Sahib Khalsa

📍 Register here (event dates: March 20-21, 2026):
teams.semel.ucla.edu/longevity/ev...
We hope to see you there.

The role of brain health and resilience in reshaping trajectories of late-life neuropsychiatric disorders - Neuropsychopharmacology Neuropsychopharmacology - The role of brain health and resilience in reshaping trajectories of late-life neuropsychiatric disorders

If you are interested in the future of neuroscience, public health, mental health, aging, prevention, or policy, I encourage you to learn more and join this conversation.
Background reading on how Brain Health shapes resilience and lifespan trajectories:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The ultimate goal is ambitious, but essential:
Moving from treating brain disease toward building and sustaining Brain Health at the population level.

We'll explore how to:
Define & measure Brain Health across the lifespan
Understand how social & environmental factors shape Brain Health & resilience
Translate Brain Health science into prevention, policy, & real-world interventions
Build a roadmap for Brain Health in California

This summit will bring together:
• Leading scientists and clinicians
• Policymakers and public health leaders
• Community partners and lived-experience stakeholders
• Innovators in technology and AI
• Artists and thought leaders exploring creativity and the brain

To address this gap, next month we are convening the UCLA Brain Health Summit, a first-of-its-kind multidisciplinary gathering in California.

Yet our current systems remain fragmented. Healthcare and research related to brain health are often divided across neurology, psychiatry, pediatrics, geriatrics, rehabilitation, and public health, limiting our ability to translate scientific insight into real-world impact.

Sleep, stress, trauma, community, culture, cardiometabolic health, the microbiome, and lived experience all play fundamental roles in determining whether the nervous system thrives or declines.

Brain health is shaped across the lifespan by an interconnected web of factors—biological, psychological, social, environmental, and physiological.

But we increasingly recognize that the brain does not exist in isolation.

How do we build and sustain healthy brains across the lifespan?
For decades, neuroscience has advanced through powerful reductionist approaches, identifying molecular pathways, neural circuits, and disease mechanisms. These discoveries have transformed medicine.

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Kudos to Paul for bringing this important perspective to light. This is the kind of insight that needed across many more areas of science and medicine, today.

With that in mind, I encourage interested readers to consider the response by Steven Porges (author of the PVT) before forming your opinion. www.clinicalneuropsychiatry.org/download/whe...

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The arguments are factually grounded, and, having participated in this process, I can verify that they were thoroughly vetted by all.

However, in science and medicine there can be varying perspectives.

Led by Paul Grossman and a multidisciplinary panel of 39 experts, this paper provides a point-by-point evaluation of the theory's physiological and evolutionary arguments about the role of the vagus nerve in various aspects of physical and mental health.

Pleased to share this newly co-authored expert opinion on the Polyvagal Theory (PVT): www.clinicalneuropsychiatry.org/download/why...

For cardiac electrophysiology practice, the message is simple: Mental health is no longer peripheral. Its systematic inclusion in cardiac care may meaningfully alter survival trajectories.

If yes, prevention becomes possible: brief, scalable psych interventions, digital mental health tools, automated risk stratification in ICD clinics & early collaborative care

Key unknowns: Do vulnerability traits (anxiety sensitivity, trauma history, interoceptive threat amplification) identify who is most at risk after ICD implantation?
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

In an accompanying editorial, my UCLA cardiology colleague Dr. Noel Boyle and I argue that ICD aftercare must change:
🫀 Cardiac electrophysiology (EP) ≠ only wires & shocks 🧠 Mental health must be core clinical infrastructure. 🫀+🧠
www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/...

And this mattered: Those who developed these psychiatric diagnoses had significantly higher mortality, especially when symptoms appeared early after ICD placement.

Mental Disorders Following Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator Therapy: Incidence and Prognostic Implications in a Nationwide Cohort Study View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.

But what happens after lifesaving cardiac treatment? A recent Taiwan population study found that people receiving an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) had higher rates of depression, anxiety, and insomnia after implantation.
www.jacc.org/doi/10.1016/...

We’ve seen this story before: Acute stressors (earthquakes, world cup soccer matches) trigger day-of spikes in cardiac deaths. Stress becomes the tipping point for vulnerable hearts. www.nejm.org/doi/full/10....

Mental health is shaping survival after heart disease—yet we rarely treat it that way. A new meta-analysis of 22 million people links PTSD, anxiety, depression & insomnia with higher risk of acute coronary syndrome. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

+29 in LA this weekend. It’s only a flight away!

“Diagnostic and Scientific Manual” sounds like a much more appropriate DSM label. And emphasizing a focus on the underlying causes and spectrums of psychiatric disorders are both huge positives!

You are too kind David. I forgot this was online—I’m going to check it out and take notes 😂

This review by Christoph Thais and colleagues does a wonderful job of examining the diversity of molecular & cellular pathways of intestine-specific interoceptive processing. It shows many opportunities to leverage modern neurobiological tools to understand nonhuman & human gut-brain interactions

The nature of the relation between mental well-being and ill-being - Nature Human Behaviour Tamnes et al. explore the complex relationship between ill-being—including mental and behavioural disorders—and mental well-being.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...