In November 2016, LIBR organized the Interoception Summit, a first of its kind gathering of interoception experts from around the world. The primary output of this gathering is the white paper “Interoception and Mental Health: A Roadmap” published yesterday in the attached Interoception special issue of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. The special issue highlights several new and exciting ways in which interoceptive science is impacting mental health. The articles (several by LIBR investigators) span a diverse set of approaches including functional neuroimaging, psychophysiology, novel behavioral interventions, and a detailed examination of the link between interoception and inflammation.
 
This special issue is a great representation of LIBR’s impact on the interoception field. Congratulations to everyone who contributed to this exciting new publication!

The Laureate Institute for Brain Research (LIBR) is excited to announce the PLoS One publication of the 1st float study ever conducted in patients suffering from both anxiety and depression. 

This open-label trial from Dr. Justin Feinstein's Float Clinic and Research Center at LIBR in 50 patients provides an initial proof-of-principle study showing that 1-hour of float therapy can provide significant short-term relief from symptoms of stress and anxiety across a range of different conditions including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Panic Disorder, Agoraphobia, Social Anxiety Disorder, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder.  

More than resolving symptoms of mental illness, the experience greatly enhanced mental wellness, leaving patients in a peaceful serene state afterwards.  This mood-enhancing effect of floatation was especially notable given that most of the patients had comorbid depression. 

It is important to emphasize that this was an open-label study examining the short-term effects of floating.  We are now tracking the time course of these effects as well as studying whether or not there is evidence for long-term benefit following repeated practice.  

Dr. Paulus and colleagues have published a new book chapter titled "Call for Pragmatic Computational Psychiatry: Integrating Computational Approaches and Risk-Prediction Models and Disposing of Causality" in "Computational Psychiatry: New Perspectives on Mental Illness.

"Biological psychiatry is at an impasse. Despite several decades of intense research, few if any, biological parameters have contributed to a signifi cant improvement in the life of a psychiatric patient. It is argued that this impasse may be a consequence of an obsessive focus on mechanisms. Alternatively, a risk-prediction framework provides a more pragmatic approach, because it aims to develop tests and measures which generate clinically useful information. Computational approaches may have an important role to play here. This chapter presents an example of a risk-prediction framework, which shows that computational approaches provide a signifi cant predictive advantage. Future directions and challenges are highlighted."

Computational Psychiatry: New Perspectives on Mental Illness
Over the next 3 years, 50% of the chapters will be posted on a monthly rotational basis. Take a look by following the above link to the MIT Press website and “Look Inside the Book.” 

Ernst Strüngmann Forum Reports
Additional books published by MIT Press
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Full citation:
Paulus MPP, Huang C, Harle KM. 2016. Call for Pragmatic Computational Psychiatry: Integrating Computational Approaches and Risk-Prediction Models and Disposing of Causality. In: Computational Psychiatry: New Perspectives on Mental Illness, edited by A. D. Redish and J. A. Gordon.  Strüngmann Forum Reports, vol. 20, J. Lupp, series editor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Congratulations to Drs. Sahib Khalsa and Justin Feinstein on their intriguing Journal of Neuroscience article featured by the editors in the current issue!

"In a pair of twin sisters, a rare disease had damaged the brain’s structures believed necessary to feel fear. But an injection of a drug [isoproterenol] could nevertheless make them anxious." The results suggest that the amygdala isn’t the only part of the brain involved in fear and anxiety. Determining the additional systems involved could provide key neural targets for future anxiety treatments.

News coverage of the research:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brain-holds-more-one-road-fear?tgt=nr
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2082072-fearless-twins-reveal-how-our-bodies-affect-our-emotions/

Full Citation: S. Khalsa et al. Panic anxiety in humans with bilateral amygdala lesions: Pharmacological induction via cardiorespiratory interoceptive pathways. Journal of Neuroscience. Vol. 36, March 23, 2016. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4109-15.2016

Congratulations to Dr. Martin Paulus and Dr. Hamed Ekhtiari, a post-doctoral fellow at LIBR, on the recent book publication of "Neuroscience for Addiction Medicine".

Drs. Paulus and Ekhtiari served as editors and section contributors for the two volumes published in Progress in Brain Research.

To view the contents and contributors, please visit ScienceDirect: Volume 1 and Volume 2.

In early September, The American Journal of Psychiatry accepted the paper "Depression-related increases and decreases in appetite reveal dissociable patterns of aberrant activity in reward and interoceptive neurocircuitry" by Dr. Simmons and his colleagues. 

This paper provides important evidence about why some individuals lose their appetite when they get depressed, while others feel driven to eat more. Using sophisticated behavioral tasks and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Dr. Simmons and his colleagues have demonstrated that activity in the brain regions important for reward and monitoring the body's homeostatic needs distinguishes between depressed individuals who eat too much and those who eat too little.

The American Journal of Psychiatry has accepted a paper by Dr. Kym Young and colleagues titled "Amygdala activity during autobiographical memory recall in depressed and vulnerable individuals: Association with symptom severity and autobiographical overgenerality".

The results of this work suggest left amygdala hyperactivity during negative autobiographical recall is a trait-like marker of depression, as both vulnerable groups (individuals remitted from depression, and otherwise healthy individuals at high familial risk of developing depression) showed activity similar to the depressed group, while amygdala hypoactivity during positive autobiographical recall is a state marker of depression manifesting in active disease. Treatments targeting amygdala hypoactivity and blunted salience during positive autobiographical recall conceivably may exert antidepressant effects.

