Publications by authors named "Flora Moujaes"
Background: Ketamine has emerged as one of the most promising therapies for treatment-resistant depression. However, inter-individual variability in response to ketamine is still not well understood and it is unclear how ketamine's molecular mechanisms connect to its neural and behavioral effects.
Methods: We conducted a single-blind placebo-controlled study, with participants blinded to their treatment condition.
Article Synopsis
- Research on psilocybin for treating psychiatric disorders is expanding, but the connection between brain changes and subjective experiences is not well established.
- A study involving 70 healthy participants examined how different doses of psilocybin affect cerebral blood flow (CBF) and how individual characteristics relate to these effects.
- Results indicated that personal baseline characteristics influenced the brain's response to psilocybin, linking subjective experiences to measurable brain changes and suggesting potential for personalized treatment strategies in psychedelic therapy.
Comparing Neural Correlates of Consciousness: From Psychedelics to Hypnosis and Meditation.
Biol Psychiatry Cogn Neurosci Neuroimaging
May 2024
Article Synopsis
- Recent studies suggest that both pharmacological (e.g., psilocybin and LSD) and nonpharmacological (e.g., hypnosis and meditation) methods can induce altered states of consciousness (ASCs) useful for treating psychiatric disorders, but a direct comparison of their neural effects was needed.
- This research used functional connectivity MRI to analyze these four ASC methods, revealing that they have distinct neural connectivity patterns that can help predict individual responses.
- The findings emphasize the importance of understanding how ASCs work at a neural level, which could enhance treatment strategies for psychiatric conditions.
Article Synopsis
- * Our study focused on resting-state functional MRI data and found that spatial and temporal autocorrelation effectively explain various network topology measures.
- * We discovered that changes in network topology due to aging and certain drugs are influenced by spatial autocorrelation, suggesting a way to relate complex measurements back to fundamental biological processes.
Article Synopsis
- Precision psychiatry seeks to tailor psychiatric treatments by identifying individual biomarkers but faces challenges in linking molecular changes to broader neural system effects.
- Research indicates that psychedelics may offer rapid and enduring relief from certain psychiatric symptoms, necessitating a precision medicine approach to maximize their benefits.
- Advances in computational psychiatry, particularly using neuroimaging techniques and receptor mapping, show promise in predicting individual responses to psychedelics, paving the way for improved therapeutic strategies.
Integrating motivational signals with cognition is critical for goal-directed activities. The mechanisms that link neural changes with motivated working memory continue to be understood. Here, we tested how externally cued and non-cued (internally represented) reward and loss impact spatial working memory precision and neural circuits in human subjects using fMRI.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDifficulties in advancing effective patient-specific therapies for psychiatric disorders highlight a need to develop a stable neurobiologically grounded mapping between neural and symptom variation. This gap is particularly acute for psychosis-spectrum disorders (PSD). Here, in a sample of 436 PSD patients spanning several diagnoses, we derived and replicated a dimensionality-reduced symptom space across hallmark psychopathology symptoms and cognitive deficits.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFReward processing and cognition are disrupted in schizophrenia (SCZ), yet how these processes interface is unknown. In SCZ, deficits in reward representation may affect motivated, goal-directed behaviors. To test this, we examined the effects of monetary reward on spatial working memory (WM) performance in patients with SCZ.
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