Publications

Recent papers from the Department of Psychiatry examine clinical initiatives around consultation-liaison psychiatry and first-episode psychosis, consultation-liaison psychiatry in the obstetrical setting, and the expansion of telepsychiatry during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of the Academy of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry: First-Episode Psychosis and the Role of the Psychiatric Consultant Timely recognition...

Investigators including Pitt Psychiatry’s Tharick Pascoal, MD, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology), have published a paper in Nature Medicine investigating the correlation between microglial activation, abnormal tau tangles (a pattern known as Braak stages), and dementia symptoms. Recent research has suggested that microglial activation is a key player in the progression of tau pathology, which...

Major challenges associated with the characterization and treatment of major depressive disorder are largely due to the heterogeneity of associated symptoms, though recent research has focused on anhedonia and negative affect as potentially useful treatment targets. In a recent JAMA Psychiatry study, investigators including Vanessa Brown, PhD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry), the study’s first author, studied if...

Attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the most common childhood neurodevelopmental disorder, is characterized by inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity that are inappropriate to the developmental stage and interfere with daily life. Two of these symptoms, hyperactivity and impulsivity, tend to decline with age. However, inattention symptoms more often persist into adulthood, even among adults...

For individuals with schizophrenia, impairment in the ability to selectively focus attention on some environmental stimuli while ignoring others is associated with worse symptoms and poor functional outcomes. Moreover, these cognitive impairments are largely resistant to treatment through medication. To improve understanding of how dysfunction in the neural selective attention system contributes to these cognitive...

Clinical trials intended to aid in the development of effective antidepressant medication has been hindered by antidepressant placebo effects. These effects may involve cortical and subcortical endogenous opioid signaling, yet the mechanism through which opioid release affects mood remains unclear. In a recent Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging paper, Pitt Psychiatry investigators...