PODCAST · science
NPP BrainPod
by Springer Nature
BrainPod is the podcast from the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, produced in association with Nature Publishing Group. Join us as we delve into the latest basic and clinical research that advance our understanding of the brain and behavior, featuring highlighted content from a top journal in fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, and pharmacology. For complete access to the original papers and reviews featured in this podcast, subscribe to Neuropsychopharmacology. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Episodes
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Shared genetic architecture and neurobiological pathways of problematic alcohol use and anxiety disorders
Problematic alcohol use frequently occurs in conjunction with anxiety disorders. Between 20 to 40 percent of individuals with anxiety disorders are also diagnosed with alcohol use disorder. Anxiety can lead people to use alcohol to self-medicate, and disordered alcohol use can cause increased...
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Examining fronto-limbic brain and sleep mechanisms of antidepressant effects in cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia
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…
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Incentive salience, not psychomotor sensitization or tolerance, drives escalation of cocaine self-administration in heterogeneous stock rats
There are a number of theories that have been studied to try to explain addiction and drug use escalation, and thus to also create animal models of that behavior that can then serve to help develop treatments. One theory for escalation is that people feel worse and worse over time and so they…
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Oxytocin neurons in the anterior and posterior paraventricular nucleus have distinct behavioral functions and electrophysiological profiles
Oxytocin has become known for having anti-anxiety and affiliative behavioral effects. That’s why clinicians and researchers are excited about using oxytocin as a potential therapeutic. Brian Trainor is a professor at UC Davis, and his lab has been studying this complexity for the past decade. For...
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The genetics of cannabis lifetime use
Cannabis, which is increasingly legally available, both for therapeutic and recreational use, is now one of the most commonly used drugs worldwide. Of people who have ever used cannabis, studies vary, but they estimate that about 10-25 percent of people who use cannabis go on to develop cannabis...
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Older and wiser? The neural correlates of worry induction and reappraisal in older adults
Worry seems like something most people do from time to time, but for some people, severe worry can become an overwhelming sensation, and for older adults later in life, severe worry has been associated with an increased risk of stroke and coronary heart disease. Carmen Andreescu is a professor of...
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Grey matter morphometry in young adult e-cigarette users, tobacco cigarette users & non-using controls
There’s been a fair amount of animal data suggesting that nicotine can affect the developing brain, but there hadn’t been the equivalent human studies done on people whose brains are still developing. And today there are two predominant forms of nicotine delivery - tobacco cigarettes, and...
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Validation of L-type calcium channel blocker amlodipine as a novel ADHD treatment through cross-species analysis, drug-target Mendelian randomization, and clinical evidence from medical records
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is a common condition that, for a lot of people, is difficult to treat. The drugs that exist have a number of adverse side effects, and about 25 percent of patients don’t respond to existing drugs. And so a team of researchers in Iceland, led by...
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Rapid and sustained antidepressant effects of vaporized N,N-Dimethyltryptamine: A Phase 2a clinical trial in Treatment-Resistant Depression.
Draulio Araujo, professor at the Brain Institute in the University of Rio Grande Norte in Natal, Brazil, has been studying ayahuasca for more than 20 years. It’s a psychedelic plant used in rituals in South America that has also been researched for its potential to treat depression. The effects…
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Endocannabinoid contributions to the perception of socially relevant, affective touch in humans
New drugs that target the endocannabinoid system are being proposed for disorders that are usually characterized by the dysregulation of social processing, like social anxiety disorder and autism spectrum disorder. Researchers have been trying to understand the mechanisms for how these drugs…
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Sex differences in sensitivity to dopamine receptor manipulations of risk-based decision making in rats
The scientific literature has shown that females demonstrate more aversion to risk-taking than males. Studies have also demonstrated that the basal lateral amygdala, or BLA, is a critical hub for processing risk and reward information. And yet further research has shown that activity in the...
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Biomarker development for menstrual Cycle affective change: the need for greater temporal, mechanistic, and phenotypic specificity.
The menstrual cycle is known to affect things like mood and changes in pain. But there can also be symptoms that have a serious impact on a person’s function, ability to work, ability to maintain friendships and romantic relationships. This is a rare condition known as premenstrual dysphoric...
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Genome-wide association studies of coffee intake in UK/US participants of European ancestry uncover cohort-specific genetic associations
Researchers are interested in understanding the biology of why some people are more likely to overconsume substances. Some substances are difficult to study—people might not admit to illegal substance abuse or to how much alcohol they drink. But Americans are more likely to accurately recall and...
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C-reactive protein moderates associations between racial discrimination and ventromedial prefrontal cortex activation during attention to threat in Black American women
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...
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Ghrelin decreases sensitivity to negative feedback and increases prediction-error related caudate activity in humans, a randomized controlled trial
There’s a hormone called ghrelin that’s secreted in the stomach, and when someone is hungry it contributes to that feeling of hunger and the need to search for food. But neurological studies have suggested that ghrelin might also play a role in compulsivity and impulsivity, and it might be…
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Spotlighting SHAPERS: Sex hormones associated with psychological and endocrine roles
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…
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Comparable roles for serotonin in rats and humans for computations underlying flexible decision-making
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...
