NP_Publications

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The human posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) is routinely implicated in cognition and disease, yet its specific functional contributions remain unclear. Historically, human neuroimaging has linked the region to episodic memory and the default mode network, while a distinct non-human primate electrophysiology literature has focused on economic decision-making. Integrating anatomical evidence with these literatures, it has recently been proposed that this divergence reflects subregional...

Suicidal ideation and attempts are common in first-episode psychosis (FEP), but less is known about how these outcomes change in large, community-based, coordinated specialty care (CSC) settings. This longitudinal cohort study examined 2951 individuals with FEP enrolled in 87 CSC clinics across 15 states in the Early Psychosis Intervention Network between 2019 and 2024. Suicide-related outcomes were assessed at admission and every 6 months for up to 2 years. At admission, 34% reported suicidal...

CONCLUSIONS: Hospitalizations decreased substantially after CSC admission and remained low over 2 years in this large national FEP cohort. Prior hospitalization and markers of earlier illness course (younger age and shorter DUP) were associated with higher hospitalization burden, highlighting targets for CSC care refinement.

Entropy is a novel brain measure that holds important information about brain flexibility and functioning, with promise for informing brain development in adolescence, as it has been shown to change across the lifespan. However, little is known about how it changes during the critically important phase of pubertal development, which kickstarts a period of broad neural reorganization and restructuring. This proof-of-concept cross-sectional study examined associations between fMRI signal entropy...

The brain's functional connectivity dynamics have been explained by a critically tuned model, but such models miss occasional reconfigurations. A new PLOS Biology study shows that modulatory control near a critical point can account for these rare events.

Schizophrenia, a serious mental illness, is associated with evidence of NMDA receptor (NMDAR) dysfunction and characterized by cognitive impairments that reflect impaired value updating and feedback-driven control. However, the cellular and circuit-level mechanisms underlying these disruptions remain unclear. Here, we test how NMDA receptor (NMDAR) signaling in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) contributes to adaptive decision-making by combining targeted genetic ablation in mice and systemic...

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Different fields have fundamentally different models of how decisions are made. Psychology and neuroscience tend to assume that decisions are made by calculating and comparing the values of all options. In ethology, conversely, decisions tend to be binary regardless of the number of options: Decision-makers calculate the value of continuing to exploit some option and explore only when this value drops below a threshold. Because these fields use incompatible methods, it remains unclear which view...

CONCLUSION: Overall, rTMS in SUD samples is safe and well-tolerated regardless of recovery stage and substance. Most reported side effects were mild, self-limiting, and tolerable. However, AE reporting was incomplete, as 35 of 141 trials reported no safety data, limiting conclusions to reported outcomes. This evidence supports the safety of rTMS as a potential stand-alone or adjunctive treatment for SUD.

CONCLUSIONS: Disgust OCD patients experienced attenuated improvement following DBS compared to harm-avoidant OCD patients. If confirmed in larger cohorts, these findings could motivate preoperative phenotypic stratification, inform decision-making about DBS candidacy, and guide alternative therapeutic strategies for disgust patients.

Intracranial neurophysiology studies have typically ignored signals from electrodes located in white matter (WM), assuming that their information content is artifactual or related to nearby gray matter (GM). Here, we tested the electrophysiological and functional features of signals recorded from different WM locations. Signals were recorded from 19 patients undergoing intracranial monitoring for drug-resistant epilepsy by means of stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG). Each sEEG electrode was...

CONCLUSION: Atypical neural responses during the directed auditory attention oddball task are predicted primarily by PTSD symptomatology, not mTBI blast severity. Avoidance is tied to exaggerated early reflexive responses, dysphoria is related to muted novelty detection, and hyperarousal is associated with difficulty distinguishing between stimuli relevant and irrelevant to behavior.

CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that an arts-based intervention can improve mental health in college students, while the mechanistic roles of creative ideation and cognitive flexibility remain unclear. Larger samples and randomized control designs are necessary to further evaluate mechanisms behind arts-based interventions for college students.

CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE: In this development and validation of our prediction model, CAT-Autism surpassed full item-bank scores with an average of 13 questions; these findings demonstrated that adaptively administering a small, statistically optimal subset of items can yield comparable (or better) results while reducing respondent burden. Next steps will be to test implementation parameters and confirm efficacy of CAT-Autism in clinical and community settings.

CONCLUSIONS: Our findings highlight the potential value of sleep measures in early identification and treatment of suicide risk in CHR. Further research in this area is warranted.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Mental health disorders are a significant public health problem with profound impacts on individual health, communities and society. Interventional approaches are limited in both utilization and access, despite their strong evidence base in specific disorders. The objective of this review is to describe factors and challenges influencing equity in interventional psychiatry.

Objective: To compare effects of adjunctive active versus sham vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) on suicidal ideation (SI) in markedly treatment-resistant depression (TRD).

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Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) is associated with vast clinical, behavioral, and neurobiological heterogeneity that hinder both the efficacy of current interventions and future treatment development. While recent efforts have focused on stratifying psychiatric disorders based on underlying neurobiological markers, such approaches remain largely unexplored in AUD. To address this, we empirically-derived neurobiological subtypes of AUD and evaluated their reproducibility and clinical relevance....