NPP BrainPod

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

Serotonin is a critical chemical when it comes to a number of psychiatric conditions, such as OCD, where it seems to play a particular role in cognitive flexibility. That is, serotonin levels are related to the fact that someone is perseverating on intrusive thoughts or compulsions and isn’t able to be as flexible as otherwise would be necessary.Trevor Robbins, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, is one of the authors of a recent study titled Comparable roles for serotonin in rats and humans for computations underlying flexible decision-making, and he says such cognitive flexibility also plays a role in depression and schizophrenia. Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01762-6

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

Sanjay Mathew is a professor and vice chair for research at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program. He’s one of the two authors of a recent review paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, “The why, when, where, how, and so what of so-called rapidly acting antidepressants.” With his colleague Alan Schatzberg, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Mood Disorders Center at Stanford University, they explore both the drugs that have been studied as rapidly-acting anti-depressants to date, and they also review the challenges and opportunities in how such research is conducted. They say that a version of ketamine has changed the field.Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01647-8

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

Antisocial personality disorder, or ASPD, is a difficult disorder to study. There have been studies on psychopathic individuals, and on youth with psychopathic traits, but most studies on ASPD to date have been on incarcerated adults. A team of researchers at Heidelberg University wanted to study individuals who are not incarcerated and see what these findings could elucidate about the brains, in particular the amygdalas, of individuals with ASPD.Haang Jeung-Maarse is a medical doctor at Bielfeld University in Germany and is one of the authors of the paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, on the effects of oxytocin on amygdala reactivity to angry faces in males and females with antisocial personality disorder.Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-023-01549-9

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

Psychedelic drugs have received attention recently for their potential use as treatments for psychiatric disorders. Single, high doses of LSD have shown promise for treating depressive disorders. But there’s another way in which people have been using LSD, and it’s what’s known as micro-dosing, taking LSD at below noticeable levels, where it doesn’t seem to have a psychedelic impact—but users say it does in fact have an impact on their overall sense of well-being. This is just what Harriet de Wit, University of Chicago professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience, wanted to study. Dr. de Wit partnered with James Glazer, a postdoc in psychiatry at Northwestern University.Read their full study here: Low doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) increase reward-related brain activity | Neuropsychopharmacology (nature.com)