Chronic pain often leads practitioners to prescribe opioids, though prescribed opioids have created a nationwide crisis that reportedly killed more than 107,000 Americans from December 2020 through December 2021. Therefore, an urgent need exists to develop novel non-opioid and non-addicting therapies for managing chronic pain. To help develop these therapies, the National Institutes of Health recently awarded a five-year grant to Mahmoud Salama Ahmed, Ph.D., from the TTUHSC Jerry H. Hodge School of Pharmacy. 

Researchers at the University of Michigan have demonstrated that a single dose of a psychedelic compound significantly improves cognitive flexibility in mice for at least three weeks after administration. This groundbreaking finding suggests potential therapeutic applications for conditions characterized by cognitive rigidity, including depression, PTSD, and Alzheimer's disease.

A large-scale study from the Genomic Psychiatry Cohort has uncovered distinct sex-based patterns in how panic disorder relates to substance use. Males with panic disorder demonstrated substantially higher alcohol risk scores compared to females with the same condition, while ancestry appeared to have no significant impact on these associations.

Saying one thing while feeling another is part of being human, but bottling up emotions can have serious psychological consequences like anxiety or panic attacks. To help health care providers tell the difference, a team led by scientists at Penn State has created a stretchable, rechargeable sticker that can detect real emotions — by measuring things like skin temperature and heart rate — even when users put on a brave face.