Publications by authors named "Gregory Fonzo"

Article Synopsis
  • MDMA, also known as Ecstasy or Molly, has been used since the 1970s for both recreational and therapeutic purposes, with the FDA recognizing its potential for treating PTSD as a Breakthrough Therapy in 2017.
  • The effects of MDMA in therapeutic settings are distinct, promoting trust and self-compassion while allowing cognitive clarity, which differentiates it from other psychedelics.
  • Preliminary evidence indicates that MDMA-Assisted Therapy is effective, with 67%-71% of PTSD patients no longer meeting diagnostic criteria after treatment, significantly more than those receiving placebo therapy.
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Objective: The authors critically examine the evidence base for psilocybin administered with psychological support/therapy (PST) in the treatment of psychiatric disorders and offer practical recommendations to guide future research endeavors.

Methods: PubMed was searched for English-language articles from January 1998 to November 2023, using the search term "psilocybin." A total of 1,449 articles were identified and screened through titles and abstracts.

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Neuroimaging techniques including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalogram (EEG) have shown promise in detecting functional abnormalities in various brain disorders. However, existing studies often focus on a single domain or modality, neglecting the valuable complementary information offered by multiple domains from both fMRI and EEG, which is crucial for a comprehensive representation of disorder pathology. This limitation poses a challenge in effectively leveraging the synergistic information derived from these modalities.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how brain network changes linked to Alzheimer's disease (AD) differ between those with amyloid-beta (A+) and normal elderly individuals (A-), using advanced deep learning on fMRI data.
  • The researchers identified specific brain regions associated with cognitive functions like attention and memory, which were tied to biomarkers in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) indicating levels of amyloid-beta and phosphorylated tau.
  • Findings suggest these brain signatures link to various molecular pathways, helping to clarify the relationship between Alzheimer's pathology and cognitive decline.
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Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder with defining abnormalities in memory, and psychedelics may be promising candidates for the treatment of PTSD given their effects on multiple memory systems. Most PTSD and psychedelic research has investigated memory with fear conditioning and extinction. While fruitful, conditioning and extinction provide a limited model of the complexity of PTSD and phenomenology of psychedelics, thereby limiting the refinement of therapies.

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Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a prevalent psychiatric disorder characterized by substantial clinical and neurobiological heterogeneity. Conventional studies that solely focus on clinical symptoms or neuroimaging metrics often fail to capture the intricate relationship between these modalities, limiting their ability to disentangle the complexity in MDD. Moreover, patient neuroimaging data typically contains normal sources of variance shared with healthy controls, which can obscure disorder-specific variance and complicate the delineation of disease heterogeneity.

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Article Synopsis
  • Major depressive disorder (MDD) is widespread and often resistant to traditional medications, leading to the need for alternative treatments like repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS).
  • The study introduces a new data-driven method using iterated masking empirical mode decomposition (itEMD) and sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) to better predict rTMS outcomes based on EEG recordings, which capture brain activity.
  • Analyzing key brain oscillations, the research identifies specific brain regions that correlate with treatment success for different rTMS protocols and emphasizes the importance of personalized approaches in treating MDD through advanced EEG analysis.
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Cocaine use disorder (CUD) is prevalent, and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) shows promise in reducing cravings. However, the association between a consistent CUD-specific functional connectivity signature and treatment response remains unclear. Here we identify a validated functional connectivity signature from functional magnetic resonance imaging to discriminate CUD, with successful independent replication.

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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social and communication deficits (SCDs), restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) and fixated interests. Despite its prevalence, development of effective therapy for ASD is hindered by its symptomatic and neurophysiological heterogeneities. To comprehensively explore these heterogeneities, we developed a new analytical framework combining contrastive learning and sparse canonical correlation analysis that identifies symptom-linked resting-state electroencephalographic connectivity dimensions within 392 ASD samples.

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Importance: Understanding the heterogeneity of neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPSs) and associated brain abnormalities is essential for effective management and treatment of dementia.

Objective: To identify dementia subtypes with distinct functional connectivity associated with neuropsychiatric subsyndromes.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Using data from the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies-3 (OASIS-3; recruitment began in 2005) and Alzheimer Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI; recruitment began in 2004) databases, this cross-sectional study analyzed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, clinical assessments, and neuropsychological measures of participants aged 42 to 95 years.