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Integrating public health and translational basic science to address challenges of xylazine adulteration of fentanyl
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...
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The why, when, where, how, and so what of so-called rapidly acting antidepressants
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...
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AI-based analysis of social media language predicts addiction treatment dropout at 90 days
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...
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Oxytocin effects on amygdala reactivity to angry faces in males and females with ASPD
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...
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To dismantle structural racism in science, scientists need to learn how it works
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...
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Low doses of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) increase reward-related brain activity
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,...
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Sex-dependent risk factors for PTSD: a prospective structural MRI study
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...
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Sex differences in appetitive and reactive aggression
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...
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What’s wrong with my experiment?: The impact of hidden variables on neuropsychopharmacology research
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...
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A scientific approach to navigating the academic job market
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…
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Identification of THC impairment using functional brain imaging
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...
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Evolution of prefrontal cortex
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...
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Astrocyte-neuron signaling in the mesolimbic dopamine system: the hidden stars of dopamine signaling
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...
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Neurobiology of loneliness: a systematic review
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…
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Medial orbitofrontal cortex dopamine D1/D2 receptors differentially modulate distinct forms of probabilistic decision-making
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...
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Addiction as a brain disease revised: why it still matters, and the need for consilience
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...
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Big data in psychiatry: multiomics, neuroimaging, computational modeling, and digital phenotyping
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...
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Acute dose-dependent effects of lysergic acid diethylamide in a double-blind placebo-controlled study in healthy subjects
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...
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Big behavior: challenges and opportunities in a new era of deep behavior profiling
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…
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Leveraging large genomic datasets to illuminate the pathobiology of autism spectrum disorders
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…
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Pubertal adversity alters chromatin dynamics and stress circuitry in the pregnant brain
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...
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Social networking and mental health: looking beyond frequency of use and towards mechanisms of action
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...
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Distinct acute effects of LSD, MDMA, and D-amphetamine in healthy subjects
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...
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Chronic opioid pretreatment potentiates the sensitization of fear learning by trauma
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...
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Effects of MDMA on attention to positive social cues and pleasantness of affective touch.
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...
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Superolateral medial forebrain bundle deep brain stimulation in major depression: a gateway trial.
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...
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Cues play a critical role in estrous cycle-dependent enhancement of cocaine reinforcement
Research has demonstrated that, overall, women are more vulnerable to drug addiction than men are. They become addicted more quickly after first using, they have a harder time staying off drugs, and they relapse at higher rates. But most studies have focused on men, and models that have been...
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Food Addiction: A Valid Concept?
Over the past decade, the use of the term 'food addiction' to describe an unhealthy approach to eating has grown. It refers to the idea that, for some people, their inability to control their food intake has similarities to that of a drug of abuse. Paul Kenny is the chair of the Department of...
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Sex Matters
As our environment becomes ever increasingly complex, understanding how sex differences impact disease risk and resilience will only become more critical. The 2019 , "Sex Matters," edited by Dr. Tracy L. Bale, highlights the causal and mechanistic value in cases where significant sex differences...
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Recent advances in the study of aggression
Aggression is an evolutionary behavior seen throughout the animal world. When it comes to humans, however, some forms of aggression can be seen as pathological, dangerous, and quite costly to society. And yet there's a dearth of approved, effective treatments for aggression. Meghan Flanigan is a...
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Neurocognitive effects of umami: association with eating behavior and food choice
While the influence of sweet taste on neurocognitive function has been widely studied, umami or savory has received less of a research focus. Animal models and even some small human studies seem to show that umami given in a broth before a meal can influence appetite and food intake. And this...
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Burst activation of dopamine neurons produces prolonged post-burst availability of actively released dopamine.
For years now, scientists have noticed a rather strange phenomenon in animal models: scientists would stimulate dopamine production in the brain, but once the stimulation was over, the dopamine would remain. Bita Moghaddam is chair and professor of behavioral neuroscience at Oregon Health and...
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Considerations for the Use of DREADDs in Behavioral Neuroscience
There's a technology that's proven to be increasingly useful in the past decade -- it's called DREADD, or "designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs." The current approach is to create a designer receptor that is unlocked by the drug, clozapine-n-oxide, or CNO. Researchers have...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
BrainPod is the podcast from the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, produced in association with Nature Publishing Group. Join us as we delve into the latest basic and clinical research that advance our understanding of the brain and behavior, featuring highlighted content from a top journal in fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, and pharmacology. For complete access to the original papers and reviews featured in this podcast, subscribe to Neuropsychopharmacology.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
HOSTED BY
Springer Nature
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BrainPod is the podcast from the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, produced in association with Nature Publishing Group. Join us as we delve into the latest basic and clinical research that advance our understanding of the brain and behavior, featuring highlighted content from a top journal in...
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