Publications by authors named "Heather B Ward"

Background: Negative symptom severity predicts functional outcome and quality life in people with psychosis. However, negative symptoms are poorly responsive to antipsychotic medication and existing literature has not converged on their neurobiological basis. Previous work in small schizophrenia samples has observed that lower cerebellar-prefrontal connectivity is associated with higher negative symptom severity and demonstrated in a separate neuromodulation experiment that increasing cerebellar-prefrontal connectivity reduced negative symptom severity.

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Article Synopsis
  • Current treatments for schizophrenia are inadequate, with no effective options for negative symptoms or cognitive issues, leading researchers to explore neuromodulation techniques like repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) as a potential solution.
  • A systematic review and meta-analysis of rTMS studies involving schizophrenia found that while certain adverse effects (like headache and dizziness) were more common with active rTMS, the overall safety profile indicated no increased risk of severe side effects compared to sham treatments.
  • The study concludes that rTMS is safe and generally well-tolerated in people with schizophrenia, suggesting it does not pose a higher risk of adverse effects, including seizures, than seen in the general population.*
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Background: Neurocognitive impairment is a well-known phenomenon in schizophrenia that begins prior to psychosis onset. Connectome-wide association studies have inconsistently linked cognitive performance to resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. We hypothesized that a carefully selected cognitive instrument and refined population would allow identification of reliable brain-behavior associations with connectome-wide association studies.

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Background: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) are a disabling symptom for people with schizophrenia (SCZ), and do not always respond to antipsychotics. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has shown efficacy for medication-refractory AVH, though the underlying neural mechanisms by which rTMS produces these effects remain unclear. This systematic review evaluated the structural and functional impact of rTMS for AVH in SCZ, and its association with clinical outcomes.

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Decades of psychosis research highlight the prevalence and the clinical significance of negative emotions, such as fear and anxiety. Translational evidence demonstrates the pivotal role of the amygdala in fear and anxiety. However, most of these approaches have used hypothesis-driven analyses with predefined regions of interest.

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Background: Psychomotor disturbances are observed across psychiatric disorders and often manifest as psychomotor slowing, agitation, disorganized behavior, or catatonia. Psychomotor function includes both cognitive and motor components, but the neural circuits driving these subprocesses and how they relate to symptoms have remained elusive for centuries.

Methods: We analyzed data from the HCP-EP (Human Connectome Project for Early Psychosis), a multisite study of 125 participants with early psychosis and 58 healthy participants with resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging and clinical characterization.

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While pharmacological, behavioral and psychosocial treatments are available for substance use disorders (SUDs), they are not always effective or well-tolerated. Neuromodulation (NM) methods, including repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and deep brain stimulation (DBS) may address SUDs by targeting addiction neurocircuitry. We evaluated the efficacy of NM to improve behavioral outcomes in SUDs.

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Individuals with schizophrenia are 10 times more likely to have a tobacco use disorder than the general population. Up to 80% of those with schizophrenia smoke tobacco regularly, a prevalence three-times that of the general population. Despite the striking prevalence of tobacco use in schizophrenia, current treatments are not tailored to the pathophysiology of this population.

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Tobacco use is the top preventable cause of early mortality in schizophrenia. Over 60% of people with schizophrenia smoke, three times the general prevalence. The biological basis of this increased risk is not understood, and existing interventions do not target schizophrenia-specific pathology.

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Background: Electronic health records (EHRs) are a significant contributor to physicians' low satisfaction, reduced engagement and increased burnout. Yet the majority of evidence around EHR and physician harms is based on self-reported screen time, which may both over- and underreport actual exposure.

Aims: The purpose of this study was to examine how objective EHR use correlates with physician well-being and to develop preliminary recommendations for well-being-based EHR interventions.

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The size of the physician-scientist workforce has declined for the past 3 decades, which raises significant concerns for the future of biomedical research. There is also a considerable gender disparity among physician-scientists. This disparity is exacerbated by race, resulting in a compounding effect for women of color.

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Psychiatric neuroimaging has had limited impact on the clinical care of psychiatric disorders. Despite decades of discoveries of abnormalities in brain circuits, neuroimaging findings have not translated into clinical application. Some have proposed the solution to this problem is larger samples and increasing amounts of imaging data per individual.

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Comorbid personality disorders are common in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). Individuals with comorbid borderline personality disorder (BPD) may be less responsive to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), but it remains unclear whether BPD affects responsiveness to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). We sought to investigate the association between BPD and response to TMS.

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: Cocaine use disorder (CUD) is a public health problem with limited treatment options and a significant relapse rate. Neuroimaging studies have identified abnormal functional connectivity in individuals with substance use disorders. Neuromodulation has been proposed to target this altered neurocircuitry.

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The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health emergency that demands leadership throughout the health care system. Leadership is the ability to guide a team or organization toward a stated goal or objective. In addition to hospital-wide leadership, there is need for leadership at the level of medical teams.

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Background: There is a great public health need to identify novel treatment strategies for opioid use disorder (OUD) in order to reduce relapse and overdose. Noninvasive brain stimulation (NIBS) has demonstrated preliminary effectiveness for substance use, but little is known about its use in OUD. Neuromodulation may represent a potential adjunctive treatment modality for OUD, so we conducted a systematic review to understand the state of the current research in this field.

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Background: Racial inequities for patients with heart failure (HF) have been widely documented. HF patients who receive cardiology care during a hospital admission have better outcomes. It is unknown whether there are differences in admission to a cardiology or general medicine service by race.

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A significant segment of the United States adult population is obese. Bariatric surgery is one approach to weight loss when nonsurgical efforts have failed. In individuals with a body mass index ≥50, gastric reduction with duodenal switch is more effective than gastric bypass.

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Despite the fact that menstrual psychosis has been described since the eighteenth century, there are only about 80 cases reported in the literature. The knowledge and awareness about the disorder remain poor, leading to inaccurate diagnoses and suboptimal treatment. This is the case of a 25-year-old woman with recurrent hospitalizations for mental status changes including psychotic phenomena and catatonia that appeared to follow a cyclical pattern that correlated with her menstrual periods, with complete symptom resolution and return to her usual level of functioning between episodes despite continued treatment with antipsychotic medications.

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