Publications by authors named "K Egger"
Background: In recent years, both meditation and psychedelics have attracted rapidly increasing scientific interest. While the current state of evidence suggests the promising potential of psychedelics, such as psilocybin, to enhance meditative training, it remains equivocal whether these effects are specifically bound to psilocybin or if other classical psychedelics might show synergistic effects with meditation practice. One particularly promising candidate is -dimethyltryptamine (DMT), an active ingredient of ayahuasca.
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- Isolated rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) can indicate early-stage alpha-synucleinopathies, and this study focused on predicting the progression of iRBD using a machine learning framework analyzing polysomnography (PSG) data.
- The study involved 66 iRBD patients, with 18 showing progression to alpha-synucleinopathies within about 2.7 years.
- The machine learning model performed best using EEG features from REM sleep, suggesting that PSG analysis could help identify patients at risk and enhance clinical trials for potential treatments.
Article Synopsis
- Previous studies found that patients with isolated rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) have distinct changes in their EEG patterns.
- The current study aimed to track how these EEG features change over time by comparing 23 iRBD patients to 23 controls over an average of 4 years.
- Initial findings showed that while iRBD patients had abnormal EEG characteristics at the start (like slowed brain activity), these differences diminished over time, indicating the need for more longitudinal research to understand these changes as potential indicators of neurodegeneration.
The potent hallucinogen N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) has garnered significant interest in recent years due to its profound effects on consciousness and its therapeutic psychopotential. DMT is an integral (but not exclusive) psychoactive alkaloid in the Amazonian plant-based brew ayahuasca, in which admixture of several β-carboline monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) inhibitors potentiate the activity of oral DMT, while possibly contributing in other respects to the complex psychopharmacology of ayahuasca. Irrespective of the route of administration, DMT alters perception, mood, and cognition, presumably through agonism at serotonin (5-HT) 1A/2A/2C receptors in brain, with additional actions at other receptor types possibly contributing to its overall psychoactive effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCerebral intraparenchymal hemorrhage due to electrode implantation (CIPHEI) is a rare but serious complication of deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery. This study retrospectively investigated a large single-center cohort of DBS implantations to calculate the frequency of CIPHEI and identify patient- and procedure-related risk factors for CIPHEI and their potential interactions. We analyzed all DBS implantations between January 2013 and December 2021 in a generalized linear model for binomial responses using bias reduction to account for sparse sampling of CIPHEIs.
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