Congratulations to LIBR's Dr. Kym Young and Dr. Jerzy Bodurka on this impressive accomplishment!

Dr. Martin Paulus' work on resilience with Marine infantry platoons and Olympic BMX athletes has been featured in the article "The Science of Bouncing Back" as part of the Frontiers of Medicine section in TIME Magazine. 

"By the end of [mindfulness] training, their brains actually looked more resilient, Paulus says. “We were able to show, at least in the brain, that we can train people to modify their brain processes toward the direction of resilience.”

Risk-Prediction Model for Clinical Psychiatry

Dr. Martin Paulus has published a viewpoint article in JAMA Psychiatry that highlights the difficulties of making neuroscience useful for clinical psychiatry and advocates for a risk-prediction model in the development of impactful biological psychiatry to help patients now. LIBR's Tulsa 1000 study is based on this premise of making an impact on everyday psychiatric practice.

Scholarship Awarded

Kara Kerr, a Tulsa University Ph.D. student in Clinical Psychology and member of the Simmons Laboratory at LIBR has been named as a recipient of the 2015 Academy for Eating Disorders Early Career Scholarship. This competitive award includes a travel scholarship to the International Conference on Eating Disorders later this year in Boston, MA. Congratulations to Kara on her achievement!

Paper Accepted for Publication

A two-part meta-analysis article by Dr. Paul Hamilton, Madison Farmer and Phoebe Fogelman of LIBR on "Depressive Rumination, the Default-Mode Network, and the Dark Matter of Clinical Neuroscience" has been accepted into the journal Biological Psychiatry. Congratulations to the authors!

A new paper on the emotional life of a patient with Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been published by Dr. Justin Feinstein at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research and his colleagues at the University of Iowa. Their research shows that patients with AD can experience emotion that persists beyond the patient's memory for the event that caused the emotion and highlights the importance promoting positive emotional experiences as part the care and management of Alzheimer's disease. 

The article was recently published in the journal Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology. To download a PDF copy of the article, please click here. The William K. Warren Foundation has generously provided support to allow the study to be available for open access to the public.

The results of this study have garnered positive attention from the press through the following sources:

U.S. News and World Report Health
The Telegraph
Discover
National Public Radio

Congratulations to Dr. Feinstein and his collaborators on this important contribution to the Alzheimer's disease literature.

Congratulations to Dr. Yoon-Hee Cha and collaborators at LIBR and The University of Oklahoma on their new publication currently featured in IEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. 

The study shows lasting effects of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) on brain activity and correlations with symptom changes in patients with mal de debarquement syndrome, a chronic disorder of imbalance often associated with anxiety and migraine.

Together with additional brain imaging measures, these findings provide support for the success of the authors' current treatment method using rTMS. 

Click here to read the featured article.

Newly published research in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) from Dr. Patrick Bellgowan's laboratory at LIBR has been released to the public.

First-author Dr. Rashmi Singh and colleagues at LIBR and Tulsa University have shown that collegiate football players with and without a history of concussion have smaller hippocampal volumes than healthy controls and that the volume loss is related to the number of years played.

Click here to read more about the article "Relationship of Collegiate Football Experience and Concussion With Hippocampal Volume and Cognitive Outcomes".

"Trait impulsivity is related to ventral ACC and amygdala activity during primary reward anticipation" by Kara Kerr, et al. 

Paper abstract: Trait impulsivity is characterized by behavioral disinhibition and rash decision-making that contribute to many maladaptive behaviors. Previous research demonstrates that trait impulsivity is related to the activity of brain regions underlying reward sensitivity and emotion regulation, but little is known about this relationship in the context of immediately available primary reward. This is unfortunate, as impulsivity in these contexts can lead to unhealthy behaviors, including poor food choices, dangerous drug use, and risky sexual practices. In addition, little is known about the relationship between integration of reward and affective neurocircuitry, as measured by resting-state functional connectivity, and trait impulsivity in everyday life, as measured with a commonly used personality inventory. We therefore asked healthy adults to undergo a fMRI task in which they saw cues indicating the imminent oral administration of rewarding taste, as well as a resting-state scan. Trait impulsivity was associated with increased activation during anticipation of primary reward in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and amygdala. Additionally, resting-state functional connectivity between the ACC and the right amygdala was negatively correlated with trait impulsivity. These findings demonstrate that trait impulsivity is related not only to ACC-amygdala activation, but also how tightly coupled these regions are to one another

Prevailing theories hold that the insula is functionally organized along its caudal-to-rostral axis, with posterior regions coding lower-level sensory information and anterior regions coding higher-level stimulus significance relative to the body's homeostatic needs. Contrary to predictions of this model, the response of the taste-sensitive region of the caudal, but not rostral, insula to food images was directly related to the body's homeostatic state as indexed by levels of peripheral glucose. 

Click here to read The Brain and Behavior Research Foundation's summary of Dr. Simmon's findings.

Paper by Maryam Falahpour et al., titled "Subject Specific BOLD fMRI Respiratory and Cardiac Response Functions Obtained from Global Signal" has been accepted for publication in Neuroimage.