Publications

Investigators at Pitt Psychiatry have recently published studies in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) and Translational Psychiatry on the molecular biology of the human brain. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS): Diurnal rhythms across the human dorsal and ventral striatum In a paper recently published in...

Two recent studies from the Department of Psychiatry have enhanced our understanding of the role of cortical GABA neurons in health and disease. In Biological Psychiatry, Pitt Psychiatry investigators analyzed indices of parvalbumin-expressing basket cells axon terminals across regions of the visuospatial working memory network in schizophrenia. A paper published in Cerebral Cortex examines GABA neuron transcript...

New research from Pitt Psychiatry investigators provides insight into the development of anxiety, depression, and/or bipolar in adolescence. A Biological Psychiatry study examines the association between trauma exposure, reward neural circuitry function, and affective and anxiety disorders. In the Journal of Affective Disorders, investigators study whether child maltreatment and cognitive function influence the...

Children and adolescents with autism are nine times more likely than peers without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to require emergency room visits for psychiatric reasons, and twelve times more likely to require psychiatric hospitalization by age 21. Additionally, research suggests that poor emotion regulation is associated with a higher likelihood of co-occurring psychiatric disorders. The Emotion Dysregulation...

Many adolescents experience poor or insufficient sleep. However, research suggests that stigmatized youth, including those who identify as racial, gender, and/or sexual minorities, may experience even poorer sleep than those who do not experience stigma. Poor sleep quality is associated with mental health issues that are faced disproportionately by transgender or by gender minority adolescents (defined here as...

In a recent General Hospital Psychiatry paper, Oommen Mammen, MD (Assistant Professor of Psychiatry), and James Tew, MD (Associate Professor of Psychiatry), described the importance of communicating about suicide risk with families of individuals with borderline personality disorder who are chronically suicidal. We spoke with Dr. Mammen, the paper’s lead author, about how to help families arrive at a shared...