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Brain/ Mental Health

How the Arts transform our Brains, Bodies, and Minds

May 31, 2023 by Greater Good Science Center Leave a Comment

One of my favorite say­ings comes from David Thore­au: “My life has been the poem I would have writ / But I could not both live and utter it.” It speaks to the way that life and art are inter­twined, and how we gain so much from liv­ing life with a sense of beau­ty and aes­thet­ics in mind.

There are many ways art infus­es my own life—from singing and play­ing gui­tar to read­ing nov­els and attend­ing plays, which all help to improve my mood and enhance my sense of won­der with the world. Prob­a­bly, neu­roaes­thet­ics many of you feel the same way. Some of you may have felt you’ve even been saved by art.

[Read more…] about How the Arts trans­form our Brains, Bod­ies, and Minds

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health, Education & Lifelong Learning Tagged With: art, brain, heal, life, neuroaesthetics, Your Brain on Art

Smartphone-based cognitive behavioral therapy found to significantly decrease insomnia, substantially outperforming sleep education

May 17, 2023 by SharpBrains Leave a Comment

Dig­i­tal Ther­a­py for Insom­nia More Effec­tive Than Sleep Edu­ca­tion, Study Finds (Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Man­aged Care):

A smart­phone-based, Chi­nese culture­–adapted dig­i­tal cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­a­py for insom­nia (DCBT‑I) appli­ca­tion improved insom­nia sever­i­ty com­pared with sleep edu­ca­tion, accord­ing to find­ings of a study pub­lished in JAMA Net­work Open.

Researchers want­ed to study the effi­ca­cy of this DCBT‑I app com­pared with sleep edu­ca­tion using the same app … “To our knowl­edge, this is the first RCT [ran­dom­ized clin­i­cal tri­al] in which the con­trol group received sleep edu­ca­tion pro­vid­ed using the same inter­face as an inter­ven­tion,” said the researchers. [Read more…] about Smart­phone-based cog­ni­tive behav­ioral ther­a­py found to sig­nif­i­cant­ly decrease insom­nia, sub­stan­tial­ly out­per­form­ing sleep education

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health, Technology & Innovation Tagged With: Chinese, cognitive-behavioral-therapy, DCBT-I, digital cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, insomnia, insomnia severity, randomized clinical trial, sleep education

Should doctors prescribe lecanemab (Leqembi) to women? The answer, given available evidence, is probably No

May 10, 2023 by Prof. Michael Valenzuela Leave a Comment

Data from the CLARITY tri­al ear­li­er this year was sup­posed to be the crown­ing glo­ry of the amy­loid hypoth­e­sis, vin­di­ca­tion for pro­po­nents of this long-held but much-maligned the­o­ry of Alzheimer’s disease.

Yet the results left many feel­ing under­whelmed, and even the study authors noncommittal.

The CLARITY tri­al has many admirable fea­tures. It recruit­ed close to 1800 peo­ple from around the world, pret­ty bal­anced between women and men. While the major­i­ty were white, 17% of the cohort was Asian and 12% Latino.

Choice of pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary out­comes were impec­ca­ble. The pri­ma­ry out­come was the Clin­i­cal Demen­tia Rat­ing sum of box­es (CDR-SB), a score­card of sorts rat­ed by a clin­i­cian across the domains of mem­o­ry, ori­en­ta­tion, prob­lem solv­ing, com­mu­ni­ty affairs, home duties and per­son­al care. Sec­ondary out­comes includ­ed stan­dard mea­sures of glob­al cog­ni­tion, dai­ly func­tion, as well as bio­mark­ers in the brain, from the CSF and blood.

So what hap­pened? [Read more…] about Should doc­tors pre­scribe lecanemab (Leqem­bi) to women? The answer, giv­en avail­able evi­dence, is prob­a­bly No

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health Tagged With: amyloid, amyloid antibodies, amyloid removal, CLARITY trial, Clinical Dementia Rating, immunotherapy, lecanemab, Leqembi, women

Study shows the power of electroencephalography and machine learning to help predict response to psychotherapy (or lack thereof) in patients with PTSD

May 2, 2023 by SharpBrains Leave a Comment

A fas­ci­nat­ing study just pub­lished in Nature Men­tal Health aimed at help­ing pre­dict the out­comes of psy­chother­a­py for patients with Post-Trau­mat­ic Stress Dis­or­der (PTSD) using Machine Learn­ing (ML) and elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy (EEG) data.

