Healthy Clinical Trials in Tucson, AZ

Higher education is crucial for young adults in their intake of knowledge and skills to further their careers and reach their potentials. However, going through college is not necessarily an easy path. The purpose of this study is to enhance university students' well-being and educational experience by examining factors associated with stress and well-being. The investigator plans to recruit eighty participants from a large public university in the US to provide survey data and saliva samples at two waves during the data collection semester (beginning and end of the semester). Survey data will include demographic information and help gauge psychosocial factors related to stress and well-being. Saliva will be tested for two biomarkers each wave of data collection, cortisol (sampling three times a day for diurnal patterns for two consecutive days) and c-reactive protein, which indicate physiological stress/immune responses. Additionally, participants be randomly assigned to an intervention (n = 40) or control group (n = 40), where the intervention group will undertake a brief intervention focused on motivation and emotion regulation circa mid-semester and the control group will receive a placebo goal-setting short training. The investigator aims to examine whether intervention efforts can enhance end-of-semester psychological and physiological well-being, and particularly, whether students from diverse backgrounds (e.g., first-generation, low-income, and/or BIPOC) can benefit from the intervention. The investigator will use advanced quantitative data analysis (using Mplus v.8, in a structural equation modeling framework) to examine intervention efficacy and group differences. The investigator hypothesizes that those receiving the intervention will display a healthier profile at the end of the semester compared to their control group counterparts; and the investigator hypothesize students from diverse backgrounds will have significantly improved results from the intervention. The study will allow a better understanding to crucial steps towards exploring how to improve the well-being, higher-education pipeline, and retention of students with diverse backgrounds, providing insight on how each student's university experience can be improved. Read Less

The full experiment involves participants coming into the lab on five separate occasions for neuropsychological testing, a decision making battery, functional and structural MRI, and two TMS sessions for stimulation of the target or control stimulation site. The clinical trial component concerns only the last two sessions where subjects will be randomly assigned to different groups to receive different TMS interventions. In particular, the TMS experiments will ask two main questions: What is the causal role of frontal pole in explore-exploit behavior in younger and older adults? What is the causal role of IFG in explore-exploit behavior in younger and older adults? The investigators will use continuous theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (cTBS, Huang et al. 2005) to inhibit neural activity in each region for approximately 50 minutes (Wischnewski & Schutter, 2015) and measure the downstream effects on behavior in younger and older adults. Consistent with their respective roles in the explore-exploit circuit (Figure 5 in Research Strategy), the investigators predict that inhibition of frontal pole will lead to a selective reduction in directed, but not random, exploration, while inhibition of IFG will decrease exploitation and lead to increases in both types of exploration. Participants in each age group will be pseudo-randomly assigned to either the frontal pole group or IFG group such that the study will have 42 participants (21 males, 21 females) in each group. Thus there will be four distinct groups of subjects older frontal pole, younger frontal pole, older IFG, younger IFG. Each participant will take part in two TMS sessions, one target and one control session. The order of sessions will be counterbalanced across subjects. The primary endpoints of the study are to determine whether: cTBS applied to frontal pole inhibits directed exploration within the younger and older groups cTBS applied to IFG promotes both directed and random exploration within the younger and older groups The study is powered to answer these questions with 80% power at a threshold of p < 0.05. Read Less