10 Clinical Trials for Various Conditions
Background: * Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States, and researchers are interested in gaining a better understanding of the perceived beneficial effects of nicotine to help improve treatment strategies for nicotine dependence. Understanding the conditions under which nicotine improves attention and cognitive processing may provide more useful information for this research. * The ability to pay attention and filter relevant from irrelevant stimuli is central to all aspects of information-processing. Top-down and bottom-up attentional processes illustrate how the brain combines stimuli and goal-directed behaviors. Bottom-up processing is an unconscious response to sensory input; for instance, when the eyes automatically focus on a prominent image in a picture. Top-down processing is a conscious response to drive attention toward specific stimuli; for instance, when a person is asked to focus on a less immediately noticeable image in a picture. Researchers are interested in determining whether nicotine improves cognitive performance by acting on top-down or bottom-up attentional mechanisms. Objectives: - To investigate the effect of nicotine on the top-down and bottom-up mechanisms of attention in cigarette smokers. Eligibility: - Current smokers (at least 10 cigarettes per day for at least 1 year) between 18 and 55 years of age. Design: * This study will involve one training session and four experimental sessions. * During the training session, participants will receive a sample dose of the nicotine nasal spray used in the study to determine if they can tolerate the effects. * For each experimental session, participants will receive one dose of nicotine nasal spray (1 mg, 2 mg, or 3 mg) or placebo spray, followed by blood pressure and heart rate monitoring, performance of an attentional test, and questionnaires to rate participants perception of nicotine effectiveness. Participants may receive different doses at different sessions, and will not be told which dose they will receive at any given point.
The project's objective is to explore the impact of Mindfulness-Based-Stress-Reduction (MBSR) on pain regulation, social stress, basic affective and attention functions, and on the brain, immune, and endocrine mechanisms that subserve these processes. Specifically, the investigators hypothesize that participants undergoing MBSR training will show decreased emotional distress on self-report measures, increased sustained attention on a behavioral task, decreased stress levels on a social stress test, decreased general psychosocial stress as indexed by diurnal salivary cortisol profile, changes in inflammatory response, modulation of cellular aging, and different neural patterns in response to thermal pain and aversive visual stimuli as indexed by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). To test these hypotheses, the study will recruit 50 participants through the UW-Madison Integrative Medicine Program. All participants will be randomly assigned either to an 8-week MBSR program or to an 8-week training program in health-enhancement. At the conclusion of the study, participants will be invited to participate to the second class should they be interested. Participants will complete self-report questionnaires, behavioral tasks, fMRI scanning, cortisol sampling, and blood sampling before training begins, after the first program ends, and again four months after the first program ends and prior to the second program. If hypotheses are supported, the study may benefit participants by reducing their psychological distress, increasing their well-being, and helping them better manage pain and aversive stimuli. There are no other direct benefits to participants. Potential risks associated with fMRI include ferromagnetic collision, neurostimulation effects, and psychological discomfort. Potential risks to subjects include slight potential discomfort in providing saliva samples, discomfort of painful thermal stimulation, stress associated with the Trier Social Stress Test, some psychological discomfort from viewing disturbing photographs as part of the compassion fMRI study, and breach of confidentiality. Consent for the present study will entail both written and verbal descriptions of the protocol. Subjects will be informed that their participation is completely voluntary, and that they can withdraw at any time.
The objectives of this study are to identify neural mechanisms of increased pain in pediatric FAPD and examine mechanisms of disrupted attention in the presence of induced pain. The overarching goal is to determine whether youth with FAPD process pain differently than healthy youth and to identify the brain areas involved.
This study will use an anticholinergic pharmacological probe to examine attention network function in SCD using EEG. The overall hypothesis is that in older adults with SCD, normal cognitive performance is maintained by compensatory attention network activity, supported by enhanced cholinergic function. The investigators anticipate that SCD will be associated with greater compensatory attention network activity and that disrupting this compensatory process through anticholinergic challenge will result in a greater negative effect on attentional performance (Attention Network Test, ANT) and attention network functioning (EEG) in older adults with SCD compared to those without SCD.
