Depression and Anxiety最新文献

Background: The relationship between laxative use and the risk of depression remains uncertain. We aimed to assess the prospective association of regular laxative use with the risk of incident depression and to examine whether genetic risk of depression modifies this association.

Methods: Four hundred fifty thousand forty-five participants without depression at baseline and have complete information on laxative use from the UK Biobank were included. The study outcome was incident depression, derived from linkage to primary care records, hospital inpatient data, death register records, or self-reported medical conditions at follow-up visits.

Results: During a median follow-up of 12.4 years, 18,651(4.1%) participants have developed depression. Regular laxative use was significantly associated with a higher risk of incident depression (vs. nonregular laxative use; adjusted hazard ratio [HR] = 1.78, 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.68–1.89). Genetic risk of depression did not significantly modify this association. The risk of incident depression increased with increasing types of laxatives used, with a HR of 1.89 (95%CI, 1.73–2.08) for use of single laxative type and 2.32 (95%CI, 1.82–2.96) for combined use of two or more laxative types (P for trend <0.001). The positive association between regular laxative use and incident depression was more pronounced in men (adjusted HR = 2.21, 95%CI, 1.96–2.48) versus women (adjusted HR = 1.67, 95%CI, 1.56–1.79; P interaction <0.001). Compared to those who did not use laxatives regularly and did not have constipation, participants who used laxatives regularly and had constipation had the highest risk of incident depression (adjusted HR = 2.33, 95%CI, 1.94–2.80).

Conclusions: Regular laxative use was significantly associated with a higher risk of incident depression, especially in men.

We conducted three surveys on representative random samples of adult Polish residents drawn from the citizens’ register. They were conducted in June 2022 (N = 1050), October 2022 (N = 1041), and February 2023 (N = 982). Interviews were conducted using a mixed-mode technique (CAPI, CATI, and CAWI). Our key findings are that at least mild symptoms of depression are exhibited by a quarter of adults surveyed (25.8%), including a tenth (9.4%) with moderate or more severe symptoms. Translated to the population, that is more than 7.5 million Poles with at least mild symptoms and more than 2.7 million with more severe symptoms, respectively. The scale of depression symptoms is characterized by a certain seasonality. Fewer people experience them in spring than in autumn and winter. The most significant risk factors include, first of all, a poor economic situation, the presence of other health problems, and young age. There is also a higher risk for women and residents of large cities.

Background: Psychological distress is a critical concern in mental health, significantly impacting the quality of life across lifespan. Reliable and culturally adaptable assessment tools are essential for effective diagnosis and intervention. The Kessler Psychological Distress Scales (K-10 and K-6) are widely used for their efficiency and psychometric strength, but the reliability of K-10 and K-6 across different populations and settings remains to be determined.

Objective: This study aims to evaluate the reliability generalization (RG) of the K-10 and K-6 scales across diverse demographic and cultural contexts, providing a comprehensive meta-analysis of their performance.

Method: A RG meta-analysis was conducted using data from peer-reviewed articles published between 2002 and 2024, sourced from databases such as Web of Science, Scopus, and ScienceDirect. The analysis included 48 studies that reported reliability measures like Cronbach’s α, focusing on the psychometric properties of the scales across various populations and settings.

Results: The meta-analysis revealed high internal consistency for both the K-10 (mean α = 0.90, 95% confidence interval (CI) [0.88, 0.91]) and K-6 (mean α = 0.84, 95% CI [0.80, 0.88]) scales. Reliability varied across different populations and languages. For the K-10, the highest reliability was found among adolescents (α = 0.93) and carers (α = 0.91). The K-10 demonstrated exceptional reliability in settings such as Australia (α = 0.97) and significant variability in Tanzania (α = 0.78). The K-6 scale showed high reliability among outpatients (α = 0.89) and the general population (α = 0.87). The scales were adapted into multiple languages, including English, Chinese, Swahili, Farsi, Indonesian, Japanese, Hindi, and Portuguese, reflecting their global applicability and adaptability.

Conclusion: The Kessler Psychological Distress Scales (K-10 and K-6) are reliable tools for measuring psychological distress in general and clinical populations. Their high reliability and adaptability across diverse settings highlight their value in clinical practice and research. These findings support the continued use and adaptation of these scales in global mental health assessments, emphasizing the importance of cultural and linguistic considerations.

Background: High psychological resilience (HR) could protect individuals from psychosocial stress and thereby make individuals less vulnerable to depression and anxiety; however, the underlying neural mechanism remains to be investigated.

Methods: The Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST) was administered to participants of 59 healthy individuals with HR and 56 individuals with low psychological resilience (LR) during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning. Cortisol concentrations and subjective stress levels were collected across the MIST. Repeated measures analyses of variance were conducted to measure the group differences in subjective and cortisol stress responses. Two-sample t-tests were conducted to detect the group differences in stress-related brain activation and functional connectivity (FC).

