balcony in Sakarya. Dr. Dilek Colak, who now runs a laboratory at Weill Cornell Medicine that peers into human brain organoids the size of a lentil, grew up across the street from him. The boy had a mental illness. He watched the other children play. He did not come down. Decades later, in a Genomic Psychiatry Interview published today, Dr. Colak names that single childhood observation as the quiet seed of everything that followed.
“Though I have forgotten the faces of most of my childhood friends,” she says, “I never forgot the boy who was always apart from us. That early, quiet observation of his isolation stayed with me, ultimately grounding my scientific interest in the brain and drawing me toward a career in neuroscience.”
From Hazelnut Harvests to Human Brain Organoids
Dr. Colak was born in Sakarya, a city on the Black Sea side of northern Turkiye. She grew up until high school in a small town surrounded by farm animals and the smell of hazelnuts at harvest. The curiosity that began there carried her, eventually, to the Max Planck Institute for Neuroscience and the Helmholtz Center Stem Cell Institute in Munich, where she completed doctoral work under Dr. Magdalena Götz on the cellular logic of brain development. In 2009 she crossed the Atlantic for a postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Dr. Samie Jaffrey at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The move felt impulsive. She worried that she was following the city rather than the science. She was wrong about that, and the error has defined her life. “I was excited to shift my focus to molecular neuroscience in the Jaffrey lab, I worried that my choice was driven more by a desire to live in New York than by a fair evaluation of all my options,” she recalls. “However, it proved transformative; not only did the Jaffrey lab provide the training for my seminal discoveries and the foundation for my own laboratory, but I also met my husband and started my family here.”
Inside the Jaffrey lab, Dr. Colak uncovered an RNA-directed silencing mechanism implicated in Fragile X Syndrome. The finding reframed her ambitions. A laboratory bench could not, by itself, turn a molecular insight into a treatment. She launched her own group in 2015. She is now Associate Professor at the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute and at the Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children’s Health, a dual appointment that places her at the interface of molecular neuroscience and pediatric medicine.
What Scientific Excellence Leaves Out
Dr. Colak’s current work focuses on how non-neuronal astrocytes and RNA degradation pathways regulate brain function and behavior, with autism and schizophrenia as the conditions she most wants to understand. Her group combines genetically engineered mouse models with human stem cell-derived brain organoids. The goal is to define what she calls the molecular signatures of these disorders, to see how breakdowns in local protein synthesis and cell-to-cell communication might surface, eventually, as the behaviors that send patients and families to clinics.
Ask her what she enjoys most about running a laboratory and she answers without hedging. “What I enjoy most is the opportunity to question long-standing dogmas and to investigate neglected areas of research.” The interview suggests she means it. Pressed on what the scientific community should examine about itself, she offers a sharp critique of how merit is currently tallied.
“Scientific excellence is often measured through a narrow lens that overvalues high-impact journals and quantitative ‘basic science,’ often at the expense of locally relevant research and clinical expertise,” she argues. “True transformation requires moving beyond these reductive metrics toward holistic frameworks that prioritize qualitative expert judgment and the diverse societal impacts of global research.”
It is not a fashionable position inside institutions that still rank themselves by impact factor. It is worth noting that a scientist whose own training ran through Max Planck, Helmholtz, and Weill Cornell is making it.
A Private Fear, Plainly Named
Dr. Colak identifies as her greatest achievement the crossing of systemic barriers and a lack of resources in order to pursue higher education, finding the opportunities abroad that built both the science and the family. Her heroes are trailblazer women. The living person she most admires is Malala Yousafzai. Her favorite occupations are traveling, running, and skiing. She lives in Tenafly, New Jersey.
Asked about her greatest fear, she does not reach for the abstract. “I harbor a quiet, persistent fear of an unfinished story,” she says, “of not being there to witness my children’s transition into adulthood.” It is the sort of sentence that sits differently on the page when you remember that her laboratory is built around children’s brains.
Her motto is likewise plain. Appreciate what you have while you work on what you want. She would live, given the choice, in a Mediterranean town. She treasures non-digital childhood photographs, her college-era jeans, and the first drawings and videos of her daughters. She is, in her own description, determined and energetic, working to be less of a perfectionist so that time goes further.
Somewhere inside all of that, the boy on the balcony is still watching.
Dr. Dilek Colak’s Genomic Press interview is part of a larger series called Innovators and Ideas that highlights the people behind today’s most influential scientific breakthroughs. Each interview in the series offers a blend of cutting-edge research and personal reflections, providing readers with a comprehensive view of the scientists shaping the future. By combining a focus on professional achievements with personal insights, this interview style invites a richer narrative that both engages and educates readers. This format provides an ideal starting point for profiles that explore the scientist’s impact on the field, while also touching on broader human themes. More information on the research leaders and rising stars featured in our Innovators and Ideas – Genomic Press Interview series can be found on our interview website: https://interviews.genomicpress.com/.
