Publications by authors named "Wolfgang A"

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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Importance: Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) is the signature injury experienced by military service members and is associated with poor neuropsychiatric outcomes. Yet, there is a lack of reliable clinical tools for mTBI diagnosis and prognosis.

Objective: To examine the white matter microstructure and neuropsychiatric outcomes of service members with a remote history of mTBI (ie, mTBI that occurred over 2 years ago) using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and neurite orientation dispersion and density imaging (NODDI).

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Introduction: The USA is experiencing an opioid epidemic. Active duty service members (ADSMs) are at risk for opioid use disorder (OUD). The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has disrupted health care and introduced additional stressors.

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Purpose Of Review: This review discusses the current and projected landscape of psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT), with a focus on clinical, legal, and implementation considerations in Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare systems.

Recent Findings: 3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)- and psilocybin-assisted therapy have shown promising outcomes in efficacy, safety, tolerability, and durability for PTSD and depression, respectively. MDMA-assisted therapy is already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on an Expanded Access ("compassionate use") basis for PTSD, with full approval projected for 2024.

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Article Synopsis
  • Soil microbiomes notably influence the microbial communities found on plants (phyllospheres) and have a lesser impact on aphids, suggesting that plants play a role in how soil organisms affect aphids.
  • During aphid feeding, there’s a significant reduction in microbial diversity on plants, regardless of the soil type; however, the impact on soil microbiomes varies based on the specific soil used.
  • The findings highlight the interconnectedness of soil, plant, and aphid microbiomes, hinting at innovative ways to manage pests through microbiome interactions.
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Psychedelic treatments, particularly 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)-assisted and psilocybin-assisted therapies, have recently seen renewed interest in their clinical potential to treat various mental health conditions. Clinical trials for both MDMA-assisted and psilocybin-assisted therapies have shown to be highly efficacious for post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression. Recent research trials for psychedelic-assisted therapies (PAT) have demonstrated that although they are resource-intensive, their effects are rapid-acting, durable and cost-effective.

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Article Synopsis
  • The significance of crop-associated microbiomes in enhancing plant health and performance has been well-established, particularly in sugar beet cultivation, which relies on genetics and soil microbiomes.
  • Research highlights how bacterial, fungal, and archaeal communities impact sugar beet's resilience, leading to strategies for sustainable farming, including biocontrol of diseases and improved fertilization.
  • The review discusses the unique traits of sugar beet microbiomes, their dynamics throughout plant growth, and potential biocontrol strategies to guide future studies on optimizing sugar beet cultivation through microbiome management.
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Introduction: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression are common in service members and veterans, and the response to currently available treatments is often modest at best. Recent studies suggest potential benefit with psychedelic-assisted therapies (PATs), particularly 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine-assisted therapy for PTSD and psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression. This study examined beliefs and perceived barriers regarding PAT among service members and veterans to inform the delivery of these treatments if they are approved by the FDA.

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The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted breakthrough therapy status to 3,4-methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine-assisted therapy (MDMA-AT) in 2017 due to preliminary evidence supporting its efficacy and safety in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A series of six phase-II clinical trials studying MDMA-AT for treatment-resistant PTSD found that 54% of MDMA-AT full-dose participants no longer met the diagnosis of PTSD after two MDMA sessions, compared to 23% in the control group. In the first phase-III clinical trial, 67% no longer met the criteria for PTSD after three sessions.

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Depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) highly co-occur with alcohol use disorder (AUD). The comparative effects of noradrenergic vs. serotonergic antidepressants on drinking and depressive outcomes for those with AUD and co-occurring depression and/or PTSD are not well known.

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Indigenous leafy green vegetable crops provide a promising nutritious alternative for East African agriculture under a changing climate; they are better able to cope with biotic and abiotic stresses than cosmopolitan vegetable crops. To verify our hypothesis that the associated microbiome is involved, we studied archaeal and bacterial communities of four locally popular leafy green crops in Uganda (, , , and ) and of four plant microhabitats (phyllosphere, root endosphere, rhizosphere, and soil) by complementary analyses of amplicon and isolate libraries. All plants shared an unusually large core microbiome, comprising 18 procaryotic families but primarily consisting of , , , , and one archaeon from the soil crenarchaeotic group.

