Publications by authors named "J D Ragland"

While continued cannabis use and misuse in individuals with schizophrenia is associated with a variety of negative outcomes, individuals with a history of use tend to show higher cognitive performance compared to non-users. While this is replicated in the literature, few studies have used task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to evaluate whether the brain networks underpinning these cognitive features are similarly impacted. Forty-eight first-episode individuals with schizophrenia (FES) with a history of cannabis use (FES + CAN), 28 FES individuals with no history of cannabis use (FES-CAN), and 59 controls (CON) performed the AX-Continuous Performance Task during fMRI.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • A longer duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) leads to worse treatment outcomes, so early detection through screening in primary care is essential but its acceptability is unclear.
  • * A qualitative study involving 12 providers and 8 service users revealed overall support for psychosis screening in integrated behavioral health primary care (IBH-PC) but highlighted concerns about brief appointment times and the low prevalence of psychosis.
  • * Challenges like leadership support, staff training, turnaround, and organizational changes influence the implementation of screening, indicating that while acceptable, careful planning and consideration of barriers is necessary for success.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: People with psychosis and mood disorders experience disruptions in working memory; however, the underlying mechanism remains unknown. We focused on 2 potential mechanisms: poor attentional engagement should be associated with elevated levels of prestimulus alpha-band activity within the electroencephalogram (EEG), whereas impaired working memory encoding should be associated with reduced poststimulus alpha suppression.

Methods: We collected EEG data from 68 people with schizophrenia, 43 people with bipolar disorder with a history of psychosis, 53 people with major depressive disorder, and 90 healthy comparison subjects while they completed a spatial working memory task.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Nontargeted analysis (NTA) is a rapidly growing field of techniques that includes the identification of unknown chemical analytes in complex mixtures such as environmental, biological, and food matrices. The use of reference mass spectral databases is a key component of most NTA workflows, providing a high level of confidence for chemical identification when analytical standards are not available, yet effective interlaboratory sharing of research grade spectra remains challenging. The Database Infrastructure for Mass Spectrometry (DIMSpec) project focused on the creation of an open-source toolkit supporting storage and sharing of high-resolution mass spectra with attached sample and methodological metadata.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Hypothesis: The current study investigated the extent to which changes in attentional control contribute to performance on a visual perceptual discrimination task, on a trial-by-trial basis in a transdiagnostic clinical sample.

Study Design: Participants with schizophrenia (SZ; N = 58), bipolar disorder (N = 42), major depression disorder (N = 51), and psychiatrically healthy controls (N = 92) completed a visual perception task in which stimuli appeared briefly. The design allowed us to estimate the lapse rate and the precision of perceptual representations of the stimuli.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF