Psychosomatic Medicine

OBJECTIVE: Social stress-loneliness, isolation, and low relationship quality-increase risks for aging-related diseases. However, the ways in which they intersect to undermine healthy aging remain poorly understood. We utilized latent class analysis to identify groups of older adults based on their social stress in both the United States and Mexico. Thereafter, we examined their cross-sectional associations with markers of functional and biological aging. METHOD: Participants in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS, N = 8,316) and Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS, N = 15,001) reported their loneliness, isolation (i...

OBJECTIVE: Autonomic regulation of organ and tissues may give rise to disruptions of typical functions. The Body Perception Questionnaire Short Form (BPQ-SF) includes items that were developed to assess autonomic symptoms in daily life. This pair of studies aimed to establish previously unexplored psychometric properties of the BPQ-SF autonomic symptoms scale, develop normative values for clinical and research use, and assess the convergence of self-reports with sensor-based measures...

OBJECTIVE: Depression and fatigue are common among cancer patients and are associated with germline genetic variation. The goal of this pilot study was to examine genetic associations with depression and fatigue in the year after allogeneic HCT. METHODS: Blood was collected from patients and their donors prior to HCT. Patients completed self-report measures of depression and fatigue prior to HCT (T1), 90 days post-HCT (T2), and one year post-HCT (T3). Of the 384 genetic variants genotyped on a custom Illumina BeadChip microarray, 267 were retained for analysis based on quality control...

OBJECTIVE: Research suggests that therapeutic communication could enhance patient comfort during medical procedures. Few studies have been conducted in clinical settings, with adequate blinding. Our hypothesis was that a positive message could lead to analgesia and anxiolysis, and that this effect would be enhanced by an empathetic interaction with the nurse performing the procedure, compared to an audio-taped message. This study aimed to modulate the contents and delivery vector of a message regarding peripheral intravenous catheter (PIC) placement in the emergency room (ER)...

OBJECTIVE: Although several studies have examined the association between estradiol and human aggression, a consistent understanding of their correlation has yet to be established. This study aimed to investigate this relationship comprehensively. METHODS: We systematically searched five English databases (PubMed, Web of Science, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, and CINAHL) from their inception to June 5, 2023. Two authors independently screened publications and extracted data based on predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria...

OBJECTIVES: Midlife obesity is a risk factor for dementia, while obesity in older age may be protective of cognition, a phenomenon known as the "obesity paradox." The mechanisms underlying this phenomenon and the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and cognitive function over time remain unclear. METHODS: In 1399 adults with and without Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), median age 73.6 years, from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), we modeled the effects of baseline BMI on within-person trajectories of cognitive decline using Latent Growth Curve Modeling...

OBJECTIVE: Short sleep and insomnia are each associated with greater risk for age-related disease, which suggests that insufficient sleep may accelerate biological aging. We examine whether short sleep and insomnia alone or together relate to epigenetic age among older adults. METHODS: A total of 3,795 men (46.3%) and women aged 56-100 years from the Health and Retirement Study were included. Insomnia was defined as reporting at least one insomnia symptom (difficulty falling asleep, waking up at night, or waking up too early in the morning) and feeling unrested when waking up most of the time...

OBJECTIVE: Parental trauma exposure and trauma-related distress can increase risk for adverse health outcomes in offspring, but the pathways implicated in intergenerational transmission are not fully explicated. Accelerated biological aging may be one mechanism underlying less favorable health in trauma-exposed individuals and their offspring. This study examines associations of preconception maternal and paternal posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms with child telomere length, and maternal prenatal C-reactive protein (CRP) as a biological mechanism...

OBJECTIVE: Biased interoception decoupled from physiology might be relevant in the etiology of pathological illness anxiety. Empirical evidence for interoceptive deviations in illness anxiety is scarce but potentially informative to optimize treatments. We hypothesized that persons with pathological illness anxiety differ fundamentally in the classification of bodily sensations from those without pathological illness anxiety. METHODS: In a respiratory categorization task, participants breathed into a pulmonary training device...

OBJECTIVE: Functional somatic syndromes (FSS) are highly prevalent across all levels of healthcare. The fact that they are characterised by medically unexplained symptoms, such as fatigue and pain, raises the important question of their underlying pathophysiology. Psychosocial stress represents a significant factor in the development of FSS and can induce long-term modifications at the epigenetic level. The aim of this review was to systematically review, for the first time, whether individuals with FSS are characterised by specific alterations in DNA methylation...

