Psychiatry

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the feasibility of automatically assessing the Social Rhythm Metric (SRM), a clinically-validated marker of stability and rhythmicity for individuals with bipolar disorder (BD), using passively-sensed data from smartphones. METHODS: Seven patients with BD used smartphones for 4 weeks passively collecting sensor data including accelerometer, microphone, location, and communication information to infer behavioral and contextual patterns. Participants also completed SRM entries using a smartphone app...

Individual differences in human temperament can increase the risk of psychiatric disorders like depression and anxiety. Our laboratory utilized a rat model of temperamental differences to assess neurodevelopmental factors underlying emotional behavior differences. Rats selectively bred for low novelty exploration (Low Responders, LR) display high levels of anxiety- and depression-like behavior compared to High Novelty Responder (HR) rats. Using transcriptome profiling, the present study uncovered vast gene expression differences in the early postnatal HR versus LR limbic brain, including changes in genes involved in cellular metabolism...

The brain and adrenal are critical control centers that maintain body homeostasis under basal and stress conditions, and orchestrate the body's response to stress. It is noteworthy that patients with stress-related disorders exhibit increased vulnerability to mental illness, even years after the stress experience, which is able to generate long-term changes in the brain's architecture and function. High levels of glucocorticoids produced by the adrenal cortex of the stressed subject reduce neurogenesis, which contributes to the development of depression...

OBJECTIVE: Early exposure to common anesthetic and sedative agents causes widespread brain cell degeneration and apoptosis in the developing rat brain, associated with persistent learning deficits in rats. This study was designed to determine whether the α2 adrenergic receptor agonist, dexmedetomidine, produces brain cell degeneration and apoptosis in postnatal day-7 rats in the same brain areas when compared to ketamine. METHODS: Systemic saline, ketamine 20 mg/kg, or dexmedetomidine at 30 or 45 μg/kg were given six times to postnatal day 7 rats (n  =  6/group) every 90 min...

OBJECTIVE: The spillover hypothesis suggests that childhood aggression results from spillover of interparental conflict to poor parenting, which promotes aggressive child behavior. This study was designed to examine the spillover hypothesis in non-genetically related parent-child dyads from the toddler period through age 6 years. METHOD: A sample of 361 sets of children, adoptive parents, and birth parents from the Early Growth and Development Study (EGDS) was assessed from child age 9 months to 6 years on measures of adoptive parent financial strain, antisocial traits, marital hostility, hostile parenting, and child aggression...

Emotion is a key aspect of behavior, enabling humans and animals to assign either positive or negative values to sensory inputs and thereby to make appropriate decisions. Classical experiments in mammalian models, mainly in primates and rodents, have shown that the amygdala is essential for appetitive and aversive associative processing and that dysfunction of this brain region leads to various psychiatric conditions, including depression, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, phobias, autism, and posttraumatic stress disorder...

Cav 1.3 belongs to the family of voltage-gated L-type Ca2+ channels and is encoded by the CACNA1D gene. Cav 1.3 channels are not only essential for cardiac pacemaking, hearing and hormone secretion but are also expressed postsynaptically in neurons, where they shape neuronal firing and plasticity. Recent findings provide evidence that human mutations in the CACNA1D gene can confer risk for the development of neuropsychiatric disease and perhaps also epilepsy. Loss of Cav 1.3 function, as shown in knock-out mouse models and by human mutations, does not result in neuropsychiatric or neurological disease symptoms, whereas their acute selective pharmacological activation results in a depressive-like behaviour in mice...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

IMPORTANCE: Developmental brain disorders are a group of clinically and genetically heterogeneous disorders characterized by high heritability. Specific highly penetrant genetic causes can often be shared by a subset of individuals with different phenotypic features, and recent advances in genome sequencing have allowed the rapid and cost-effective identification of many of these pathogenic variants. OBJECTIVES: To identify novel candidate genes for developmental brain disorders and provide additional evidence of previously implicated genes...

As patients strive to manage their own health and illnesses, many wonder how to get a copy of their health data to share with their physicians, load into apps, donate to researchers, link to their genomic data, or have on hand just in case. To seek diagnosis or better care (see table), many..

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Previous diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies have shown microstructural changes in the brain white matter of at-risk mental state (ARMS) subjects for psychosis and patients with first-episode psychosis (FEP). However, only a few studies have been conducted in clinical high-risk samples and findings in both groups are inconsistent, in particular along the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF). METHODS: This DTI study used tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) to compare fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) between ARMS subjects, untreated and antipsychotic-treated FEP patients and healthy controls (HC) across the whole brain and the SLF...

In healthy individuals, direct eye contact is thought to modulate a cortical route eliciting social cognitive processes via activation of a fast subcortical pathway. This study aimed to examine functional brain connectivity during direct eye contact in women with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to childhood abuse as compared with healthy controls. We conducted psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analyses in Statistical Parametric Mapping-8 (SPM8) using the superior colliculus (SC) and locus coeruleus (LC) as seed regions while 16 healthy subjects and 16 patients with a primary diagnosis of PTSD related to childhood maltreatment viewed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm involving direct (D) versus averted (A) gaze (happy, sad, neutral)...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.