Recent clinical evidence suggests that racemic 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) might be useful for treating a range of neuropsychiatric diseases including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. However, concerns about its abuse potential stemming from its monoamine releasing properties have hampered its clinical development. Thus, safer analogues of racemic MDMA with...
Ketamine has been shown to reduce depression and suicidality in individuals resistant to treatment by other drugs. Exactly how ketamine works is not known. Here, I propose a new hypothesis that involves synaptic and circuit plasticity and may lead to enhanced efficacy in treating depression as well as other conditions.
The formation of the integral human being requires an understanding of biological, intellectual, spiritual, and moral dimensions. However, studies integrating Islamic philosophy and modern neuroscience in explaining this formation remain limited. This study examines the concepts of consciousness proposed by Ibn Sina and Santiago Ramón y Cajal and formulates a conceptual synthesis for integral...
Emotional regulation is one of the psychological processes that is necessary to recognize, regulate and respond to emotional experience. As more and more individuals embrace yoga as a complete mind-body practice, yoga has been steadily garnering attention in the realm of mental health—particularly in its various forms, which incorporate a wide range of physical positions, breathing methods,...
Major depressive disorder (MDD) remains a global health burden, with over 60% of patients failing to respond adequately to current treatments. Treatment-resistant depression (TRD), a form of MDD, highlights the urgent need for mechanistically novel antidepressants. Psychoplastogens—a class of fast-acting compounds that promote neuroplasticity—are emerging as promising alternatives to...
Bipolar-spectrum illness emerging after traumatic brain injury (TBI) can be difficult to treat and may present with mixed or agitated depressive features that appear sensitive to glutamatergic modulation. In post-TBI cases, diagnostic certainty is often limited because irritability, impulsivity, sleep disturbance, affective lability, and cognitive change may overlap with frontal-limbic injury...
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a multifactorial neurodegenerative disorder characterized by amyloid-β (Aβ) accumulation, tau pathology, synaptic dysfunction, and neuroinflammation, which collectively drive progressive memory loss, cognitive decline, and behavioral changes. Increasing evidence implicates epigenetic dysregulation as a key contributor to these pathological processes by altering gene...
Trauma-related dissociation can present with derealisation, depersonalisation, abrupt lapses in awareness, memory gaps, and fugue-like states, and it may be difficult to treat with standard approaches alone. Glutamatergic interventions have been proposed as neuroplasticity-focused strategies because N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonism and downstream...
Esketamine, the S-enantiomer of ketamine, has emerged as a rapid-acting antidepressant with unique mechanisms. This narrative review synthesizes current evidence on its clinical applications, safety, and regulatory status based on peer-reviewed literature published between January 2000 and March 2024, searched in PubMed, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Library. Esketamine exerts its effects...
A complex ensemble of neuromodulatory receptors orchestrates the many forms of synaptic plasticity that drive behavioral state changes, but an understanding of how such receptors functionally interact is limited. Here, we find that the antidepressant action of ketamine is dependent on both the receptor tyrosine kinase, tropomyosin-related kinase B (TrkB), and the G protein-coupled receptor,...