The Genomic Press Interview in Genomic Psychiatry titled “Dilek Colak: How do glial cells achieve multiple functions, and how do they contribute to neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric diseases?,” is freely available via Open Access, starting on 5 May 2026 in Genomic Psychiatry at the following hyperlink: https://doi.org/10.61373/gp026k.0030.
About Genomic Psychiatry: Genomic Psychiatry: Advancing Science from Genes to Society (ISSN: 2997-2388, online and 2997-254X, print) represents a paradigm shift in genetics journals by interweaving advances in genomics and genetics with progress in all other areas of contemporary psychiatry. Genomic Psychiatry publishes peer-reviewed medical research articles of the highest quality from any area within the continuum that goes from genes and molecules to neuroscience, clinical psychiatry, and public health.
Living in the fast-paced heart of New York City puts one right where global cultures collide, creating a unique energy that is a reminder of how diverse people and bold ideas come together to solve the world’s biggest health mysteries.
Credit
Dilek Colak
Dilek Colak: How do glial cells achieve multiple functions, and how do they contribute to neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric diseases?
LAWRENCE — A researcher from the University of Kansas has led a large-scale study of university undergraduates to better understand how psychological conditions such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and eating disorders are connected.
The investigation, appearing in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, relied on the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP), an emerging alternative to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the traditional guide for diagnosing and treating patients.
The findings suggest HiTOP’s use of symptom dimensions may better support more precise, personalized mental health care.
“There are problems with the way we diagnose people with mental health issues,” said lead author Kelsie Forbush, professor of clinical child psychology at KU. “The current system is categorical, so you either have the mental health condition, or you don’t. That can be really problematic for a number of reasons, and it’s especially true for eating disorders.”
Forbush also pointed to concerns with the DSM, which is currently recommended by the American Psychological Association, including a tendency for disorders to be highly heterogeneous.
“There are numerous ways a person could meet criteria for a category,” Forbush said. “I believe there are 126 different ways a person could meet criteria for anorexia nervosa. So, in many cases, that yes-or-no label doesn’t really tell the clinician or therapist what is actually going on with a person. It’s also possible for somebody with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa to have the exact same symptoms in common, except for being at different body weights.”
Forbush said two clients can have completely different diagnostic labels but nearly identical symptoms. Under the DSM, she added, two people can also be assigned the same label with little symptom overlap.
“We also see an issue of diagnostic migration over time because of some of these issues,” Forbush said. “For example, we did a study several years ago where we found among people who were diagnosed with anorexia nervosa at baseline, one year later none of them had the same diagnosis of anorexia nervosa, but they all had an eating disorder.”
Under the DSM’s diagnostic system, Forbush said, small changes in symptom presentation can lead to a different diagnosis. Because of these issues, HiTOP has gained traction.
“People are wanting a system that is going to be more clinically helpful and also convey more information about prognosis,” she said. “That’s another issue we have with the current diagnostic system. When I get the label, I don’t know: Is this somebody who is at high risk or low risk? It’s just not very informative in that way.”
Alternatively, HiTOP uses dimensional systems rather than diagnostic categories. More specific subdimensions — such as fear, distress and eating pathology — are grouped under broader dimensions.
“These are dimensions instead of categories,” Forbush said. “One way I think of it is if you get your blood pressure taken or your weight taken, it’s a number anywhere along a range. And you can also say, ‘Oh, that’s high blood pressure,’ or ‘that’s a weight that the CDC would say is obesity,’ right?”
Using HiTOP, Forbush and her collaborators are developing a hierarchy of symptoms and relationships among symptoms to better understand what a person is experiencing.
“In our past research, we found that this dimensional system was much more predictive of things like whether somebody recovered, their psychiatric impairment, and how severe their mental health condition was even a year later,” Forbush said. “Whereas the current system, the DSM, didn’t predict very much, even when we looked at many disorders together.”
The study used data from a nationally representative sample of veterans that was collected at KU. All participants were veterans who had separated from their service branch within the previous six months.
The team analyzed how symptoms clustered together and identified “internalizing” as a broad, higher-order dimension reflecting a tendency toward inwardly directed distress. This hierarchical internalizing structure supports HiTOP over DSM-style diagnostic categories.
“I’d say the core of internalizing is a high propensity toward negative emotionality,” Forbush said. “So high levels of neuroticism — more likely to feel sad, down, anxious, just wired that way. Even negative temperament: some babies come out with a more negative temperament than others. That doesn’t mean they’ll develop disorders, but it makes it more likely. So it’s really about treating that core negative emotionality. If that is treated well, the hope is people won’t develop more disorders within that domain over time.”