Results: The LR group exhibited an increase in cortisol concentration after the MIST, whereas the HR group exhibited a decrease in cortisol concentration after the MIST. The LR group exhibited higher activation in the left anterior insula and lower FC between the left orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and the right temporal pole (TP) (all p_FWE < 0.05). Mediation analyses revealed that the left anterior insula mediates the relationship between psychological resilience and depression and the left OFC–right TP FC mediates the relationship between psychological resilience and anxiety.

Conclusions: Findings highlight that the anterior insula and OFC–TP FC could be the critical neural mechanism underlying the interaction between psychological resilience and psychosocial stress. Moreover, higher anterior insula activation and lower OFC–TP FC could be the crucial neural mechanism of individuals with low psychological resilience developing into depression/anxiety when experiencing daily psychosocial stressors.

Objectives: Melancholic depression (MD) is a common subtype of major depressive disorder (MDD). It is difficult to treat because its neurobiological basis is poorly understood. Therefore, to investigate whether MD patients have any structural changes in gray matter (GM) and the molecular foundation of these changes, we combined voxel-based morphometry (VBM) analysis with neurotransmitter system-derived mapping from public data.

Methods: 137 drug-naive MDD patients and 75 healthy controls (HCs) were recruited for structural magnetic resonance imaging. The imaging results were analyzed using VBM analysis. MDD patients were then divided into MD and nonmelancholic depression (NMD) subgroups according to their scores on the Montgomery–Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) and the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale. Next, we analyzed the spatial correlation between the changes in the gray matter volume (GMV) maps and the neurotransmitter receptor/transporter protein density maps provided by the JuSpace toolbox.

Results: Compared to HCs, patients with MD had significant GMV reduction in the bilateral hippocampus, bilateral thalamus, right amygdala, and right posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)/precuneus. Compared to patients with NMD, MD patients had significant GMV reduction in the bilateral PCC/precuneus and lateral occipital cortex. Moreover, compared to HCs, changes in GMV introduced by MD were spatially associated with the serotonin transporter, cannabinoid receptor, and μ-opioid receptor. Compared to NMD patients, changes in GMV introduced by MD were spatially associated with the vesicular acetylcholine transporter.

Conclusion: The present study discovered abnormal GMV alterations in patients with subtypes of depression. We also found a series of neurotransmitter receptors that may be associated with the alterations. The findings of the current study may provide a more comprehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying the structural abnormalities in subtypes of depression and potentially offer new insights into developing new therapeutic strategies.

Social dysfunction is common across psychiatric disorders, including depressive and anxiety disorders. Both disorders have been associated with negative biases in socioaffective neural processing, which may impact responses to social stimuli. This study aims to determine whether social dysfunction across these psychiatric disorders is indeed coupled to altered neural processing of negative and positive valenced emotional stimuli and whether a common neurobiological correlate can be identified. An implicit emotional faces functional magnetic resonance imaging task was used to measure brain activation in response to emotional stimuli in participants with depression (N = 46), anxiety (N = 45), comorbid depressive and anxiety disorders (N = 57), and healthy controls (N = 52). Social dysfunction was indexed using five items of the World Health Organisation Disability Assessment Schedule-2.0 (i.e., perceived social disability) and with the De Jong-Gierveld Loneliness scale (LON; i.e., perceived loneliness). Higher perceived social disability scores were associated with greater brain activation in the left angular gyrus in response to sad emotional faces across all participants but did not correlate with responses to overall negative (sad, angry, and fearful) or positive (happy) emotional faces. No interaction effect of diagnosis was observed for the finding. Perceived loneliness scores did not correlate with brain activation to emotional faces. Taken together, perceived social disability across persons with and without depressive and/or anxiety disorders converges specifically on sad emotional processing of the left angular gyrus, suggesting a potential common neurobiological correlate for social dysfunction.

Background: As a sense of an intense stressor, perceived peer victimization can cause adverse effects on mental health, like depressive symptoms. Yet, little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms underlying how perceived peer victimization causes and maintains depressive symptoms in preadolescence.

Methods: Here we investigate the effects of peer victimization on amygdala subregional functional connectivity in 101 preadolescent migrant children, and their relations to depressive symptoms and potential protective factors of self-esteem and daily cortisol. Further control analyses were conducted to verify whether there are any specific effects in migrant children compared to 54 age-matched preadolescent children from nonmigrant background.