Anxiety disorders are one of the most common psychological disorders. Underlying anxiety is an increased attentional bias to threat, which has been identified as a causal contributor in the development of anxiety. Given this causal relationship, attention bias modification was introduced as a treatment option where anxiety is reduced by training individuals to direct their attention away from threat and thereby decreasing anxiety. Over a decade of research using this approach, called attention bias modification (ABM), suggests that overall the approach is effective in reducing anxiety. Although ABM appears to be a very promising treatment option for anxiety, there are several factors limiting the effectiveness of ABM. These include the recognition of individual-level needs and a known underlying mechanism of action by which ABM is effective. Neuroimaging evidence suggests that attentional bias to visual threat is associated with a network of brain regions including the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, and visual cortex. In human participants, experience-dependent neuroplasticity is visible in voxel-based morphometry based measures of gray matter volume following training. Recently, voxel-based morphometry measures of gray matter volume have been linked to dendritic spine density-a known cellular mechanism for learning-related neuroplasticity. Thus, voxel-based morphometry measures are ideally suited to measure learning-related neuroplasticity following attention bias modification. In this proposal participants' level of attentional bias, anxiety, and gray matter volume will be measured before and after completing six weeks of attention bias modification training (N = 50) or attention control training (N= 50). The proposal aims to (1) establish that pre-treatment bias predicts variability in gray matter volume in the extended amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex, (2) assess the extent to which reduced extended amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex gray matter volume following ABM underlies reductions in attentional bias and anxiety, and (3) Establish pre-treatment bias as a predictor of successful ABM as measured by reduced bias, reduced anxiety, and reduced gray matter volume in the extended amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex. Consistent with the objectives of the AREA grant and NIMH's focus on identifying and validating new targets for treatment development that underlie disease mechanisms, the current proposal plans to involve students at a rural primarily undergraduate university in a research project aimed at establishing neuroplasticity in the extended amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex as a target mechanism for ABM training outcome, which could be used to objectively track training-related outcomes in anxiety treatment.
Background: Irritability is an elevated proneness to anger. Children with irritability have difficulty tolerating frustration. They get angry and have temper outbursts more easily than their others their age. Irritability is a symptom of DMDD and ADHD. (DMDD is disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. ADHD is attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.) Yet the reasons why some children get irritated easily are not well understood. Objective: To use brain imaging methods to study responses to frustration in youth. Eligibility: Youth aged 8 to 17 years with severe irritability (including those diagnosed with DMDD) and/or ADHD. Healthy volunteers are also needed. All participants are already enrolled in studies 02-M-0021 or 01-M-0192. Design: Participants will visit the clinic 3 times. The second and third visits will be 3 to 4 weeks apart. The first visit will be an enrollment visit. They will receive training on the tasks they will do during the study. Participants and their parents will take surveys. They will answer questions about their moods and feelings. Participants will train for an MRI scan. They will lie in a mock scanner tube and hear the noises an MRI makes. On the second and third visits, participants will have real MRI scans. They will play a computer game or watch a movie during each scan. The scans will last about 1 hour. The week after each scan, participants will wear a device on their wrist to measure their heart rate and activity level. Participants and their parent will use a smartphone to answer questions about how they are feeling and acting. Participants who do not have smartphones will be given one to use during the study.
The purpose of this study is to observe the attention and memory processes in breast cancer survivors. Both cancer survivors and healthy volunteers (who are the same age as the cancer survivors) will participate in this study so we can compare the results of testing on each group of participants.
This research aims to elucidate mechanisms through which change occurs during cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for depression. Assessing meta-cognitive processes of self-knowledge (top-down), electrophysiological and behavioral correlates of emotion processing (bottom-up), and their relation to treatment outcome will provide new insights into the mechanisms of emotion regulation deficits in depression. It will also contribute toward the clinical goal of identifying patients who may benefit most from CBT for unipolar depression.
The aim of this study is to test whether the attention-enhancing effects of low-dose nicotine can be enhanced by the drug galantamine, FDA-approved for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. This proof-of-principle study is performed in healthy non-smokers and involves two single exposures to a nicotine patch (7 mg/24 hrs) and two single exposures to galantamine (4 mg). The dose of galantamine is substantially lower than the clinical dose range of 16-24 mg/day. The hypothesis is that performance-enhancing effects of nicotine are greater in the presence of this low dose of galantamine.
The purpose of this study is to better characterize differences in mood, attention, brain activation patterns underlying the beneficial effects of pharmacological treatments previously demonstrated to be help individuals successfully quit tobacco smoking. Smokers will be randomly assigned to one of three treatments: 1) bupropion sustained release (SR), 2) nicotine patch, or 3) placebo patches plus pills across a 45-day period with a 3-week intensive post-treatment follow-up. In addition, 20 percent of the subjects will be randomized to a delayed-quit control group.