Navigating Uncertainty: Adapting Guidance for Mental Health During the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency & the Crucial Role of Bi-directional Feedback.

In response to the COVID-19 public health emergency, state and local mental health authorities rapidly developed and disseminated guidance to community mental health agencies. While tailored communication is effective to reach target audiences under usual circumstances, strategies to facilitate the implementation of guidance amidst a rapidly evolving public health emergency are not well understood. This project sought to understand factors informing decision-making about adaptations to guidance, and strategies used to disseminate and facilitate guidance implementation among system-level community partners in OnTrackNY Coordinated Specialty Care (CSC) programs for early psychosis.

A neural code supporting prospective probabilistic reasoning for instrumental information demand in humans.

When making adaptive decisions, we actively demand information, but relatively little is known about the mechanisms of active information gathering. An open question is how the brain prospectively estimates the information gains that are expected to accrue from various sources by integrating simpler quantities of prior certainty and the reliability (diagnosticity) of a source. We examine this question using fMRI in a task in which people placed bids to obtain information in conditions that varied independently in the rewards, decision uncertainty, and information diagnosticity.

The relationship between COMT, proline, and negative symptoms in clinical high risk and recent psychosis onset.

Individuals at clinical high-risk (CHR) of developing psychosis, as well as patients with recent psychosis onset (RO), experience significant negative symptoms that detrimentally impact daily-life functioning and are associated with poor outcomes, even in those who do not convert to psychosis. Targeting negative symptoms may thus hold promise for the treatment of CHR and RO patients. Building from previous findings we examined whether the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) ValMet functional polymorphism and fasting peripheral proline concentration predicts the severity of negative symptoms experienced by adolescents and young adults at CHR or those with RO.

The Combined Relationship of Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Enactment and Medical Cannabis Laws with Chronic Pain-Related Healthcare Visits.

Background: U.S. state electronic prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs) are associated with reduced opioid dispensing among people with chronic pain and may impact use of other chronic pain treatments.

Psychological Assessment and Intervention at the Boston Marathon.

The Boston Marathon is a highly regarded event in the running world, not just for its prestige and challenging course, but also for its implementation of a psychology team to support runners. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombings underscored the essential role that mental health support plays at this event, prompting the development and expansion of its innovative care model. This review critically outlines, evaluates, and analyzes the approach and effectiveness of the psychological care model provided to runners on race day as part of the Boston Marathon medical team, including the standard of care, how it functions, and best practices for other marathons.

Sex-Specific Effects of Anxiety on Cognition and Activity-Dependent Neural Networks: Insights From (Female) Mice and (Wo)men.

Background: Neuropsychiatric symptoms, such as depression and anxiety, are observed in 90% of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), two-thirds of whom are women. Neuropsychiatric symptoms usually manifest long before AD onset creating a therapeutic opportunity. Here, we examined the impact of anxiety on AD progression and the underlying brainwide neuronal mechanisms.

Changes in Recovery Capital Among Patients Receiving Buprenorphine Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder in a Telehealth Setting.

Background: Medications for the treatment of opioid use disorder (MOUD) such as buprenorphine are the most effective treatment available for OUD; yet, beyond drug testing results and retention in care, systematically measured clinical outcomes have proven elusive. There is growing interest in integrating systematic monitoring of patient-reported outcomes and measurement-based care as strategies to improve patients' success in treatment.

Methods: We analyzed changes in recovery capital assessed via the Brief Assessment of Recovery Capital (BARC-10) from baseline to 30-120 days post-intake among patients initiating buprenorphine treatment from May to October 2023 at Ophelia, a telehealth MOUD provider, who were retained for ≥90 days.

Developing decision support tools for high-risk women and healthcare providers to increase chemoprevention informed choice and uptake: A retrospective translational science case study.

Retrospective case studies are one approach to help identify processes underlying the translation of successful health interventions. This case study investigates the development of and (), decision support tools for breast cancer risk assessment, and risk-stratified prevention. Following a recently developed protocol for retrospective translational science case studies, we examined the career trajectory of Dr Katherine Crew as she expanded from basic science to interdisciplinary, patient-oriented research in oncology and began collaboration with Dr Rita Kukafka, a public health informatician focused on communicating risk.

