Frontiers in neuroendocrinology
April 2016
Tracey J. Shors, Emma M. Millon
Sexual aggression and violence against women (VAM) are not only social problems; they are mental health problems. Women who experience sexual trauma often express disruptions in emotional and cognitive processes, some of which lead to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Animal models of neurogenesis and learning suggest that social yet aggressive interactions between a...
Neurotoxicology and Teratology
2016
Henrietta Szutorisz, Gabor Egervari, James Sperry et al.
Cannabis (Cannabis sativa, Cannabis indica) is the illicit drug most frequently abused by young men and women. The growing use of the drug has raised attention not only on the impact of direct exposure on the developing brain and behavior later in life, but also on potential cross-generational consequences. Our previous work demonstrated that adolescent exposure to Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol...
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
2016
Britta K. Hölzel, Vincent Brunsch, Tim Gard et al.
Mindfulness has been suggested to impact emotional learning, but research on these processes is scarce. The classical fear conditioning/extinction/extinction retention paradigm is a well-known method for assessing emotional learning. The present study tested the impact of mindfulness training on fear conditioning and extinction memory and further investigated whether changes in white matter...
Neural Plasticity
2016
Chuan-Chih Yang, Alfonso Barrós‐loscertales, Daniel Pinazo et al.
284 citations
The topic of investigating how mindfulness meditation training can have antidepressant effects via plastic changes in both resting state and meditation state brain activity is important in the rapidly emerging field of neuroplasticity. In the present study, we used a longitudinal design investigating resting state fMRI both before and after 40 days of meditation training in 13 novices. After...
Journal of Neurochemistry
November 2015
Roberta Imperatore, Giovanna Morello, Livio Luongo et al.
Endocannabinoids (eCB) are key regulators of excitatory/inhibitory neurotransmission at cannabinoid-1-receptor (CB1 R)-expressing axon terminals. The most abundant eCB in the brain, that is 2-arachidonoylglycerol (2-AG), is hydrolyzed by the enzyme monoacylglycerol lipase (MAGL), whose chronic inhibition in the brain was reported to cause CB1 R desensitization. We employed the MAGL knock-out...
Neurotoxicology
July 2015
Rubén García‐cabrerizo, M Julia García-Fuster
While hippocampus is a brain region particularly susceptible to the effects of MDMA, the cellular and molecular changes induced by MDMA are still to be fully elucidated, being the dosage regimen, the species and the developmental stage under study great variables. This study compared the effects of one and four days of MDMA administration following a binge paradigm (3×5 mg/kg, i.p., every 2 h)...
Current Molecular Medicine
May 4, 2015
Yuta Ohgi, Takashi Futamura, Kenji Hashimoto
109 citations
Glutamate, a major excitatory neurotransmitter, plays important roles in synaptic plasticity, such as long-term potentiation (LTP) and new synapse formation. Growing evidence suggests that glutamate signaling is involved in the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BP). Postmortem brain studies demonstrated altered...
L'Encephale
December 1, 2014
Marion Trousselard, Dominique Steiler, Damien Claverie et al.
The first part of this paper describes the long history of the concept of Mindfulness. Contrary to the belief that Mindfulness only has Buddhist and Hindu origins, it is also rooted in Jewish, Islamic and Christian religions. Furthermore, western philosophers have described a mindful path to become more aware of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. Mindfulness can be considered as a...
PLoS One
September 2, 2014
Marwan N. Baliki, Ali Mansour, Alex T. Baria et al.
539 citations
Chronic pain is associated with neuronal plasticity. Here we use resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate functional changes in patients suffering from chronic back pain (CBP), complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) and knee osteoarthritis (OA). We isolated five meaningful resting-state networks across the groups, of which only the default mode network (DMN) exhibited...
Frontiers in Psychology
May 22, 2014
Jesper eMogensen
In the search for a neural substrate of cognitive processes, a frequently utilized method is the scrutiny of posttraumatic symptoms exhibited by individuals suffering focal injury to the brain. For instance, the presence or absence of conscious awareness within a particular domain may, combined with knowledge of which regions of the brain have been injured, provide important data in the search...