PTSD is a men­tal health con­di­tion trig­gered by expe­ri­enc­ing or wit­ness­ing a trau­mat­ic event; two evi­dence-based treatments–Prolonged Expo­sure (PE) and Cog­ni­tive Pro­cess­ing Ther­a­py (CPT)–are com­mon­ly used to help patients, with var­ied results.

In this study, the researchers used a super­vised machine learn­ing approach and high-den­si­ty rest­ing-state EEG (rsEEG) record­ings to pre­dict indi­vid­ual psy­chother­a­py out­comes. They iden­ti­fied a pre­treat­ment EEG con­nec­tiv­i­ty sig­na­ture in the eyes-open theta fre­quen­cy range that was pre­dic­tive of patients’ respons­es to both PE and CPT. [Read more…] about Study shows the pow­er of elec­troen­cephalog­ra­phy and machine learn­ing to help pre­dict response to psy­chother­a­py (or lack there­of) in patients with PTSD

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health, Technology & Innovation Tagged With: Alto Neuroscience, cognitive processing therapy, digital biomarker, electroencephalography, posttraumatic stress disorder, precision psychiatry, prolonged exposure, Psychotherapy, PTSD

On the 7 Habits of Highly Stress-Resilient Minds, cognitive screenings, anti-amyloid drugs, and more

April 27, 2023 by SharpBrains Leave a Comment

Wel­come to a new edi­tion of Sharp­Brains e‑newsletter, this time cov­er­ing the lat­est devel­op­ments in stress research, med­i­ta­tion, vir­tu­al real­i­ty, anti-amy­loid drugs, cog­ni­tive screen­ings, and more.

#1. The 7 Habits of High­ly Stress-Resilient Minds

“Any­thing worth doing will have aspects of stress woven through: chal­lenge, dis­com­fort, risk. We can’t change that. But what we can change is our response” – Elis­sa Epel, Direc­tor of the Aging, Metab­o­lism, and Emo­tions Cen­ter at UCSF

#2. Har­ness­ing mind­ful­ness and vir­tu­al real­i­ty sim­u­la­tions to max­i­mize sports performance

Good tips and tools to “sim­u­late or repli­cate real-world per­for­mance anx­i­ety and pres­sure in a con­trolled way, allow­ing pro­gres­sive and man­aged expo­sure to stress.”

#3. 8 week Mind­ful­ness-Based Stress Reduc­tion (MBSR) course found to be as effec­tive as Lexapro (esc­i­talo­pram) to treat adults with anx­i­ety dis­or­ders, and with far few­er side effects

“When peo­ple can come into a clin­ic and be seen by a psy­chol­o­gist or psy­chi­a­trist and giv­en a full evaluation—where the [pro­fes­sion­al] can dis­cuss with the patient the option of med­ica­tion, psy­chother­a­py, or meditation—that will be a good thing” — study’s lead author, Dr. Eliz­a­beth Hoge at George­town University

#4. CMS: anti-amy­loid drug Leqem­bi (lecanemab) doesn’t meet the “rea­son­able and nec­es­sary” stan­dard required for wider Medicare coverage

Brave evi­dence-based deci­sion, fac­ing con­sid­er­able pres­sure — “impor­tant ques­tions still need to be answered to sup­port peo­ple with Medicare, care­givers, and their refer­ring and treat­ing physi­cians to make informed, appro­pri­ate deci­sions about use of any drug in this par­tic­u­lar class” … also, reg­istry-based stud­ies “may be used to assess whether out­comes seen in care­ful­ly con­trolled clin­i­cal tri­als (e.g., FDA tri­als) are repro­duced in the real-world and in a broad­er range of patients.”

