Abstract Emerging evidence suggests that adults with a history of early life adversity (ELA), while more susceptible to psychopathology, may also be particularly sensitive to the benefits of contemplative practices. In the present study, we examined whether ELA was associated with greater mental health benefits following a contemplative-based social resilience training program, administered as...
Recreational psychedelic use is increasing, yet data on adverse events remains limited. This study characterized emergency department (ED) visits associated with recreational psychedelic use at UC San Diego Medical Center. We conducted a retrospective chart review of ED encounters (2010–2023). Cases were identified using ICD-10 hallucinogen-related codes and confirmed through manual review....
Background: Depression in children is a concerning societal issue and can be associated with poor academic performance, school dropout, and poor overall quality of life. Additionally, child depression is often associated with parallel stress and depression in parents. Objective: This scenario highlights the urgent need for the development and implementation of accessible and scalable solutions...
Medical scientists have dual commitments to clinical care and research efforts. Such commitments can create hectic and stressful work schedules, which may impact on well-being and cognition. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that brief mindfulness coaching (three 1.5 hour online group sessions over 12 weeks) can benefit medical scientists. We conducted a waitlist-controlled intervention...
Mystical experiences are powerful experiences that may have therapeutic value. Ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, has shown potential to induce mystical experiences. However, little research has explored this phenomenon, particularly in treatment-resistant depression. We analyzed clinical data from 60 veterans with treatment-resistant depression receiving a total of 189 ketamine treatments....
Depression in children is a concerning societal issue and can be associated with poor academic performance, school dropout, and poor overall quality of life. Additionally, child depression is often associated with parallel stress and depression in parents. This scenario highlights the urgent need for the development and implementation of accessible and scalable solutions that may cobenefit...
CNS DrugsJune 1, 2025Sijia Zhang, Houtan Afshar, Peter J. Colvonen et al.1 citation
Ketamine and esketamine are increasingly used to manage treatment-resistant depression and have also been shown to reduce symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Little is known about how common comorbidities in the veteran population, such as traumatic brain injury (TBI) or obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), may influence ketamine and esketamine treatment outcomes. In this retrospective...
Interoceptive attention to internal sensory signals, such as the breath, is fundamental to mindfulness. However, interoceptive attention can be difficult to study, with many studies relying on subjective and retrospective measures. Response consistency is an established method for evaluating variability of attention on exteroceptive attention tasks, but it has rarely been applied to...
Ketamine helps some patients with treatment resistant depression (TRD), but reliable methods for predicting which patients will, or will not, respond to treatment are lacking. Herein, we aim to inform prediction models of non-response to ketamine/esketamine in adults with TRD. This is a retrospective analysis of PHQ-9 item response data from 120 patients with TRD who received repeated doses of...
Background Ketamine helps some patients with treatment resistant depression (TRD), but reliable methods for predicting which patients will, or will not, respond to treatment are lacking.
Background The antidepressant effects of ketamine and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) are hypothesized to rely on mechanisms of long-term-potentiation and synaptic plasticity. Cannabis, via activation of CB1 receptors has been shown to impair synaptic plasticity, suggesting that cannabis use might moderate the antidepressant effects of ketamine and/or rTMS.
Summary: Background: (S)-ketamine is a glutamatergic drug with potent and rapid acting effects for the treatment of depression. Little is known about the effectiveness of intranasal (S)-ketamine for treating patients with comorbid depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Methods: We performed a retrospective case series analysis of clinical outcomes in 35 Veterans with co-morbid...
Adverse childhood experiences are linked to poor attentive behaviors during adolescence, as well as increased risk for mental health disorders in adults. However, no study has yet tested targeted interventions to optimize neurocognitive processes in this population. Here, we investigated closed-loop digital interventions in a double-blind randomized controlled study in adolescents with...
Abstract Global events are becoming more complex at a swifter pace than humans are developing resilience. This leads to increasing dissonance and despair, especially in young adults who are experiencing mental distress and dread at exceedingly high rates. Awareness of global warming is increasing climate distress and decreasing self-efficacy. However, younger minds are also highly flexible,...
Abstract Interoceptive attention to internal sensory signals is fundamental to mindfulness. However, it is difficult to measure objectively, and the vast majority of investigations of the neural correlates of mindfulness-based attention rely on subjective and retrospective measures of distraction. In this study, we measured consistency of response times on a breath-monitoring task (instruction...
Abstract Interoceptive attention to internal sensory signals is fundamental to mindfulness. In an attention-to-breathing task in 161 adults, we found that consistency of interoceptive attention significantly correlated with performance efficiency across several exteroceptive cognitive domain tasks. EEG source mapping within subjects showed that on low-consistency or distracted trials there was...