Biological Psychiatry
February 1, 2023
Friederike Holze, Peter Gasser, Felix Müller et al.
294 citations
This study aimed to investigate the efficacy and safety of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)-assisted therapy in patients who experienced anxiety with or without association with a life-threatening illness. The study is an investigator-initiated 2-center trial that used a double-blind, placebo-controlled, 2-period, random-order, crossover design with 2 sessions with either oral LSD (200 μg) or...
Biological Psychiatry
February 1, 2023
Devon Stoliker, Leonardo Novelli, Franz X. Vollenweider et al.
49 citations
Classic psychedelic-induced ego dissolution involves a shift in the sense of self and a blurring of the boundary between the self and the world. A similar phenomenon is identified in psychopathology and is associated with the balance of anticorrelated activity between the default mode network, which directs attention inward, and the salience network, which recruits the dorsal attention network...
Biological Psychiatry
February 1, 2023
Anne Maj van der Velden, Jacqueline Scholl, Else-Marie Elmholdt et al.
Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and its prevalence is on the rise. One of the most debilitating aspects of depression is the dominance and persistence of depressive rumination, a state of mind that is linked to onset and recurrence of depression. Mindfulness meditation trains adaptive attention regulation and present-moment embodied awareness, skills that may be...
Biological Psychiatry
December 7, 2022
Flora Moujaes, Katrin H. Preller, Jie Lisa Ji et al.
44 citations
Precision psychiatry aims to identify markers of interindividual variability that allow for predicting the right treatment for each patient. However, bridging the gap between molecular-level manipulations and neural systems-level functional alterations remains an unsolved problem in psychiatry. After decades of low success rates in pharmaceutical research and development for psychiatric drugs,...
Biological Psychiatry
July 15, 2022
Randall J Ellis, Anissa Bara, Claudia A Vargas et al.
Cannabis remains one of the most widely abused drugs during pregnancy. In utero exposure to its principal psychoactive component, Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), can result in long-term neuropsychiatric risk for the progeny. This study investigated epigenetic signatures underlying these enduring consequences. Rat dams were exposed daily to THC (0.15 mg/kg) during pregnancy, and adult male...
Biological Psychiatry
June 1, 2022
Yukitoshi Izumi, F. Hsu, C. Conway et al.
BACKGROUND: Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a non-competitive inhibitor of NMDA receptors (NMDARs) that appears to have ketamine-like rapid antidepressant effects in patients with treatment resistant major depression. In preclinical studies, ketamine enhances glutamate-mediated synaptic transmission in hippocampus and prefrontal cortex. The present study examined effects of N2O on glutamate transmission...
Biological Psychiatry
July 1, 2021
L. Mayo, Christine A Rabinak, M. Hill et al.
The endocannabinoid (eCB) system is one the most ubiquitous signaling systems of the brain and offers a rich pharmacology including multiple druggable targets. Preclinical research shows that eCB activity influences functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala and thereby influences an organism’s ability to cope with threats and stressful experiences. Animal studies show...
Biological Psychiatry
April 1, 2021
Heather J. Brooks, H. Oughli, Lojine Y. Kamel et al.
Introduction Low-burden and accessible interventions are needed to prevent cognitive decline in individuals at high-risk for decline. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) are two interventions which can be delivered remotely, improving their reach and scalability. This aim of this study is to assess the feasibility, safety and tolerability...
Biological Psychiatry
January 8, 2021
Mingzheng Wu, Samuel Minkowicz, V. Dumrongprechachan et al.
96 citations
BACKGROUND Ketamine elicits rapid onset antidepressant effects in patients with clinical depression through mechanisms hypothesized to involve the genesis of neocortical dendritic spines and synapses. Yet, the observed changes in dendritic spine morphology usually emerge well after ketamine clearance, raising questions about the link between rapid behavioral effects of ketamine and plasticity....
Biological Psychiatry
September 29, 2020
M. H. Mejia, N. Wade, Rachel E. Baca et al.
Accumulating evidence suggests that the use of cannabis and nicotine and tobacco-related products (NTPs) during the adolescent years has harmful effects on the developing brain. Yet, few studies have focused on the developing brain as it relates to the co-administration of cannabis and NTPs, despite the high prevalence rates of co-use in adolescence. The review aimed to synthesize the existing...
Biological Psychiatry
January 13, 2020
Katrin H. Preller, Patricia Duerler, Joshua B. Burt et al.
199 citations
BackgroundThe use of psilocybin in scientific and experimental clinical contexts has triggered renewed interest in the mechanism of action of psychedelics. However, its time-dependent systems-level neurobiology remains sparsely investigated in humans.MethodsWe conducted a double-blind, randomized, counterbalanced, crossover study comprising 23 healthy human participants who received placebo and...
Biological Psychiatry
July 24, 2019
J. DePierro, Lauren Lepow, Adriana Feder et al.
Many biological systems are altered in association with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and resilience. However, there are only few approved pharmacological treatments for PTSD, and no approved medications to enhance resilience. This paper provides a critical review of select neurobiological findings in PTSD and resilience, and also of pharmacologic approaches that have emerged from this...
Biological Psychiatry
June 3, 2019
Anya K. Bershad, Scott T. Schepers, Michael P. Bremmer et al.