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The rhizosphere microbiome is crucial for plant health, especially for preventing roots from being infected by soil-borne pathogens. Microbiota-mediated pathogen response in the soil-root interface may hold the key for microbiome-based control strategies of phytopathogens. We studied the pathosystem sugar beet-late sugar beet root rot caused by in an integrative design of combining and (greenhouse and field) trials.

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Understanding how organisms adapt to extreme environments is fundamental and can provide insightful case studies for both evolutionary biology and climate-change biology. Here, we take advantage of the vast diversity of lifestyles in ants to identify genomic signatures of adaptation to extreme habitats such as high altitude. We hypothesized two parallel patterns would occur in a genome adapting to an extreme habitat: 1) strong positive selection on genes related to adaptation and 2) a relaxation of previous purifying selection.

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Under more intensified cropping conditions agriculture will face increasing incidences of soil-borne plant pests and pathogens, leading to increasingly higher yield losses world-wide. Soil-borne disease complexes, in particular, are especially difficult to control. In order to better understand soil-borne -based disease complexes, we studied the volatile-based control mechanism of associated bacteria as well as the rhizospheric microbiome on Ugandan tomato plants presenting different levels of root-galling damage, using a multiphasic approach.

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We present the Kepler Object of Interest (KOI) catalog of transiting exoplanets based on searching four years of time series photometry (Data Release 25, Q1-Q17). The catalog contains 8054 KOIs of which 4034 are planet candidates with periods between 0.25 and 632 days.

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Wolbachia are obligatory endosymbiotic alpha-proteobacteria found in many insect species. They are maternally transmitted and often exhibit reproductive phenotypes like cytoplasmic incompatibility. Pityogenes chalcographus is a bark beetle causing severe damage in spruce stands.

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In this paper, we propose a powerful symmetric radial basis function (RBF) classifier for nonlinear detection in the so-called "overloaded" multiple-antenna-aided communication systems. By exploiting the inherent symmetry property of the optimal Bayesian detector, the proposed symmetric RBF classifier is capable of approaching the optimal classification performance using noisy training data. The classifier construction process is robust to the choice of the RBF width and is computationally efficient.

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A powerful symmetrical radial basis function (RBF) aided detector is proposed for nonlinear detection in so-called rank-deficient multiple-antenna assisted beamforming systems. By exploiting the inherent symmetry of the optimal Bayesian detection solution, the proposed RBF detector becomes capable of approaching the optimal Bayesian detection performance using channel-impaired training data. A novel nonlinear least bit error algorithm is derived for adaptive training of the symmetrical RBF detector based on a stochastic approximation to the Parzen window estimation of the detector output's probability density function.

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The cochlear inner hair cells (IHCs) are connected to afferent type I auditory neurons and use probably L-glutamate as a neurotransmitter. This IHC synapse receives efferent input from the lateral part of the efferent olivocochlear system with neurons originating in the brainstem and terminating below IHCs synapsing with the afferent type I dendrites. A number of substances have been proposed to function as neurotransmitter or neuromodulator in the lateral efferent system: acetylcholine, gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), dopamine, enkephalin and dynorphin.

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To render quality-of-life scores on an instrument acceptable for cross-national comparison, the instrument's reliability and validity must be established in all countries in question. The Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire-Marks (AQLQ-M) was developed in Australia, where it was shown to have good reliability and validity. However, no attempt had been made to determine the psychometric properties of the AQLQ-M and its domains (i.

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Items in Spector's Work Locus of Control-Scale were modified to reflect how much control the respondent feels he might have on a job as opposed to what he feels people in general have. This modified Work Locus of Control Scale was tested for reliability and construct validity. As part of a larger study, data were collected via mail questionnaires from a sample of 284 pharmacists licensed in Indiana.

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