#5. Pilot pro­gram by IU and Davos Alzheimer’s Col­lab­o­ra­tive to test AI-pow­ered cog­ni­tive screen­ing at scale

“…The test itself, the Linus Health Core Cog­ni­tive Eval­u­a­tion, is com­prised of a lifestyle-based ques­tion­naire and a

dig­i­tal cog­ni­tive assess­ment, which asks patients to remem­ber three unre­lat­ed words, com­plete the clock draw­ing test, and repeat the three words. The tool then uses arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) to detect sub­tle signs of cog­ni­tive impair­ment and gen­er­ates a score…“[Using that score,] they get a stop­light that’s green, yel­low, or red. And the doc­tor can take a quick look at it and decide, ‘what do I do with this?’”

#6. Pear Ther­a­peu­tics los­es 97% of its mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion since 2021, explores strate­gic alternatives

Unfor­tu­nate news from a pio­neer in dig­i­tal med­i­cine, show­ing how hard it is to bring non-inva­sive inter­ven­tions to mar­ket via clin­i­cal channels.

#7. Beyond bulky VR head­sets: Voice recog­ni­tion, eye track­ing, and nat­ur­al ges­tures in the era of the meta­verse and the “Medi-verse”

“We don’t real­ly know the poten­tial of the meta­verse … includ­ing a poten­tial “Medi-verse” that focus­es on health­care deliv­ery. But … one thing that seems unlike­ly is us con­tin­u­ing to inter­act with the dig­i­tal world through desk­top com­put­ers, smart­phones, and bulky head­sets. More like­ly, we will inter­act with the dig­i­tal world through voice recog­ni­tion, eye track­ing, and nat­ur­al ges­tures like in the sce­nario above.” -- Dr. Cori Lath­an, author of Invent­ing the Future: Sto­ries from a Techno-Optimist

#8. Ten resources, brain teasers and illu­sions to cel­e­brate Brain Aware­ness Week 2023

We have brains; there­fore we feel, and think, and are. Some­thing we cel­e­brat­ed dur­ing Brain Aware­ness Week (March 13–19th) and can and should keep cel­e­brat­ing every day!

 

Have a great month of May

 

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health, Education & Lifelong Learning, SharpBrains Monthly eNewsletter Tagged With: anti-amyloid drugs, cognitive-screenings, digital medicine, lecanemab, Leqembi, Linus Health Core Cognitive Evaluation, meditation, Mindfulness-Based-Stress-Reduction, Pear Therapeutics, stress research, virtual-reality

8‑week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course found to be as effective as Lexapro (escitalopram) to treat adults with anxiety disorders, and with far fewer side effects

April 19, 2023 by Greater Good Science Center Leave a Comment

Cred­it: Brain­Post, with data from Hoge et al (2022)

Anx­i­ety is the most com­mon psy­chi­atric dis­or­der, with over 301 mil­lion ?peo­ple affect­ed around the world. Whether extreme anx­i­ety aris­es in social sit­u­a­tions, is trig­gered by a par­tic­u­lar pho­bia, or man­i­fests as a gen­er­al unease in the world, it can severe­ly affect people’s every­day func­tion­ing and lead to high lev­els of distress.

Luck­i­ly, there are good treat­ments for anx­i­ety, includ­ing Cog­ni­tive Behav­ioral Ther­a­py (or CBT) and var­i­ous phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal drugs. Still, CBT takes a high­ly-trained ther­a­pist to admin­is­ter and can be lengthy and expen­sive, mak­ing it inac­ces­si­ble to many peo­ple who need it. And, while drug ther­a­pies can work well and are often cov­ered by insur­ers, they may not be accept­able for peo­ple who wor­ry about the poten­tial side effects of putting a drug in their body. [Read more…] about 8‑week Mind­ful­ness-Based Stress Reduc­tion (MBSR) course found to be as effec­tive as Lexapro (esc­i­talo­pram) to treat adults with anx­i­ety dis­or­ders, and with far few­er side effects

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health, Education & Lifelong Learning Tagged With: anxiety, anxiety disorder, body scans, cognitive-behavioral-therapy, Lexapro, mbsr, medication, meditation, mindful breathing, Mindfulness-Based-Stress-Reduction, psychiatric disorder, psychiatrist, psychologist, Psychotherapy, SSRI antidepressants, walking meditation

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