Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
March 17, 2026
Yunjia Liu, Qiang Wang
Adolescent major depressive disorder is a leading cause of disability and a major risk factor for suicide. For 30% to 50% of patients who do not achieve remission after multiple treatments, consequences are substantial. Selective serotonin-reuptake inhibitors, though first-line, often take weeks to work and many adolescents do not respond, leaving a critical treatment gap. Esketamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist, may provide faster relief than conventional antidepressants, including as a monotherapy for treatment-resistant depression, but its neural mechanisms in the developing brain are not fully understood. Understanding these mechanisms is needed to guide clinical use and targeted prevention.
Biomedical Signal Processing and Control
February 1, 2021
Haidong Wang, Yubo Wang, Yun Zhang et al.
During propofol-induced unconsciousness, the brain's electrical activity patterns—EEG microstates—change in ways that can distinguish between resting, light, and deep anesthesia. Analyzing 60-channel EEG from 31 male subjects, the study identified 7 common and 2 anesthesia-specific microstate templates. Features such as the occurrence and duration of certain microstates decreased as consciousness suppression deepened. Machine learning models using these features classified the three consciousness levels with a mean accuracy of 85.6%. The findings suggest that microstate analysis may help reveal the neural mechanisms underlying propofol anesthesia and could provide useful markers for quantifying levels of consciousness.
International Journal of Neural Systems
January 23, 2020
Wen Shi, Yamin Li, Zhian Liu et al.
During propofol-induced sedation, a distinct EEG microstate pattern—a posterior central maximum labeled microstate F—emerges and becomes prominent. Its coverage, occurrence, and power significantly increase in moderate sedation, and the transition from rest to sedation is accompanied by a significant rise in mean energy across all frequency bands in this microstate. The findings suggest that microstate F is closely linked to propofol-altered consciousness and may derive from the canonical anterior-posterior microstate C. The work also advances methods for analyzing microstates in the frequency domain using multivariate empirical mode decomposition and Hilbert-Huang transform.