Juliet L Kroll

University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center | MD Anderson

Background Parents with advanced cancer and their partners are more likely to experience psychological distress than their counterparts without minor children. Greater relationship functioning may support parents in distress. Aims The current study seeks to explore couples' cancer‐related parenting communication behaviors, perception and their ass...

Panic disorder is a common psychiatric diagnosis characterized by acute, distressing somatic symptoms that mimic medically-relevant symptoms. As a result, individuals with panic disorder overutilize personal and healthcare resources in an attempt to diagnose and treat physical symptoms that are often medically benign. A biobehavioral perspective on...

Little is known about central nervous system (CNS) responses to emotional stimuli in asthma. Nitric oxide in exhaled breath (FE NO ) is elevated in asthma due to allergic immune processes, but endogenous nitric oxide is also known to modulate CNS activity. We measured fMRI blood oxygen‐dependent (BOLD) brain activation to negative (blood–injection–...

Background Adult attachment insecurity is associated with poor psychosocial and cancer-related symptom outcomes in patients with cancer; however, there is a paucity of research around the role of the spousal caregivers' attachment in patient quality of life (QOL) at the end of life (EOL). Attachment styles may be particularly relevant for couples c...

Background: As patients live longer with stage IV nonsmall cell lung cancer, correlates of end-of-life (EOL) care and experience are increasingly relevant. Methods: We, therefore, prospectively examined associations among psychospirituality (Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale, Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy-Spiritua...

Accumulating behavioral evidence suggests that asthma is associated with cognitive deficits. A number of studies have identified potential biological contributions to cognition in asthma; however, mechanistic pathways of central nervous system (CNS) involvement in asthma are yet to be established. We therefore conducted a literature review to ident...

Asthma is a major chronic health problem affecting over 300 million individuals worldwide. Asthma and anxiety are highly comorbid, causing reciprocal poorer outcomes in illness management and treatment. This chapter explores basic information about the asthma disease process, comorbid psychological presentations, disease management and medication i...

Objective: Lung cancer patients, particularly women, are vulnerable to experience disease-related stigma, which is linked to greater psychological distress and worse treatment outcomes. To inform future stigma-resilience interventions, we examined if mindfulness, self-compassion, and social support might buffer the associations between perceived l...

Approximately one‐half of individuals with cancer face personal economic burdens associated with the disease and its treatment, a problem known as financial toxicity (FT). FT more frequently affects socioeconomically vulnerable individuals and leads to subsequent adverse economic and health outcomes. Whereas multilevel systemic factors at the polic...

Purpose In efforts to understand financial distress (FD) associated with advanced cancer care from the perspective of both patients with incurable disease and their spousal caregivers, we assessed FD in both members of the couple, identified symptom and quality of life (QOL) correlates, and examined the potential role of illness communication. Met...

Accumulating research identifies a role of psychological process, particularly negative affect, in the expression of airway nitric oxide (NO), yet directional associations tend to vary across methodologies and samples. Recent findings indicate higher social support to be associated with higher airway NO; however, consequences for respiratory infect...

Background The goal of this pilot randomized controlled trial was to examine the feasibility and acceptability of delivering group-based psychosocial care via videoconference (ie, Zoom) to women with lung cancer undergoing treatment. Methods At baseline, women indicated their typical computer and internet use and were then randomized to a group-ba...

Objectives: Prior research indicates that chronic stress increases allostatic load and alters individuals' affective response to stress. Recent studies have linked health-related behaviours including poor sleep and physical inactivity with elevated negative affect responses to stress. This study extends prior work to investigate chronic stress exp...

Purpose As the economic burden and financial distress (FD) resulting from cancer care are increasingly recognized, FD remains inadequately understood from the perspective of patients and their spousal caregiver, the relational context where most financial and treatment decisions are navigated. Therefore, we assessed FD in both patients with advance...

This preprint was submitted to EPCAMH on 12.9.20. See below for the abstract: Introduction: Telemental health is a growing medium for delivering psychotherapy to youth. While significant research has been devoted to relationship building in telemental health, creating connections with youth remains complicated. Clinical tools are needed to support...

Supplementary 1 includes the word-for-word recommendations extracted during the systematic review conducted in Martinez et al. (Submitted for review)

Recommendations for building telemental health relationships with youth: a resource for clinicians created from a systematic review

Asthma as a chronic inflammatory disease can be expected to affect central nervous system structures but little is known about subcortical structures in asthma and their potential association with illness-specific outcomes and anxiety. A total of 40 young adults (20 with asthma and 20 gender- and age-matched controls) underwent high-resolution T1-w...

Tips for building rapport with adult clients via telehealth in the age of COVID-19

Tipsheet for clinicians working with youth during the COVID-19 pandemic: Ways to build rapport during telehealth sessions

A small body of research indicates that hypothalamic‐pituitary‐adrenal (HPA) axis activity and subsequent endogenous cortisol production is involved in allergic disease, including asthma. The most consistent findings observe reduced basal cortisol levels in asthma. Authors have purported that low levels of cortisol, an anti‐inflammatory steroid hor...

Objectives: Psychological stress has been linked to common cold symptoms. Nitric oxide (NO) is part of the first line of epithelial defense against pathogens, and beetroot juice is a source of dietary nitrate that increases NO availability. We therefore tested whether beetroot juice protects against cold symptoms in a period of sustained acute str...

The effects of asthma on affect have been noted for some time, but little is known about associated brain processes. We therefore examined whether emotion-induced bronchoconstriction, airway inflammation, and asthma control are related to specific patterns of brain activity during processing negative affective stimuli. Fifteen adults with asthma vi...

Emerging research indicates that individuals with asthma have an increased risk of cognitive impairment, yet the associations of asthma with neural correlates of memory remain relatively unknown. The hippocampus is the predominant neural structure involved in memory, and alterations in the hippocampal metabolic profile are observed in individuals w...

Background and objective Nitric oxide (NO) plays an important role in the airways’ innate immune response, and the fraction of exhaled NO at a flow rate of 50mL per second (FENO50) has been utilized to capture NO. Deficits in NO are linked to loss of bronchoprotective effects in airway challenges and predict symptoms of respiratory infection. While...

Background: Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is the third gasotransmitter recently discovered after nitric oxide (NO) and carbon monoxide. Both NO and H2S are involved in multiple physiological functions. Whereas NO has been shown to vary with psychological stress, the influence of stress on H2S and the relationship between H2S and NO are unknown. We theref...

Panic disorder (PD) is unique among the anxiety disorders in that panic symptoms are primarily of a physical nature. Consequently, comorbidity with medical illness is significant. This review examines the association between PD and medical illness. We identify shared pathophysiological and psychological correlates and illustrate how physiological a...

Interoception refers to the process by which the nervous system senses, interprets, and integrates signals originating from within the body, providing a moment-by-moment mapping of the body’s internal landscape across conscious and unconscious levels. Interoceptive signaling has been considered a component process of reflexes, urges, feelings, driv...

CNS immune signaling contributes to deleterious opioid effects including hyperalgesia, tolerance, reward, and dependence/withdrawal. Such effects are mediated by opioid signaling at TLR4, presumptively of glial origin. Whether CNS endothelial cells express TLR4 is controversial. If so, they would be well positioned for activation by blood-borne opi...

Glutamate neurotransmission is highly regulated, largely by glutamate transporters. In the spinal cord, the glutamate transporter GLT-1 is primarily responsible for glutamate clearance. Downregulation of GLT-1 can occur in activated astrocytes, and is associated with increased extracellular glutamate and neuroexcitation. Among other conditions, ast...