Neuropsychopharmacology Podcast

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.

Maladaptive aggression, while not a diagnosable neuropsychiatric disorder on its own, often presents as an important comorbid condition with other neuropsychiatric disorders. But while both men and women can and do display aggression, there’s been a bias to thinking of aggression, in both its adaptive and maladaptive forms, as a male behavior. Sam Golden is an assistant professor at the University of Washington in the department of biological structure and also has an appointment in the Center for Excellence in the Neurobiology of Addiction, Pain, and Emotion. He’s one of the authors of a recent study on aggression in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. Read the full study here: Sex differences in appetitive and reactive aggression | Neuropsychopharmacology (nature.com) Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit 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

Kirstie Cummings and Sofia Beas are both new assistant professors in the department of neurobiology at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. When they met, they discussed the job application process, their support network, and their own personal processes, and they decided to write an article that could serve as a resource for candidates from different backgrounds, many of whom might not have the same resources that Dr. Cummings and Dr. Beas did. The result was their paper, “A Scientific Approach to Navigating the Academic Job Market,” published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.Read the full article here: A scientific approach to navigating the academic job market | Neuropsychopharmacology (nature.com) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Driving while under the influence of THC, known as drugged driving, is becoming more of an issue as more states legalize cannabis for both medical and recreational use around the country. THC is known to impair cognitive and psychomotor performance and thus impair driving. Jodi Gilman is a neuroscientist and an associate professor of psychiatry at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and she’s one of the authors of a new study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. She says that impairment and exposure are easier to correlate with alcohol. But tolerance to THC is so vastly different among different people, and the amounts that people use whether for pain or to get high are also so vastly different, that people can have detectible amounts of THC in their system, but it does not necessarily correlate with whether or not that person is too impaired to drive. Listen in to hear what she and her team did to try to detect brain impairment under the influence of THC.Read the full article here: https://w

In the past, there had been a school of thought that looked at evolution linearly — that is, you could in theory draw a line among mammals as they evolved, and so, say, rodent brains would basically be less evolved primate brains. That turns out not to be true; evolution is much more like a branching tree, and each branch then goes on to develop independently, sometimes in parallel. Some groups of animals such as primates can evolve features of their brains that other groups simply don’t have. And now, with advanced DNA sequencing, scientists have been able to determine which groups of mammals are more closely related than others, and so they’ve figured out that, for instance, tree shrews and flying lemurs are more closely related to primates than rodents are. Here, we speak with Dr. Todd M. Preuss, professor of pathology at Emory University and an associate research professor at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Dr. Preuss is co-author with Steven Wise of a review article in Neuropsychop

Star-shaped cells called astrocytes are the most abundant cells to be found in the human brain. In the past, they’d been thought to play a supporting role to neurons, such as providing metabolic support, but recently they’re also emerging as stars of information processing. They can respond to neurotransmitters and release neuroactive substances that then affect synaptic transmission and plasticity. Michelle Corkrum is a child neurology resident at Columbia University and is one of the authors of a recent review paper on the links between astrocytes and dopamine signalling. The review looks back at the history of research in this field, going back decades. Listen in to learn more!   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Loneliness is a subjective experience, but neuroscientists define it as a distress that arrives from a discrepancy between perceived and desired social relationships. There may be an evolutionary benefit to the feeling of loneliness; we’re a social species, and feeling lonely might have sent us to seek out other humans, which has been very important for survival. Moreover, if gone unaddressed and isolation worsens, health effects of loneliness have been shown to double mortality rates. It's linked to cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, cognitive decline, higher rates of dementia, and poor mental health outcomes (i.e. depression and anxiety).With loneliness implicated in so many cognitive impacts, Dr. Lee and her colleagues wanted to understand what is known to date about the impact of loneliness on the brain. They conducted a systematic review of the published research that examines loneliness and resulting neurobiological assessments, such as imaging studies, EEG studies, and pathological studies.&nbs

It’s known that dopamine transmission in the brain, particularly in the frontal lobes, can affect decision-making and can regulate choices when it comes to actions and rewards. But the effect of dopamine transition in the medial orbital frontal cortex hasn’t yet been studied, and dysfunction in that region has been implicated in a variety of mental illnesses, including obsessive compulsive disorder, certain kinds of depression, and even schizophrenia. And so a team of researchers led by Stan Floresco, professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, used a rat model to study the effects of dopamine on two receptors in the region, D1 and D2. To do so, they trained the rats on two games that involved decision-making, and then they infused drugs, one an agonist and one an antagonist, to the brain region. Have a listen!  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Nearly 25 years ago, a paper was published about addiction that transformed the field. The director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse at the time called addiction a “brain disease,” and he wrote a paper articulating this position and the agenda that it implied. It led to a focus on researching the brain to understand the mechanisms behind addiction, which could lead to novel treatments. And it meant that the country began to treat addiction as a disease, thus treating it within the medical system and removing the victim-blaming stigma. Over the years, there has been a pushback against the view of addiction as a brain disease, even within the scientific community. In part, this occurred because research in neuroscience didn’t lead to effective treatments as quickly as the field hoped or promised. And in part, says Markus Heilig, it’s because other researchers felt that funding into the neuroscience of addition meant that other relevant mechanisms, such as social and psychological factors, were perhaps

