JAMA Psychiatry
February 2025
The arc of my career has focused on the integration of clinical care, mentoring, and research, leading to meaningful research questions and intervention trials advancing the field. In this Special Communication, I first offer a brief synopsis of my work as an academic psychiatrist, highlighting mission, themes and publications, sponsors, and collaborators. I then discuss activities as a mentor, focusing on 2 National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded research career development programs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Ableism-discrimination and social prejudice against people with disabilities-defines people by their disability and assumes that disabled people require fixing. We sought to characterize ableism after critical illness and to describe its relationship with care delivery.
Design: A secondary analysis of semi-structured individual interviews (n = 42) and ten group interviews (n = 68 participants) using modified grounded theory.
Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging
December 2024
Background: Prolonged Grief Disorder is a multidimensional condition with adverse health consequences. We hypothesized that enhanced negative emotional bias characterizes this disorder and underlies its key clinical symptoms.
Methods: In a cross-sectional design, chronically grieving older adults (61.
Unlabelled: Although evidence-based treatments for Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) exist, pretreatment characteristics associated with differential improvement trajectories have not been identified. To identify clinical factors relevant to optimizing PGD treatment outcomes, we used unsupervised and supervised machine learning to study treatment effects from a double-blinded, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial. Participants were randomized into four treatment groups for 20 weeks: citalopram with grief-informed clinical management, citalopram with prolonged grief disorder therapy (PGDT), pill placebo with PGDT, or pill placebo with clinical management.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnnu Rev Clin Psychol
December 2024
As the numbers of older adults continue to increase globally, the need for facilitating healthy aging has become critical. While a physically healthy lifestyle, including exercise and diet, is important, recent research has highlighted a major impact of psychosocial determinants of health, such as resilience, wisdom, positive social connections, and mental well-being, on whole health. This article focuses on keeping the mind and brain healthy with psychosocially active aging.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCochrane Database Syst Rev
November 2024
This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (intervention). The objectives are as follows: To assess the benefits and harms of psychotherapeutic interventions in the treatment of older adults with depression and whether the effects of different types of psychotherapeutic treatments vary for older adults with depression.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals acting as surrogate decision-makers for critically ill patients frequently struggle in this role and experience high levels of long-term psychological distress. Prior interventions that were designed solely to improve information sharing between clinicians and family members have been ineffective. We sought to examine the impact of a multicomponent family support intervention on patient and family outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLate-life depression (LLD) is often accompanied by medical comorbidities such as psychiatric disorders and cardiovascular diseases, posing challenges to antidepressant treatment. Recent studies highlighted significant associations between treatment-resistant depression (TRD) and polygenic risk score (PRS) for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults as well as a negative association between antidepressant symptom improvement with both schizophrenia and bipolar. Here, we sought to validate these findings with symptom remission in LLD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Adults with treatment-resistant late-life depression (TRLLD) have high rates of sleep problems; however, little is known about the occurrence and change in sleep during pharmacotherapy of TRLLD. This analysis examined: (1) the occurrence of insufficient sleep among adults with TRLLD; (2) how sleep changed during pharmacotherapy; and (3) whether treatment outcomes differed among participants with persistent insufficient sleep, worsened sleep, improved sleep, or persistent sufficient sleep.
Methods: Secondary analysis of data from 634 participants age 60+ years in the OPTIMUM clinical trial for TRLLD.
J Affect Disord
September 2024
Background: The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) and Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) are commonly used scales to measure depression severity in older adults.
Methods: We utilized data from the Optimizing Outcomes of Treatment-Resistant Depression in Older Adults (OPTIMUM) clinical trial to produce conversion tables relating PHQ-9 and MADRS total scores. We split the sample into training (N = 555) and validation samples (N = 187).
Introduction: Alcohol and substance use are increasing in older adults, many of whom have depression, and treatment in this context may be more hazardous. We assessed alcohol and other substance use patterns in older adults with treatment-resistant depression (TRD). We examined patient characteristics associated with higher alcohol consumption and examined the moderating effect of alcohol on the association between clinical variables and falls during antidepressant treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Late-life treatment-resistant depression (LL-TRD) is common and increases risk for accelerated ageing and cognitive decline. Impaired sleep is common in LL-TRD and is a risk factor for cognitive decline. Slow wave sleep (SWS) has been implicated in key processes including synaptic plasticity and memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: To date, no intervention has definitively improved outcomes for families of critical illness survivors. An integrated perspective on caregivers' needs after critical illness could help identify high-priority intervention targets and improve outcomes.
Objectives: To obtain diverse perspectives on the needs, barriers and facilitators, and social determinants of health associated with family caregiving across the critical illness continuum and assess the extent to which successful caregiving interventions in other populations may be adapted to the critical illness context.
Objectives: Few studies have examined the impact of late-life depression trajectories on specific domains of cognitive function. This study aims to delineate how different depressive symptom trajectories specifically affect cognitive function in older adults.
Design: Prospective longitudinal cohort study.
In this study, we aimed to improve upon a published population pharmacokinetic (PK) model for venlafaxine (VEN) in the treatment of depression in older adults, then investigate whether CYP2D6 metabolizer status affected model-estimated PK parameters of VEN and its active metabolite O-desmethylvenlafaxine. The model included 325 participants from a clinical trial in which older adults with depression were treated with open-label VEN (maximum 300 mg/day) for 12 weeks and plasma levels of VEN and O-desmethylvenlafaxine were assessed at weeks 4 and 12. We fitted a nonlinear mixed-effect PK model using NONMEM to estimate PK parameters for VEN and O-desmethylvenlafaxine adjusted for CYP2D6 metabolizer status and age.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Geriatr Psychiatry
April 2024
Objective: Perform a secondary analysis examining the efficacy of the Transdiagnostic Intervention for Sleep and Circadian Dysfunction (TranS-C) for depression symptom responses, and explore changes in potential target mechanisms.
Design: Secondary analysis of a randomized controlled trial with convenience age subsamples (younger (20-49 year; n = 52) versus and older (50-71 years; n = 35)).
Setting: Community mental health clinics.
Purpose: Developmental changes in sleep in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are understudied. In non-ASD youth, adolescents exhibit a "night owl chronotype" (i.e.
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