Annals of Palliative Medicine
July 1, 2021
Jingjing Li, Zhu Cai, Xiaoming Li et al.
58 citations
Mindfulness-based interventions and cognitive behavioral therapy are similarly effective for reducing anxiety, depression, and improving sleep quality. A meta-analysis of 11 randomized controlled trials found no significant difference between the two approaches on these outcomes after treatment. Subgroup analyses suggested that mindfulness-based interventions may offer a small advantage for general anxiety symptoms, while CBT showed a small advantage for social anxiety measured by specific scales. Mindfulness-based stress reduction also showed a slight benefit compared to other mindfulness types. The findings indicate that mindfulness-based interventions can serve as an alternative to CBT for treating anxiety symptoms.
Journal of Medicinal Chemistry
March 2, 2011
Lei Zhang, Michael A. Brodney, John Candler et al.
32 citations
A new class of compounds, 1-[(1-methyl-1H-imidazol-2-yl)methyl]-4-phenylpiperidines, acts as positive allosteric modulators (PAMs) of the metabotropic glutamate receptor 2 (mGluR2). Structure-activity relationship studies produced potent and selective mGluR2 PAMs with favorable pharmacokinetic properties. The lead compound (+)-17e dose-dependently reduced methamphetamine-induced hyperactivity and mescaline-induced scratching in mice, suggesting potential for treating psychosis.
F1000Research
September 23, 2021
Kevin Mckernan, Liam T. Kane, Yvonne Helbert et al.
10 citations
The Psilocybe genus produces psychoactive compounds like psilocybin, psilocin, baeocystin, and aeruginascin. The widespread ability to synthesize psilocybin is thought to come from a horizontal gene transfer of a ~20Kb gene cassette. A new high-quality reference genome from long-read sequencing revealed variation in this cassette and enabled shotgun sequencing of spores from many strains. Here, 81 new Psilocybe genomes were assembled and compared to the P. envy reference. Surprisingly, Psilocybe galindoi, Psilocybe tampanensis, and Psilocybe azurescens lack sequence coverage for the known synthesis pathway but show amino acid homology to an alternative pathway, suggesting convergent evolution of psilocybin synthesis.
Scientific Reports
April 15, 2025
Hong Ding, Lei Zhang, Chao Ma et al.
9 citations
Twenty weeks of mindfulness meditation training, three 20-minute sessions per week, improved attention span, concentrativeness, stability, and attentional networks in professional male fencer athletes compared to a control condition involving mind-wandering audio. The mindfulness group also showed increased oxygenated hemoglobin concentration in the prefrontal cortex during cognitive tests, lower mental fatigue, and lower salivary cortisol after the intervention. No significant differences were found for distractibility or attentional blink on task-irrelevant information. The authors suggest that long-term mindfulness meditation after physical training enhances attentive capacity and cerebral oxygenation, which may facilitate focus and improve athletic performance.
arXiv Preprint Archive
January 12, 2026
Lingchen Sun, Rongyuan Wu, Zhengqiang Zhang et al.
A method called SelfTranscendence accelerates diffusion transformer (DiT) training using only internal feature supervision, avoiding dependence on external pretrained models like DINO. The authors argue that DiTs can guide their own training if internal features are made structurally clean and semantically discriminative. They first align DiT features with clean VAE latent features for a short phase (e.g., 40 epochs), then apply classifier-free guidance to intermediate features. These enriched internal features then supervise a new DiT trained from scratch. The method improves generation quality and convergence speed over existing self-contained approaches and can surpass REPA, which uses external DINO features, on class-to-image and text-to-image tasks.
Psychiatry Research
May 25, 2020
Rongrong Xuan, Xiaoming Li, Yuxi Qiao et al.
A meta-analysis of 10 studies found that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) reduced symptoms of depression and anxiety in people with bipolar disorder immediately after treatment, with small-to-moderate effects. Stress also decreased, while mindfulness ability and emotional regulation improved. Manic symptoms were not alleviated. Benefits for depression and anxiety persisted at 3 months but were no longer detectable at 12 months. Controlled trials showed a small reduction in depressive symptoms but not anxiety. The authors conclude MBCT appears effective for depression and anxiety in bipolar disorder, though effects are time-limited and inconsistent, highlighting the need for larger studies and maintenance programs.