The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists has developed professional practice guidelines for using ketamine in psychiatric care in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Based on scientific evidence and expert clinical consensus, the guidelines aim to help psychiatrists and clinicians deliver best practice and optimize patient outcomes. They balance promoting evidence-based practice with recognizing that evidence for ketamine use is still evolving.
App-delivered mindfulness meditation improved sleep impairment in physician assistant (PA) students but did not significantly affect burnout, depression, or anxiety. In a randomized wait-list-controlled trial, PA students who used the 10% Happier meditation app daily for 8 weeks reported a 19% reduction in sleep impairment, compared with a 1% reduction in the control group. Changes in sleep were linked to increased resting-state functional connectivity between the medial prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal gyrus, as well as areas important for working memory. Connectivity changes predicted conversion from impaired to nonimpaired sleep in the mindfulness group.
App-delivered mindfulness meditation alters resting-state brain connectivity in physician assistant students and surgery residents. After an 8-week period, those who used a meditation app showed stronger connections between the frontoparietal network and the nucleus accumbens, and between the default mode and salience networks, compared to a wait-list control group. More mindfulness practice time correlated with increased connectivity between the lateral parietal cortex and supramarginal gyrus, which also linked to improved scores on the 'Describing' subscale of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire. These results suggest that even brief, app-based mindfulness sessions can produce dose-dependent functional connectivity changes in brain systems related to emotion, reward, and self-awareness.