Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences最新文献

Aim: Adolescents born very preterm (VPT; <32 weeks of gestation) face an elevated risk of executive, behavioral, and socioemotional difficulties. Evidence suggests beneficial effects of mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) on these abilities. This study seeks to investigate the association between the effects of MBI on executive, behavioral, and socioemotional functioning and reliable changes in large-scale brain networks dynamics during rest in VPT young adolescents who completed an 8-week MBI program.

Methods: Neurobehavioral assessments and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging were performed before and after MBI in 32 VPT young adolescents. Neurobehavioral abilities in VPT participants were compared with full-term controls. In the VPT group, dynamic functional connectivity was extracted by using the innovation-driven coactivation patterns framework. The reliable change index was used to quantify change after MBI. A multivariate data-driven approach was used to explore associations between MBI-related changes on neurobehavioral measures and temporal brain dynamics.

Results: Compared with term-born controls, VPT adolescents showed reduced executive and socioemotional functioning before MBI. After MBI, a significant improvement was observed for all measures that were previously reduced in the VPT group. The increase in executive functioning, only, was associated with reliable changes in the duration of activation of large-scale brain networks, including frontolimbic, amygdala-hippocampus, dorsolateral prefrontal, and visual networks.

Conclusion: The improvement in executive functioning after an MBI was associated with reliable changes in large-scale brain network dynamics during rest. These changes encompassed frontolimbic, amygdala-hippocampus, dorsolateral prefrontal, and visual networks that are related to different executive processes including self-regulation, attentional control, and attentional awareness of relevant sensory stimuli.

Aim: The gut microbiota can influence human behavior. However, due to the massive multiple-testing problem, research into the relationship between microbiome ecosystems and the human brain faces drawbacks. This problem arises when attempting to correlate thousands of gut bacteria with thousands of brain voxels.

Methods: We performed brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans on 133 participants and applied machine-learning algorithms (Ridge regressions) combined with permutation tests. Using this approach, we were able to correlate specific gut bacterial families with brain MRI signals, circumventing the difficulties of massive multiple testing while considering sex, age, and body mass index as confounding factors.

Results: The relative abundance (RA) of the Selenomonadaceae, Clostridiaceae, and Veillonellaceae families in the gut was associated with altered cerebellar, visual, and frontal T2-mapping and diffusion tensor imaging measures. Conversely, decreased relative abundance of the Eubacteriaceae family was also linked to T2-mapping values in the cerebellum. Significantly, the brain regions associated with the gut microbiome were also correlated with depressive symptoms and attentional deficits.

Conclusions: Our analytical strategy offers a promising approach for identifying potential brain biomarkers influenced by gut microbiota. By gathering a deeper understanding of the microbiota-brain connection, we can gain insights into the underlying mechanisms and potentially develop targeted interventions to mitigate the detrimental effects of dysbiosis on brain function and mental health.

Aim: Patients with cancer experience various forms of psychological distress, including depressive symptoms, which can impact quality of life, elevate morbidity risk, and increase medical costs. Psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy are effective for reducing depressive symptoms among patients with cancer, but most patients prefer psychotherapy. This study aimed to develop an efficient and effective smartphone psychotherapy component to address depressive symptom.

Methods: This was a decentralized, parallel-group, multicenter, open, individually randomized, fully factorial trial. Patients aged ≥20 years with cancer were randomized by the presence/absence of three cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) skills (behavioral activation [BA], assertiveness training [AT], and problem-solving [PS]) on a smartphone app. All participants received psychoeducation (PE). The primary outcome was change in the patient health questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) total score between baseline and week 8. Secondary outcomes included anxiety.

Results: In total, 359 participants were randomized. Primary outcome data at week 8 were obtained for 355 participants (99%). The week 8 PHQ-9 total score was significantly reduced from baseline for all participants by -1.41 points (95% confidence interval [CI] -1.89, -0.92), but between-group differences in change scores were not significant (BA: -0.04, 95% CI -0.75, 0.67; AT: -0.16, 95% CI -0.87, 0.55; PS: -0.19, 95% CI -0.90, 0.52).

Conclusion: As the presence of any of the three intervention components did not contribute to a significant additive reduction of depressive symptoms, we cannot make evidence-based recommendations regarding the use of specific smartphone psychotherapy.

Aim: The current study aimed to infer neurophysiological mechanisms of auditory processing in children with Rett syndrome (RTT)-rare neurodevelopmental disorders caused by MECP2 mutations. We examined two brain responses elicited by 40-Hz click trains: auditory steady-state response (ASSR), which reflects fine temporal analysis of auditory input, and sustained wave (SW), which is associated with integral processing of the auditory signal.

Methods: We recorded electroencephalogram findings in 43 patients with RTT (aged 2.92-17.1 years) and 43 typically developing children of the same age during 40-Hz click train auditory stimulation, which lasted for 500 ms and was presented with interstimulus intervals of 500 to 800 ms. Mixed-model ancova with age as a covariate was used to compare amplitude of ASSR and SW between groups, taking into account the temporal dynamics and topography of the responses.

Results: Amplitude of SW was atypically small in children with RTT starting from early childhood, with the difference from typically developing children decreasing with age. ASSR showed a different pattern of developmental changes: the between-group difference was negligible in early childhood but increased with age as ASSR increased in the typically developing group, but not in those with RTT. Moreover, ASSR was associated with expressive speech development in patients, so that children who could use words had more pronounced ASSR.

Conclusion: ASSR and SW show promise as noninvasive electrophysiological biomarkers of auditory processing that have clinical relevance and can shed light onto the link between genetic impairment and the RTT phenotype.

Aim: The effective connectivity between the striatum and cerebral cortex has not been fully investigated in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Our objective was to explore the interaction effects between diagnosis and age on disrupted corticostriatal effective connectivity and to represent the modulation function of altered connectivity pathways in children and adolescents with ADHD.

Methods: We performed Granger causality analysis on 300 participants from a publicly available Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder-200 dataset. By computing the correlation coefficients between causal connections between striatal subregions and other cortical regions, we estimated the striatal inflow and outflow connection to represent intermodulation mechanisms in corticostriatal pathways.

Results: Interactions between diagnosis and age were detected in the superior occipital gyrus within the visual network, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate gyrus, and inferior parietal lobule within the default mode network, which is positively correlated with hyperactivity/impulsivity severity in ADHD. Main effect of diagnosis exhibited a general higher cortico-striatal causal connectivity involving default mode network, frontoparietal network and somatomotor network in ADHD compared with comparisons. Results from high-order effective connectivity exhibited a disrupted information pathway involving the default mode-striatum-somatomotor-striatum-frontoparietal networks in ADHD.

Conclusion: The interactions detected in the visual-striatum-default mode networks pathway appears to be related to the potential distraction caused by long-term abnormal information input from the retina in ADHD. Higher causal connectivity and weakened intermodulation may indicate the pathophysiological process that distractions lead to the impairment of motion planning function and the inhibition/control of this unplanned motion signals in ADHD.