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Administration of psychedelics for mental health treatment, typically referred to as "psychedelic-assisted therapy," is a broad term with a very heterogeneous implementation. Despite increasing interest in the clinical application of psychedelic compounds for psychiatric disorders, there is no consensus on how to best integrate the psychedelic experience with evidence-based psychotherapeutic treatment. This systematic review provides a timely appraisal of existing approaches to combining psychotherapy with psychedelics and provides clear recommendations to best develop, optimize, and integrate evidence-based psychotherapy with psychedelic administration for straightforward scientific inference and maximal therapeutic benefit.

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Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common and often severe condition that profoundly diminishes quality of life for individuals across ages and demographic groups. Unfortunately, current antidepressant and psychotherapeutic treatments exhibit limited efficacy and unsatisfactory response rates in a substantial number of patients. The development of effective therapies for MDD is hindered by the insufficiently understood heterogeneity within the disorder and its elusive underlying mechanisms.

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Neurodevelopmental disorders, such as Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), are characterized by comorbidity and heterogeneity. Identifying distinct subtypes within these disorders can illuminate the underlying neurobiological and clinical characteristics, paving the way for more tailored treatments. We adopted a novel transdiagnostic approach across ADHD and ASD, using cutting-edge contrastive graph machine learning to determine subtypes based on brain network connectivity as revealed by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging.

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Background: Antidepressant medications yield unsatisfactory treatment outcomes in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) with modest advantages over the placebo, partly due to the elusive mechanisms of antidepressant responses and unexplained heterogeneity in patient's response to treatment. Here we develop a novel normative modeling framework to quantify individual deviations in psychopathological dimensions that offers a promising avenue for the personalized treatment for psychiatric disorders.

Methods: We built a normative model with resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) connectivity data from healthy controls of three independent cohorts.

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In recent years, psychedelics have generated considerable excitement and interest as potential novel therapeutics for an array of conditions, with the most advanced evidence base in the treatment of certain severe and/or treatment-resistant psychiatric disorders. An array of clinical and pre-clinical evidence has informed our current understanding of how psychedelics produce profound alterations in consciousness. Mechanisms of psychedelic action include receptor binding and downstream cellular and transcriptional pathways, with long-term impacts on brain structure and function-from the level of single neurons to large-scale circuits.

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Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is characterized by altered emotional and behavioral responding following a traumatic event. In this article, we review the concepts of latent-state and model-based learning (i.e.

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Background: Dementia is highly heterogeneous, with pronounced individual differences in neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) and neuroimaging findings. Understanding the heterogeneity of NPS and associated brain abnormalities is essential for effective management and treatment of dementia.

Methods: Using large-scale neuroimaging data from the Open Access Series of Imaging Studies (OASIS-3), we conducted a multivariate sparse canonical correlation analysis to identify functional connectivity-informed symptom dimensions.

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Antidepressant medications yield unsatisfactory treatment outcomes in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) with modest advantages over the placebo. This modest efficacy is partly due to the elusive mechanisms of antidepressant responses and unexplained heterogeneity in patient's response to treatment - the approved antidepressants only benefit a portion of patients, calling for personalized psychiatry based on individual-level prediction of treatment responses. Normative modeling, a framework that quantifies individual deviations in psychopathological dimensions, offers a promising avenue for the personalized treatment for psychiatric disorders.

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Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by , and . Despite its high prevalence, development of effective therapy for ASD is hindered by its symptomatic and neurophysiological heterogeneities. To collectively dissect the ASD heterogeneity in neurophysiology and symptoms, we develop a new analytical framework combining contrastive learning and sparse canonical correlation analysis to identify resting-state EEG connectivity dimensions linked to ASD behavioral symptoms within 392 ASD samples.

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Cocaine use disorder (CUD) is a prevalent substance abuse disorder, and repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has shown potential in reducing cocaine cravings. However, a robust and replicable biomarker for CUD phenotyping is lacking, and the association between CUD brain phenotypes and treatment response remains unclear. Our study successfully established a cross-validated functional connectivity signature for accurate CUD phenotyping, using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging from a discovery cohort, and demonstrated its generalizability in an independent replication cohort.

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