The world of medicine has been changing rapidly due to the increasing use of ‘big data.’ And there’s been a major revolution in this approach in neuroscience and psychiatry as well: computing power, sample sizes, neuroimaging technologies, digital approaches to phenotyping, and computational modeling all are already starting to unleash dramatic new understandings of the brain, as well as new approaches to treatment. And so the journal Neuropsychopharmacology recently published a Reviews issue on the topic of Big Data. Kerry Ressler, chief scientific officer at McLean hospital and professor of psychiatry at Harvard medical school, is one of the editors.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Interest is growing in the use of the psychedelic drug LSD for psychiatric research and even potentially for treatment. But placebo-controlled studies conducted to date have used just one dose of the drug—none have investigated the impacts of a variety of dosages within the same subjects. In addition, past studies did not use pharmaceutically-defined dosages of LSD, which has made verifying the effects of a particular dose difficult. To address this gap, Matthias Liechti, professor in the department of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Basel in Switzerland, and his colleagues conducted a study.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Scientists who study neuropsychiatric conditions and treatments often use rodent models to do so. From depression to anxiety to memory impairment and impulsivity, there are certain rodent behaviors that are used to represent these types of conditions in humans. And to use these models, researchers have had to watch the animals live or on video and jot down every instance of, say, exploratory behavior. As the process is labor intensive and results vary slightly from researcher to researcher, Dr. Bohacheck and his colleagues created a new system based on machine learning, and they published the results of their study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, along with a review of the field.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The application of the study of genetics and the use of big data to identify patterns of inheritance as well as de novo mutations has had a dramatic impact on the field of Autism Spectrum Disorder research, and it offers pathways to a greater understanding of biological mechanisms, even potentially treatments. Matthew State, chair of the department of psychiatry at University of California San Francisco, and his colleagues wrote a review paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, called “Leveraging large genomic datasets to illuminate the pathobiology of autism spectrum disorders.” Have a listen to learn more!  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It’s understood in epidemiological research that women who experience trauma during puberty are at significantly higher risk for affective disorders such as depression and anxiety when they become pregnant. And so Tracy Bale, a professor in the departments of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, has done several studies using mice to try to model and understand this effect. In her latest paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, she and her colleagues set out to study just what was happening to make the mouse brain so vulnerable to stress and trauma during puberty, and how this was activated during the hormonal onslaught of pregnancy.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Over the past decades, there’s clearly been a dramatic increase in the amount of time people spend online using social networking sites. For instance, Facebook and Instagram have literally billions of users. At the same time, there’s been a rise in mental health issues for young people from teens through their mid 20s. The rise in these issues has been seen particularly for Millennials and the I generation, both of which grew up with increased access to and use of social networking sites. As a result, some have drawn the conclusion that perhaps the two are linked, and the rise in mental health issues is linked causally to the increase in time spent online, and so treatment should involve reducing social networking use. Dr. Kiara Timpano, associate professor at the University of Miami department of psychology, and Dr. Courtney Beard, co-director of the clinical research program in behavioral health at McLean Hospital and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, reviewed the literature.

A number of drugs that are used recreationally are now being studied for their use in psychopharmacology. But while the ways in which these drugs are similar or different has been described anecdotally by recreational users, they haven’t been studied in comparison to one another. Dr. Matthias Liechti and his team of researchers recently published a study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, in which 28 healthy subjects, men and women, take doses of LSD, MDMA, amphetamines, and a placebo over four different sessions. Dr. Liechti says this blinding is important; in other studies, participants either have taken a drug or a placebo and can tell when they’re taking the drug. But in this case they don’t know which drug they’re taking, which allows the effects of the drugs to be compared against each other. Take a listen to find out more!  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

It’s known that there’s a relationship between post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and a higher rate of opioid abuse. What isn’t understood, though, is what that relationship is. Does PTSD cause people to turn to opioids in particular among all the potential drugs of abuse, or is there something about opioid use that makes users particularly sensitive to trauma?This is just what Michael Fanselow, professor in the psychology and psychiatry departments at UCLA, and his colleagues investigated for a recent study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The recreational drug MDMA, also known as Ecstasy or Molly, is particularly popular in social settings and raves, in large part because of how socially connected it makes the users feel. It's being studied for use in psychotherapy — there's a phase III clinical trial for the use of MDMA to treat PTSD. What's clear is that the drug affects how users experience social interactions. But there are questions: Does the drug make positive social interactions feel better, or reduce the negative feelings associated with negative social interactions?  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Depression is an incredibly important disorder—according to Thomas Schlaepfer, head of the department of interventional biological psychiatry at the University of Freiburg, at least 20 percent of people have a depressive episode at least once in their lives. And while most patients' symptoms improve with a combination of psychotherapy and medicine, up to 20 percent of depressed patients do not improve from existing treatments. Dr. Schlaepfer and his colleagues have been conducting research on deep brain stimulation, in which implanted electrodes automatically deliver electrical impulses to a particular region of the brain. Have a listen to learn more!  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.