OBJECTIVE: In long-term relationships, conflict is inevitable, but physical and psychological aggression is not. Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a known risk factor for age-related disease onset, and inflammation likely links the two. This study explores relationships between frequency of constructive (i.e., negotiation) and destructive (i.e., aggression) conflict tactics with inflammation in both younger and older adulthood. Based on the theory of inflammaging, the study investigates whether these associations were stronger in mid-to-late adulthood...

OBJECTIVE: eHealth is a useful tool to deliver lifestyle interventions for patients with cardiometabolic diseases. However, there are inconsistent findings about whether these eHealth interventions should be supported by a human professional, or whether self-help interventions are equally effective. METHODS: Databases were searched between January 1995 and October 2021 for randomized controlled trials on cardiometabolic diseases (cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, type 1 and 2 diabetes mellitus) and eHealth lifestyle interventions...

OBJECTIVE: Social support has been linked to a vast range of beneficial health outcomes. However, the physiological mechanisms of social support are not well characterized. Drawing on fMRI and health-related outcome data, this study aimed to understand how neural measures of "yielding" - the reduction of brain activity during social support - moderates the link between social support and health. METHODS: We employed a dataset where seventy-eight participants around the age of 24 were exposed to the threat of shock when holding the hand of a partner...

The role of technological innovations in healthcare has increased over the past years and will continue to improve the diagnosis, monitoring and treatment of various physical and mental disorders. In biobehavioral and psychosomatic medicine. the use of technology has also increased both in research and clinical contexts. The articles in the current special issue of Psychosomatic Medicine focus on technological solutions that have been applied to patient-monitoring / assessment (health-related behaviors and vital functioning), and treatment (ehealth and mhealth interventions)...

OBJECTIVE: This study assessed whether different types of childhood maltreatment (i.e., abuse vs. neglect) had differential relationships with heart rate variability (HRV) and baroreflex sensitivity (BRS). Additionally, this study tested the indirect effect of maltreatment subtypes on adult mood-related psychopathology via HRV, and whether these relationships differed in those with HRV above and below established clinical cutoffs. METHODS: Secondary analysis was performed using the MIDUS dataset (N = 967; Mage = 55; 58...

OBJECTIVE: Insomnia and poor sleep quality are frequently reported by perinatal women. Both are noted to increase risk for postpartum depression, with less known about their association with postpartum anxiety. The study sought to assess whether perinatal sleep disturbances predicted depression and anxiety symptomatology across each month of the first 6 months postpartum in women with a history of depression. METHODS: Pregnant women without active depression at enrollment (N = 159) aged 18-45 years of age were recruited...

OBJECTIVE: This cross-sectional analysis examined self-reported economic hardships of the 2008 Great Recession, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and psychological well-being (PWB) as predictors of systemic inflammatory physiology at midlife. We also tested for differential vulnerability in the relationship between recession hardship and inflammatory physiology by race/ethnicity, education, and PWB. METHODS: Adults from the Midlife in the United States Refresher sample completed a survey and biomedical assessments after the recession (n = 592 Non-Hispanic White respondents, n = 158 Black/African American (AA) respondents, n = 108 other race/ethnicity)...

OBJECTIVES: The role of context, for which a discriminatory event occurs, on cortisol dysregulation is unclear in adolescents at higher risk for chronic disease. The purpose of this study was to perform a cross-sectional analysis examining the association between racial discrimination context (peer, educational, institutional, and cumulative) and diurnal cortisol patterning in adolescents with overweight and obesity. METHODS: One-hundred adolescents [13-19 years; 49% non-Hispanic Black; 65% female; Body Mass Index Percentile (BMI%): 93...

OBJECTIVE: Digital mental health interventions (DMHI) are an effective treatment modality for common mental disorders like depression and anxiety; however, the role of intervention engagement as a longitudinal "dosing" factor is poorly understood in relation to clinical outcomes. METHODS: We studied 4,978 participants in a 12-week therapist-supported DMHI (June 2020- December 2021), applying a longitudinal agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) to the number of days per week of intervention engagement...

OBJECTIVE: Heart rate is a transdiagnostic correlate of affective states and the stress diathesis model of health. While most psychophysiological research has been conducted in laboratory environments, recent technological advances have provided the opportunity to index pulse rate dynamics in real world environments with commercially available mobile health (mHealth) and wearable photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors that allow for improved ecologically validity of psychophysiological research...