176 citations
BackgroundNumerous anecdotal reports suggest that repeated use of very low doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), known as microdosing, improves mood and cognitive function. These effects are consistent both with the known actions of LSD on serotonin receptors and with limited evidence that higher doses of LSD (100-200 μg) positively bias emotion processing. Yet, the effects of such...
Biological Psychiatry
May 30, 2019
Gunes Sevinc, Britta K. Hölzel, Jonathan Greenberg et al.
Background: The role of hippocampus in context-dependent recall of extinction is well recognized. However, little is known about how intervention-induced changes in hippocampal networks relate to improvements in extinction learning. In this study, we hypothesized that mindfulness training creates an optimal exposure condition by heightening attention and awareness of present moment sensory...
Biological Psychiatry
2019
Kaustubh Supekar, Weidong Cai, R. Krishnadas et al.
BACKGROUND Schizophrenia is a highly disabling psychiatric disorder characterized by a range of positive "psychosis" symptoms. However, the neurobiology of psychosis and associated systems-level disruptions in the brain remain poorly understood. Here, we test an aberrant saliency model of psychosis, which posits that dysregulated dynamic cross-network interactions among the salience network...
Biological Psychiatry
October 15, 2018
Chun Yang, Shizuka Kobayashi, Kazuhito Nakao et al.
Ketamine, an N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist, exerts robust antidepressant effects in patients with treatment-resistant depression. The precise mechanisms underlying ketamine's antidepressant actions remain unclear, although previous research suggests that alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole propionic acid receptor (AMPAR) activation plays a role. We investigated whether...
Biological Psychiatry
October 15, 2018
Sade M Spencer, Daniela Neuhofer, Vivian C Chioma et al.
Cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug, but knowledge of the neurological consequences of cannabis use is deficient. Two primary components of cannabis are Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). We established a THC+CBD model of self-administration and reinstated drug seeking to determine if, similar to other addictive drugs, cannabis produces enduring synaptic changes in...
Biological Psychiatry
October 15, 2018
Jennifer W. Evans, Joanna E Szczepanik, Nancy E. Brutsché et al.
The symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD) are rapidly alleviated by administration of a single dose of the glutamatergic modulator ketamine. However, few studies have investigated the potential sustained neural effects of this agent beyond immediate infusion. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the effect of a single ketamine infusion on the resting state...
Biological Psychiatry
September 20, 2018
Samuel T. Wilkinson, Paul E. Holtzheimer, Shan Gao et al.
Until recently, therapeutic development in psychiatry was targeted solely toward symptom reduction. While this is a worthwhile goal, it has yielded little progress in improved therapeutics in the last several decades in the field of mood disorders. Recent advancements in our understanding of pathophysiology suggests that an impairment of neuroplasticity may be a critical part of the development...
Biological Psychiatry
August 16, 2018
Yan Jouroukhin, Xiaolei Zhu, Alexey V Shevelkin et al.
Background: Although several studies have linked adolescent cannabis use to long-term cognitive dysfunction, there are negative reports as well. The fact that not all users develop cognitive impairment suggests a genetic vulnerability to adverse effects of cannabis, which are attributed to action of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ9-THC), a cannabis constituent and partial agonist of brain...
Biological Psychiatry
July 1, 2018
Chinnakkaruppan Adaikkan, Elham Taha, Iliana Barrera et al.
Ketamine is an N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist, which on administration produces fast-acting antidepressant responses in patients with major depressive disorder. Yet, the mechanism underlying the antidepressant action of ketamine remains unclear. To unravel the mechanism of action of ketamine, we treated wild-type C57BL/6 mice with calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II...
Biological Psychiatry
May 25, 2018
Philipp Sterzer, Rick A. Adams, Paul Fletcher et al.
901 citations
Fueled by developments in computational neuroscience, there has been increasing interest in the underlying neurocomputational mechanisms of psychosis. One successful approach involves predictive coding and Bayesian inference. Here, inferences regarding the current state of the world are made by combining prior beliefs with incoming sensory signals. Mismatches between prior beliefs and incoming...
Biological Psychiatry
February 23, 2018
Alessia Mastrodonato, Randy Martinez, Ina P. Pavlova et al.
BACKGROUND We previously reported that a single injection of ketamine prior to stress protects against the onset of depressive-like behavior and attenuates learned fear. However, the molecular pathways and brain circuits underlying ketamine-induced stress resilience are still largely unknown. METHODS Here, we tested if prophylactic ketamine administration altered neural activity in the...
Biological Psychiatry
2018
Chun Yang, Q. Ren, Y. Qu et al.
249 citations
BACKGROUND The role of the mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling in the antidepressant effects of ketamine is controversial. In addition to mTOR, extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) is a key signaling molecule in prominent pathways that regulate protein synthesis. (R)-Ketamine has a greater potency and longer-lasting antidepressant effects than (S)-ketamine. Here we...
Biological Psychiatry
September 1, 2017
Wallace C. Duncan, Elizabeth E. Slonena, Nadia S. Hejazi et al.
The rapid clinical antidepressant effects of the glutamatergic modulator ketamine may be due to its ability to restore synaptic plasticity and related effects on sleep-wake and circadian systems. Preclinical studies indicate that ketamine alters expression of circadian clock-associated molecules, and clinical studies of ketamine on plasticity-related biomarkers further suggest an association...