Developing User Personas to Aid in the Design of a User-Centered Natural Product-Drug Interaction Information Resource for Researchers.

Pharmacokinetic interactions between natural products and conventional drugs can adversely impact patient outcomes. These complex interactions present unique challenges that require clear communication to researchers. We are creating a public information portal to facilitate researchers' access to credible evidence about these interactions.

Recalling happy memories in remitted depression: a neuroimaging investigation of the repair of sad mood.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a recurrent mood disorder. The high rate of recurrence of MDD suggests the presence of stable vulnerability factors that place individuals with a history of major depression at an increased risk for the onset of another episode. Previous research has linked the remitted state, and therefore increased vulnerability for depressive relapse, with difficulties in the use of pleasant autobiographical memories to repair sad mood.

Neural correlates of automatic mood regulation in girls at high risk for depression.

Daughters of depressed mothers are at significantly elevated risk for developing a depressive disorder themselves. We have little understanding, however, of the specific factors that contribute to this risk. The ability to regulate negative affect effectively is critical to emotional and physical health and may play an important role in influencing risk for depression.

Neural correlates of rumination in depression.

Rumination, or recursive self-focused thinking, has important implications for understanding the development and maintenance of depressive episodes. Rumination is associated with the worsening of negative mood states, greater affective responding to negative material, and increased access to negative memories. The present study was designed to use fMRI to examine neural aspects of rumination in depressed and healthy control individuals.

Neural processing of reward and loss in girls at risk for major depression.

Context: Deficits in reward processing and their neural correlates have been associated with major depression. However, it is unclear if these deficits precede the onset of depression or are a consequence of this disorder.

Objective: To determine whether anomalous neural processing of reward characterizes children at familial risk for depression in the absence of a personal history of diagnosable disorder.

Neural correlates of inhibitory deficits in depression.

The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine neural correlates of inhibitory dysfunction in individuals diagnosed with major depressive disorder (MDD). Twelve MDD participants and 12 never-depressed controls completed the negative affective priming (NAP) task in the scanner. Results indicated that, in depressed participants, increased activation in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) is associated with inhibition of negative, but not positive, words; in contrast, in nondepressed participants, inhibition of positive, but not negative, words is associated with increased activation in the rACC.

The neural bases of obsessive-compulsive disorder in children and adults.

Functional imaging studies have reported with remarkable consistency hyperactivity in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and caudate nucleus of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). These findings have often been interpreted as evidence that abnormalities in cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loops involving the OFC and ACC are causally related to OCD. This interpretation remains controversial, however, because such hyperactivity may represent either a cause or a consequence of the symptoms.

Remembering the good times: neural correlates of affect regulation.

The ability to regulate one's mood state effectively is critical to emotional and physical health. Recent investigations have sought to delineate the neural mechanisms by which individuals regulate mood states and emotions, positing a critical role of a dorsal system that includes the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate. This study extended these efforts by examining the neural correlates of retrieving positive autobiographical memories while experiencing a negative mood state in a sample of healthy female adults.

Neural responses to monetary incentives in major depression.

Background: Reduced responsiveness to positive incentives is a central feature of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). In the present study, we compared neural correlates of monetary incentive processing in unmedicated depressed participants and never-depressed control subjects.

Methods: Fourteen currently depressed and 12 never-depressed participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while participating in a monetary incentive delay task.

Amygdala activation in the processing of neutral faces in social anxiety disorder: is neutral really neutral?

Previous research has suggested that Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is associated with a tendency to interpret ambiguous social stimuli in a threatening manner. The present study used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine patterns of neural activation in response to the processing of neutral facial expressions in individuals diagnosed with SAD and healthy controls (CTLs). The SAD participants exhibited a different pattern of amygdala activation in response to neutral faces than did the CTL participants, suggesting a neural basis for the biased processing of ambiguous social information in SAD individuals.

Amygdala reactivity to emotional faces predicts improvement in major depression.

Behavioral studies suggest that emotional reactivity in depressed persons predicts subsequent symptom reduction. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in a prospective study, we show that greater amygdala activation to emotional facial expressions among depressed patients predicts symptom reduction 8 months later, controlling for initial depression severity and medication status. Functional magnetic resonance imaging may thus be used as a method to identify neural markers in depressed patients at risk for poor outcome.