Publications by authors named "Adam M Chekroud"

It is widely hoped that statistical models can improve decision-making related to medical treatments. Because of the cost and scarcity of medical outcomes data, this hope is typically based on investigators observing a model's success in one or two datasets or clinical contexts. We scrutinized this optimism by examining how well a machine learning model performed across several independent clinical trials of antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia.

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Importance: Investment in workplace wellness programs is increasing despite concerns about lack of clinical benefit and return on investment (ROI). In contrast, outcomes from workplace mental health programs, which treat mental health difficulties more directly, remain mostly unknown.

Objective: To determine whether participation in an employer-sponsored mental health benefit was associated with improvements in depression and anxiety, workplace productivity, and ROI as well as to examine factors associated with clinical improvement.

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Purpose: It is unclear how hospitals are responding to the mental health needs of the population in England, against a backdrop of diminishing resources. We aimed to document patterns in hospital activity by psychiatric disorder and how these have changed over the last 22 years.

Methods: In this observational time series analysis, we used routinely collected data on all NHS hospitals in England from 1998/99 to 2019/20.

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For many years, psychiatrists have tried to understand factors involved in response to medications or psychotherapies, in order to personalize their treatment choices. There is now a broad and growing interest in the idea that we can develop models to personalize treatment decisions using new statistical approaches from the field of machine learning and applying them to larger volumes of data. In this pursuit, there has been a paradigm shift away from experimental studies to confirm or refute specific hypotheses towards a focus on the overall explanatory power of a predictive model when tested on new, unseen datasets.

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Major depressive disorder emerges from the complex interactions of biological systems that span genes and molecules through cells, networks, and behavior. Establishing how neurobiological processes coalesce to contribute to depression requires a multiscale approach, encompassing measures of brain structure and function as well as genetic and cell-specific transcriptional data. Here, we examine anatomical (cortical thickness) and functional (functional variability, global brain connectivity) correlates of depression and negative affect across three population-imaging datasets: UK Biobank, Brain Genomics Superstruct Project, and Enhancing NeuroImaging through Meta Analysis (ENIGMA; combined ≥ 23,723).

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Background: Better understanding of the heterogeneity of treatment responses could help to improve care for adolescents with depression. We analysed data from a clinical trial to assess whether specific symptom clusters responded differently to various treatments.

Methods: For this secondary analysis, we used data from the Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS), in which 439 US adolescents aged 12-17 with a DSM-IV diagnosis of major depressive disorder and a minimum score of 45 on the Children's Depression Rating Scale-Revised (CDRS-R) were randomly assigned (1:1:1:1) to treatment with fluoxetine, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), fluoxetine plus CBT, or pill placebo.

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Psychiatry is a medical field concerned with the treatment of mental illness. Psychiatric disorders broadly relate to higher functions of the brain, and as such are richly intertwined with social, cultural, and experiential factors. This makes them exquisitely complex phenomena that depend on and interact with a large number of variables.

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Background: Exercise is known to be associated with reduced risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and diabetes, but its association with mental health remains unclear. We aimed to examine the association between exercise and mental health burden in a large sample, and to better understand the influence of exercise type, frequency, duration, and intensity.

Methods: In this cross-sectional study, we analysed data from 1 237 194 people aged 18 years or older in the USA from the 2011, 2013, and 2015 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System survey.

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Objective: Even though safe and effective treatments for depression are available, many individuals with a diagnosis of depression do not obtain treatment. This study aimed to develop a tool to identify persons who might not initiate treatment among those who acknowledge a need.

Methods: Data were aggregated from the 2008-2014 U.

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Trauma-related symptoms among veterans of military engagement have been documented at least since the time of the ancient Greeks. Since the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980, this condition has been known as posttraumatic stress disorder, but the name has changed repeatedly over the past century, including shell shock, war neurosis, and soldier's heart. Using over 14 million articles in the digital archives of the , , and , we quantify historical changes in trauma-related terminology over the past century.

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Genetic risk variants for schizophrenia have been linked to many related clinical and biological phenotypes with the hopes of delineating how individual variation across thousands of variants corresponds to the clinical and etiologic heterogeneity within schizophrenia. This has primarily been done using risk score profiling, which aggregates effects across all variants into a single predictor. While effective, this method lacks flexibility in certain domains: risk scores cannot capture nonlinear effects and do not employ any variable selection.

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Schizophrenia research is plagued by enormous challenges in integrating and analyzing large datasets and difficulties developing formal theories related to the etiology, pathophysiology, and treatment of this disorder. Computational psychiatry provides a path to enhance analyses of these large and complex datasets and to promote the development and refinement of formal models for features of this disorder. This presentation introduces the reader to the notion of computational psychiatry and describes discovery-oriented and theory-driven applications to schizophrenia involving machine learning, reinforcement learning theory, and biophysically-informed neural circuit models.

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Importance: Depressive severity is typically measured according to total scores on questionnaires that include a diverse range of symptoms despite convincing evidence that depression is not a unitary construct. When evaluated according to aggregate measurements, treatment efficacy is generally modest and differences in efficacy between antidepressant therapies are small.

Objectives: To determine the efficacy of antidepressant treatments on empirically defined groups of symptoms and examine the replicability of these groups.

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Background: Understanding patterns of relapse in patients who respond to antidepressant treatment can inform strategies for prevention of relapse. We aimed to identify distinct trajectories of depression severity, assess whether similar or different trajectory classes exist for patients who continued or discontinued active treatment, and test whether clinical predictors of trajectory class membership exist using pooled data from clinical trials.

Methods: We analysed individual patient data from four double-blind discontinuation clinical trials of duloxetine or fluoxetine versus placebo in major depression from before 2012 (n=1462).

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