Frontier mental health research: psychedelics & drug studies

Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.

4 papers

Long-Term Occupational Stress Is Associated with Regional Reductions in Brain Tissue Volumes

Eva Blix, Aleksander Perski, Hans Berglund, Ivanka Savic
PLoS ONE Summary & key facts 2013 131 citations

Several brain-imaging studies found that people with long-term work-related burnout showed differences in brain structure and function compared with matched healthy adults. In groups where participants had worked more than about 60–70 hours per week for several years, researchers reported larger amygdala size, thinner medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) tissue, weaker…

Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes Functional Brain Connectivity Studies Stress Responses and Cortisol

Rapid neuroplasticity changes and response to intravenous ketamine: a randomized controlled trial in treatment-resistant depression

Jared M. Kopelman, Timothy A. Keller, Benjamin Panny, Angela Griffo, Michelle Degutis, Crystal Spotts, et al.
Translational Psychiatry Summary & key facts 2023 52 citations

In a randomized trial, 98 adults with treatment-resistant depression had brain scans before and 24 hours after a single intravenous infusion of ketamine (0.5 mg/kg) or saline. The researchers measured mean diffusivity (DTI-MD), an MRI-based, indirect marker of microstructural brain change that tends to fall when new synapses or tissue…

Advanced MRI Techniques and Applications Functional Brain Connectivity Studies Treatment of Major Depression

Testing the extreme male brain hypothesis: Is autism spectrum disorder associated with a more male‐typical brain?

Liza van Eijk, Brendan P. Zietsch
Autism Research Summary & key facts 2021 21 citations

The authors made a score that measures how male-typical a person’s subcortical brain shape is. They trained this score on 2,153 people and then measured it in 1,060 people with autism and 1,166 neurotypical controls. People with autism had a small, higher average “brain maleness” score (d = 0.20), and…

Autism Spectrum Disorder Research Functional Brain Connectivity Studies Genetics and Neurodevelopmental Disorders

The diagnosis of ASD with MRI: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Sjir J. C. Schielen, Jesper Pilmeyer, Albert P. Aldenkamp, Svitlana Zinger
Translational Psychiatry Summary & key facts 2024 15 citations

This review combined 134 studies (159 experiments) that tried to tell apart people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from healthy controls using resting-state MRI. Across studies the pooled accuracy was moderate: about 76% sensitivity, 75.7% specificity, and an AUC of 0.823. However, the authors say there is a lot of…

Autism Spectrum Disorder Research Child Development and Digital Technology Genetics and Neurodevelopmental Disorders
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