mortiz095

My colleague, Mark Rose, recently submitted this post about the potential use of buprenorphine as an antidepressant treatment for treatment resistant depression. To our knowledge, no further studies of this have been done. Perhaps it's time? MW Buprenorphine may be effective in treatment-refractory depression Mark E. Rose, MA Licensed Psychologist Persons with major depressive disorder (MDD) are considered treatment-refractory (TRD) when they fail to respond to multiple trials of antidepressant medication from different classes (Keller 2005). TRD is a devastating condition that results in substantial health care and economic cost, and untold suffering to the patient and family members (Nierenberg et al. 2007). Most FDA-approved antidepressant drugs act through monoamine reuptake inhibition, and medications that act through alternate mechanisms need to be available to patients with unrelenting depression that is untreatable with conventional antidepressants. The results of a study p...

This new study identified some functional neuroimaging correlates to performance on a task that measures something called "delay discounting." This now highly popular test (among scientists) gives people a choice or series of choices that boils down to this question: "Do you want a smaller reward (typically money) sooner, or a larger reward later?" For example, a subject might be asked to decide between getting $1 right now, or getting $20 in two weeks. "Delay discounting" refers to discounting the value of a future reward, thus increasing the likelihood of choosing the smaller reward sooner. While there have been many such studies, I'm posting this one because of the comments made by Dan Hommer at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism . His comments focus on the concept of "impulsivity." As it turns out, there is no gold standard for measuring this construct, nor is there any consensus about what it means in more than gener...

I've been a skeptic about the potential role of cannabis as an independent risk factor for developing psychosis, but this new study addresses some of the weaknesses of previous studies and shows a strong association between persistent cannabis use and the later development of psychosis. They only studied cannabis use that started after the study baseline to eliminate the effects of preexisting use, and they excluded anyone at baseline with any psychotic symptoms. The authors suggest that the risk might involve increasing the persistence of subclinical psychotic phenomena that would otherwise be transient, an interesting hypothesis. Underlying that suggestion is recent evidence that psychotic phenomena exist along a continuum from minor transient symptoms (quite common) to persistent and then more severe symptoms. Also note that the risk associated with cannabis was independent of family history of psychosis. There are still many unanswered questions about this link, but the evidenc...