NPP BrainPod

Insomnia and depression are two serious and debilitating conditions. Insomnia on its own is linked to an increase in suicide risk, and insomnia can also exacerbate the severity of depression.Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, and Adam Krause, post-doctoral research fellow in Stanford’s psychiatry department, are two of the authors of a recent study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBTI, is the gold standard for treating insomnia, and it’s been shown to relieve depressive symptoms as well.Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-026-02431-0 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Scientists have been amassing an increasing amount of evidence about the impact of racial discrimination and racial trauma, including how it can have an impact on brain regions involved with threat vigilance and emotional regulation. At the same time, there’s evidence that increased engagement in those areas has been linked to increased risk of mental health problems like depression, and they also suspect it could be a vulnerability for brain health issues such as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Negar Fani is an associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine, and she worked with Aziz Elbasheir, a PhD candidate at Emory University in the neuroscience program, on the study. They knew that C-reactive proteins, or CRPs, are a marker of immune activation in the blood.Read their full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01737-7 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr. Nicole Petersen is an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA. Her commentary is a new paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, called “Spotlighting SHAPERS: sex hormones associated with psychological and endocrine roles.” Dr. Petersen starts the paper describing an unnamed signaling molecule that can affect the physical structure of the brain and that seems to be related to a wide number of psychological and neurological conditions. Then she reveals that this is estradiol. The point she makes in the paper is that estrogen isn’t the only neuroactive substance that affects the brain in ways that we just don’t understand.Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-024-01819-0 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The drug naloxone, otherwise known as Narcan, is a critical tool in reversing fentanyl overdoses and reducing mortality. But now fentanyl is appearing on the streets adulterated with a drug called xylazine. Justin Strickland, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Cassandra Gipson-Reichardt, associate professor in the department of pharmacology nutritional sciences at the University of Kentucky, are the coauthors of a new paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology about the importance of integrating public health and translational science to address the challenges of xylazine adulteration of fentanyl. Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01680-7 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In-person treatment for substance use disorders is an incredibly important tool, but there’s a high failure rate — more than 50 percent of people who enter drop out within the first month. There hasn’t been a highly accurate method of identifying who might leave and who might succeed, and knowing this could help centers allocate resources to give the right type of assistance to the right people at the right time. One tool available is called the Addiction Severity Index, which is used to help identify the severity of the addiction and thus customize treatment, but it wasn’t developed to gauge whether a patient might drop out entirely. So a team of researchers decided to mine something known as a digital phenotype. Dr. Brenda Curtis is a clinical researcher at the National Institute on Drug Abuse Intramural Research Program, and she’s one of the paper’s authors.Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01585-5 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It’s clear there are diversity issues in science, both in terms of who does or doesn’t receive research grants, as well as who is or isn’t represented at the highest levels of scientific research. When Caleb Weinreb and Daphne Sun began their PhD program at Harvard University Medical School in systems biology, they took this on as an issue. They learned from others in their department, and they eventually created a course on the topic for incoming first year PhD students.  As they worked on improving their course over the years, they saw that in science there was a focus on narrowing racial gaps by correcting for implicit bias. For example, there had been a well-known study in which resumes with stereotypically African-American names weren’t considered as seriously as those with stereotypically white names. But the two PhD students realized that efforts to overcome such implicit bias weren’t moving the needle. They recently published a perspective paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology called “To dismantle structural racism in science, scientists need to learn how it works.” Caleb Weinreb is now a post-doc in the neuroscience department at Harvard Medical School.Read the full paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01534-2 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After a traumatic event, women are more likely to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Research has been conducted on what might be causing this higher rate of diagnoses; for instance, perhaps women had more cumulative trauma in their lives than the men in question. But scientists say that even taking prior childhood trauma into account, women are still diagnosed at a higher rate than men. Alyssa Roeckner is a neuroscience PhD candidate at Emory University, she’s in the lab of Dr. Jennifer Stevens, assistant professor in the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University. They are two of the authors of a recent study in NPP titled “Sex-dependent risk factors for PTSD: a prospective structural MRI study.”Read the full study here: Sex-dependent risk factors for PTSD: a prospective structural MRI study | Neuropsychopharmacology (nature.com) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sometimes, when researchers are conducting an experiment, the results are confusing. Maybe the control group of animals doesn’t behave the way a control should in theory be behaving. Maybe a researcher repeats a study and sees results that are unusually different from the first time around. The answers to these issues might lie in something called ‘hidden variables,’ according to a new study titled, “What’s wrong with my research? The impact of hidden variables on neuropsychopharmacology research.” Brian Trainor is a professor of psychology at the University of California Davis, and he’s one of three authors of the study. His co-authors are Amanda Kentner, professor at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, and Hannah Butler-Struben, a graduate student in the animal behavior group at UC Davis. They say that many of the articles in the review are from journals about animal behavior that wouldn’t typically come across the desk of those working in the field of neuroscience.Read the full article here: What’s wrong with my experiment?: The impact of hidden variables on neuropsychopharmacology research Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.