Publications

Chronic low back pain and depression are common and frequently co-occurring in late life. Yet treatment can be challenging as these conditions are risk factors for each other, and both interfere with the other’s treatment response. Opioids may be a marker of poor treatment response for both depression and pain. In addition, there is limited evidence of the efficacy of opioids for patients with chronic pain, and...

Tools that help psychiatrists and psychologists measure emotion dysregulation—the inability to effectively modulate the intensity or duration of emotional responses—are critical to the diagnosis and treatment of numerous psychiatric disorders. However, for youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), scientists have questioned the suitability of existing measures, given that young people with ASD can have highly...

Three studies are featured below as Pitt Psychiatry “game changers” for their contributions to research on visualizing the human brain. Longitudinal Changes in Brain Activation during Anticipation of Monetary Loss in Bipolar Disorder Investigators including Anna Manelis, PhD, and Mary Phillips, MD, have, for the first time, examined longitudinal changes in brain activation during win and loss anticipation to...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by cognitive and behavioral deficits that typically emerge before the age of three. While this distinctive developmental trajectory and the selective degradation of particular abilities suggest that ASD arises from impaired developmental processes affecting the maturation of specific neural circuits, the developmental stage at which circuit dysfunction associated with...

The paper described below was selected as a SLEEP Editor’s Choice. Sleep can play an important role in overall mental and physical health. A multidimensional sleep health score assesses sleep through six dimensions: sleep duration, timing, regularity, efficiency and quality, and daytime alertness. Although this score helps scientists create a nuanced sleep health profile, which is critical to analyzing sleep...

As cannabis use increases, questions remain about its impact on users’ cognitive function. Studies have shown that among adolescents, the use of cannabis—specifically its primary psychoactive ingredient, Δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)—can be associated with susceptibility to cognitive impairment. Previous research has examined the effects of THC on working memory and other cognitive processes in adolescence, but...