Brain
April 9, 2013
Winston Chiong, Stephen M. Wilson, Mark D’Esposito et al.
234 citations
Large-scale brain networks coordinate human behavior, and their anatomy helps explain how neurodegenerative diseases progress. Alzheimer's disease targets the default mode network, while behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia targets the salience network. The default mode network is active when healthy people consider personal moral dilemmas, yet Alzheimer's patients respond normally to these dilemmas, whereas frontotemporal dementia patients give abnormally utilitarian responses. This discrepancy may arise because the salience network modulates default mode network activity.
JAMA psychiatry
March 1, 2025
Michelle Matvey, D Parker Kelley, Ellen R Bradley et al.
12 citations
In psychedelic clinical trials, participants often cannot be masked to whether they received the active drug or placebo, because the drug's effects are so noticeable. This can bias outcomes because participants' expectations influence their responses. One proposed solution is to modify the informed consent process to obscure some details of the study design, which has been used in several recent trials. However, this approach raises serious ethical concerns. The authors review the use of such modifications in trials from 2000 to 2024, discuss the regulatory landscape, and suggest ways to reduce risks. They conclude that modified consent may improve trial interpretability but has not been explicitly tested and may not be appropriate in all cases.
Neuropsychopharmacology
January 1, 2024
Tobias Haeusermann, Winston Chiong
New treatments for mental illness, including psychedelics, ketamine, and neuromodulatory technologies, raise novel ethical questions alongside familiar ones in clinical care and research. This overview examines three key domains of ethical concern: informed consent, the role of expectancy in clinical response, and distributive justice. The authors introduce these issues without presenting empirical findings.