Neural Plasticity
December 18, 2018
Anna Lardone, Marianna Liparoti, Pierpaolo Sorrentino et al.
72 citations
It has been suggested that the practice of meditation is associated to neuroplasticity phenomena, reducing age-related brain degeneration and improving cognitive functions. Neuroimaging studies have shown that the brain connectivity changes in meditators. In the present work, we aim to describe the possible long-term effects of meditation on the brain networks. To this aim, we used...
Neuropharmacology
November 2018
Rachael Ingram, Heather Kang, Stafford Lightman et al.
Ketamine, a channel blocking NMDA receptor antagonist, is used off-label for its psychedelic effects, which may arise from a combination of several inter-related actions. Firstly, reductions of the contribution of NMDA receptors to afferent information from external and internal sensory inputs may distort sensations and their processing in higher brain centres. Secondly, reductions of NMDA...
Neuropharmacology
November 2018
I Ivan Ezquerra-Romano, W Lawn, E Krupitsky et al.
Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic drug which acts on the central nervous system chiefly through antagonism of the n-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor. Recently, ketamine has attracted attention as a rapid-acting anti-depressant but other studies have also reported its efficacy in reducing problematic alcohol and drug use. This review explores the preclinical and clinical research into...
Acta Physiologica
October 22, 2018
Henrik Michaëlsson, Mats Andersson, Johan Svensson et al.
28 citations
AIM: Major depressive disorder is a common and debilitating condition with substantial economic impact. Treatment options, although effective, are aimed at relieving the symptoms with limited disease modification. Ketamine, a commonly used anaesthetic, has received substantial attention as it shows rapid antidepressant effects clinically. We studied the effects of ketamine on hippocampal...
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
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...
Journal of experimental neuroscience
September 19, 2018
David E. Olson
Neural plasticity-the ability to change and adapt in response to stimuli-is an essential aspect of healthy brain function and, in principle, can be harnessed to promote recovery from a wide variety of brain disorders. Many neuropsychiatric diseases including mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders arise from an inability to weaken and/or strengthen pathologic and beneficial circuits,...
Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience
September 4, 2018
Rafael Vitor Lima Da Cruz, Thiago C. Moulin, Lyvia Lintzmaier Petiz et al.
86 citations
The subgranular zone (SGZ) of dentate gyrus (DG) is one of the few regions in which neurogenesis is maintained throughout adulthood. It is believed that newborn neurons in this region encode temporal information about partially overlapping contextual memories. The 5-Methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) is a naturally occurring compound capable of inducing a powerful psychedelic state....
Neuropharmacology
July 15, 2018
Ashley M Fortress, Ian M Smith, Kevin C H Pang
Anxiety disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) share a common feature of pathological avoidance behavior. The Wistar Kyoto (WKY) rat has been used as a model of anxiety vulnerability, expressing a behaviorally inhibited temperament, acquiring avoidance behavior more rapidly and displaying extinction-resistant avoidance compared to Sprague Dawley (SD) rats. Subanesthetic levels of...
Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry
July 10, 2018
Glòria Salort, María Álvaro-Bartolomé, Jesús A García-Sevilla
Ketamine (KET) is an antidepressant and hypnotic drug acting as an antagonist at excitatory NMDA glutamate receptors. The working hypothesis postulated that KET-induced sleep in mice results in dysregulation of mitogen-activated protein kinases (MAPK) MEK-ERK sequential phosphorylation and upregulation of survival p-FADD and other neuroplastic markers in brain. Low (5-15 mg/kg) and high (150...
Cell Reports
June 1, 2018
Calvin Ly, Alexandra C. Greb, Lindsay P. Cameron et al.
1,158 citations
Atrophy of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a key role in the pathophysiology of depression and related disorders. The ability to promote both structural and functional plasticity in the PFC has been hypothesized to underlie the fast-acting antidepressant properties of the dissociative anesthetic ketamine. Here, we report that, like ketamine, serotonergic psychedelics are capable of...