Results: Children with higher perceived peer victimization exhibited greater intrinsic functional connectivity of the amygdala with the middle frontal gyrus extending into the superior frontal gyrus. Perceived peer victimization could account for an indirect association between amygdala hyperconnectivity and depressive symptoms. Moderated mediation analyses revealed that basolateral amygdala connectivity with the superior frontal gyrus acted as a neural marker linking peer victimization and greater risk for depressive symptoms only in preadolescent children with low self-esteem or low daily cortisol.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that considering neurobiological vulnerability and psychophysiological factors may gain a nuanced understanding of the adverse effects of perceived peer victimization on depressive symptoms, a risk for internalizing pathology. This study could inform personalized intervention strategies to prevent or ameliorate depressive symptoms in this disadvantaged population.

Background: Dominant models of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) implicate threat-related attention biases in both the development and maintenance of posttraumatic stress symptoms. However, the ability to better understand and modify threat-related attention biases in PTSD has been hampered by the low reliability of attention bias measures more generally.

Methods: The current study adopts a new approach to calculate attention bias from a dot-probe task, response-based attention bias (RB-AB) computation, in a sample of 689 individuals reporting significantly elevated PTSD symptoms who participated in a clinical trial of threat-related attention bias modification training.

Results: RB-AB is a reliable strategy for deriving threat-related attention bias scores that correlate with both PTSD severity and anxiety. On the other hand, scores from the traditional approach were unreliable and not associated with clinical symptoms. Attention training led to reductions in RB-AB indices of attention bias, but not the traditional index, although attention bias training conditions did not appear to moderate these effects.

Conclusions: Taken together, these findings support evidence that threat-related attention biases may be a feature of PTSD and that RB-AB computation is a more reliable and valid approach for studying reaction-time-based attentional processes. Using the RB-AB approach to assess attention bias could allow us to better understand threat-related attention biases in PTSD and to ultimately develop more precise interventions to reduce threat-related attentional biases in PTSD and other disorders.

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a complex condition characterized by persistent depressed mood, loss of interest or pleasure, loss of energy or fatigue, and, in severe case, recurrent thoughts of death. Despite its prevalence, reliable diagnostic biomarkers for MDD remain elusive. Identifying peripheral biomarkers for MDD is crucial for early diagnosis, timely intervention, and ultimately reducing the risk of suicide. Metabolic changes in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) have been observed in animal models of depression, suggesting that PBMC could serve as a valuable matrix for exploring potential peripheral biomarkers in MDD.

Methods: We performed a transcriptomic analysis of PBMCs from patients with MDD and age- and sex-matched healthy controls (n = 20 per group).

Results: Our analysis identified 270 differentially expressed genes in PBMCs from MDD patients compared to controls, which correlated with the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale scores. These genes are involved in several KEGG pathways, including the herpes simplex virus 1 infection pathway, NOD-like receptor signaling pathway, antigen processing and presentation, and glycerophospholipid metabolism—all of which are linked to various aspects of the immune response. Further machine learning analysis and quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) validation identified three key genes—TRPV2, ZNF713, and CTSL—that effectively distinguish MDD patients from healthy controls.

Conclusions: The immune dysregulation observed in PBMCs is closely related to the pathogenesis of MDD. The candidate biomarkers TRPV2, ZNF713, and CTSL, identified and validated through machine learning and qPCR, hold promise for the objective diagnosis of MDD.

Trial Registration: Clinical Trial Registry identifier: ChiCTR2300076589

Background: Postpartum depression (PPD) significantly affects the welfare of mothers, infants, families, and communities. Mothers in rural areas often face low incomes, poor social security, low education levels, and inadequate medical services. These specific cultural, social, and economic aspects have led to a worsening of PPD in rural areas. However, the current situation of PPD among women in rural areas of China is still insufficiently explored.

Aim: This study aims to explore the prevalence and risk factors of PPD among women in low-income developing rural areas of China.

Methods: A cross-sectional design was used in this study. Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) was applied to evaluate PPD symptoms. General demographic questionnaire, obstetrics-/pediatrics-related questionnaire, and psychosocial-related questionnaire were adopted. Abuse Assessment Screen (AAS) was utilized to assess experienced intimate partner violence during pregnancy and postpartum. Social Support Rating Scale (SSRS) was utilized to measure their levels of social support.

Results: Of the 467 participants, the overall prevalence of PPD among women in rural areas of China was 16.5%, and the average EPDS score was 8.35 (SD = 4.50). PPD occurred most frequently at 7–9 months postpartum (33.8%). Six factors associated with PPD were whether the sex of the baby was in line with the family’s expectations, monthly income of partners, social support, IPV during pregnancy and childbirth, and negative life events in the last 1 year, as well as physical and mental exhaustion from caring for a baby.

Conclusions: This study sheds light on the prevalence and various risk factors associated with PPD among women residing in low-income developing rural areas of China. The findings highlighted the need for targeted interventions and support systems designed to address the specific socioeconomic and cultural difficulties encountered by rural mothers.