Is there a ubiquitous spectrolaminar motif of local field potential power across primate neocortex?

Mendoza-Halliday, Major et al., 2024 ("") advocates a local field potential (LFP)-based approach to functional identification of cortical layers during "laminar" (simultaneous recordings from all cortical layers) multielectrode recordings in nonhuman primates (NHPs). describes a "ubiquitous spectrolaminar motif" in the primate neocortex: 1) 75-150 Hz power peaks in the supragranular layers, 2) 10-19 Hz power peaks in the infragranular layers and 3) the crossing point of their laminar power gradients identifies Layer 4 (L4).

Heritability of movie-evoked brain activity and connectivity.

The neural bases of sensory processing are conserved across people, but no two individuals experience the same stimulus in exactly the same way. Recent work has established that the idiosyncratic nature of subjective experience is underpinned by individual variability in brain responses to sensory information. However, the fundamental origins of this individual variability have yet to be systematically investigated.

Brain-body mitochondrial distribution patterns lack coherence and point to tissue-specific and individualized regulatory mechanisms.

Energy transformation capacity is generally assumed to be a coherent individual trait driven by genetic and environmental factors. This predicts that some individuals should have high and others low mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation (OxPhos) capacity across organ systems. Here, we test this assumption using multi-tissue molecular and enzymatic activities in mice and humans.

Conceptualization and teaching health advocacy in undergraduate medical education: a document analysis.

Background: Health advocacy is considered to be a core competence for physicians, but it remains unclear how the health advocacy role, despite being described in overarching competency frameworks, is operationalized in undergraduate medical education (UME). This study aimed to identify how health advocacy is conceptualized and taught in undergraduate medical curricula.

Methods: We performed a qualitative analysis of curriculum documents from all eight medical schools in the Netherlands, all of which offered competency-based UME.

Maternal high BMI: Sex-dimorphic alterations in maternal and offspring stress indices.

Maternal body mass index (BMI) influences pregnancy and birth outcomes along with child metabolic and neurodevelopmental health and fetal sex may be a moderating factor in these effects. Alternations in autonomic nervous system (ANS) functioning, identified in heart rate (HR) measurements, could present early markers of these prenatal programming effects in both the mother and the developing fetus. This study examines the associations between pre-pregnancy BMI and maternal and fetal ANS functioning and infant postnatal behavioral outcomes stratified by fetal sex.

Providers' perspectives of barriers and facilitators to scale-up of mental health care in the public health delivery system of Mozambique: a qualitative inquiry.

Background: A central challenge to closing the mental health treatment gap in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is determining the most effective pathway for delivering evidence-based mental health services. We are conducting a cluster-randomized, Type 2 hybrid implementation-effectiveness trial across 20 districts of Mozambique called the Partnerships in Research to Implement and Disseminate Sustainable and Scalable EBPs (PRIDE) program. Following training of nonspecialized providers in facilitation of evidence-based treatments for mental health and informed by the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR), we identified how PRIDE compares to care as usual and the perceived barriers and facilitators of implementation and modifications needed for widescale service delivery and scale-up.

Parenthood and All-cause Mortality in Older Adults with Schizophrenia: A Multicenter 5-Year Prospective Study.

Objective: The large body of literature examining the association between parenthood and mortality in the general population contrasts with a lack of studies among older adults with schizophrenia. Identifying potential protective factors of premature death in this population is important to help guide prevention measures. Here, we examined whether all-cause and cause-specific mortality rates significantly differ between older adults with schizophrenia with and without children, during a 5-year follow-up.

Parent Training for Disruptive Behaviors in Referred Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether face-to-face and therapist-assisted online (i.e., blended) behavioral parent training are effective on reducing disruptive behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in routine mental health care.

Inhibition of striatal indirect pathway during second postnatal week leads to long-lasting deficits in motivated behavior.

Schizophrenia is a neuropsychiatric disorder with postulated neurodevelopmental etiology. Genetic and imaging studies have shown enhanced dopamine and D2 receptor occupancy in the striatum of patients with schizophrenia. However, whether alterations in postnatal striatal dopamine can lead to long-lasting changes in brain function and behavior is still unclear.