Biological Psychology
May 1, 2018
Ratna Jyothi Kakumanu, Ajay Kumar Nair, Rahul Venugopal et al.
Meditation, as taught by most schools of practice, consists of a set of heterogeneous techniques. We wanted to assess if EEG profiles varied across different meditation techniques, proficiency levels and experience of the practitioners. We examined EEG dynamics in Vipassana meditators (Novice, Senior meditators and Teachers) while they engaged in their traditional meditation practice...
Brain and Behavior
April 1, 2018
Anna-Lena Lumma, Sofie L. Valk, Anne Böckler et al.
Self-referential processing is a key component of the emotional self-concept. Previous studies have shown that emotional self-referential processing is related to structure and function of cortical midline areas such as medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and that it can be altered on a behavioral level by specific mental training practices. However, it remains unknown how behavioral...
Neuroscience Letters
March 16, 2018
Jeffrey Landrigan, Farah Shawaf, Zach Dwyer et al.
The efficacy of ketamine to alleviate depressive symptoms has promoted a wealth of research exploring alternate therapeutic targets for depression. Given the caveats of ketamine treatment taken together with the increasingly greater emphasis on combinatorial therapeutic approaches to depression, we sought to asses whether the hypothalamic "hunger hormone", ghrelin, would augment the effects of...
Synapse
March 2018
Bryan Kolb, Yilin Li, Terry Robinson et al.
Psychoactive drugs have the ability to alter the morphology of neuronal dendrites and spines and to influence later experience-dependent structural plasticity. If rats are given repeated injections of psychomotor stimulants (amphetamine, cocaine, nicotine) prior to being placed in complex environments, the drug experience interferes with the ability of the environment to increase dendritic...
Scandinavian Journal of Psychology
February 1, 2018
Amanda McCleery, Jonathan K Wynn, Daniel H. Mathalon et al.
Auditory hallucinations, a hallmark symptom of psychosis, are experienced by most people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia at some point in their illness. Auditory hallucinations can be understood as a failure in predictive coding, whereby abnormalities in sensory/perceptual processing combine with biased cognitive processes to result in a dampening of normal prediction error signaling. In this...
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
February 2018
Henrietta Szutorisz, Yasmin L. Hurd
Extensive debates continue regarding marijuana (Cannabis spp), the most commonly used illicit substance in many countries worldwide. There has been an exponential increase of cannabis studies over the past two decades but the drug's long-term effects still lack in-depth scientific data. The epigenome is a critical molecular machinery with the capacity to maintain persistent alterations of gene...
Frontiers in Synaptic Neuroscience
2018
Allie J Widman, Amy E Stewart, Elise M Erb et al.
In the past 20 years, ketamine has become a promising treatment for Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) due to its rapid and sustain antidepressant effects in patients. A single ketamine treatment causes improvement in depressive symptoms within hours and can last weeks, long after it is eliminated. Previous studies have demonstrated increased synaptic plasticity at CA3-CA1 synapses in hippocampus...
Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience
2018
Madhuri R Tolahunase, Rajesh Sagar, Muneeb Faiq et al.
Current interventions for major depressive disorder (MDD) are suboptimal, and only one third respond to them on initial treatment. Neuroplasticity theories are the basis for several emerging treatments. Evidence on the impact of yoga, a well-known mind-body intervention, on neuroplasticity in MDD is limited. To determine the effects of 12-week yoga- and meditation-based lifestyle intervention...
Brain and Neuroscience Advances
2018
Bolton K H Chau, Kati Keuper, Mandy M Lo et al.
Neuroplastic underpinnings of meditation-induced changes in affective processing are largely unclear. We included healthy older participants in an active-controlled experiment. They were involved a meditation training or a control relaxation training of eight weeks. Associations between behavioral and neural morphometric changes induced by the training were examined. The meditation group...