The effect of d-cycloserine on brain processing of breathlessness over pulmonary rehabilitation: an experimental medicine study.

Research Question: Pulmonary rehabilitation is the best treatment for chronic breathlessness in COPD but there remains an unmet need to improve efficacy. Pulmonary rehabilitation has strong parallels with exposure-based cognitive behavioural therapies (CBT), both clinically and in terms of brain activity patterns. The partial N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA)-receptor agonist d-cycloserine has shown promising results in enhancing efficacy of CBT, thus we hypothesised that it would similarly augment the effects of pulmonary rehabilitation in the brain.

Multi-subject Stochastic Blockmodels for adaptive analysis of individual differences in human brain network cluster structure.

There is considerable interest in elucidating the cluster structure of brain networks in terms of modules, blocks or clusters of similar nodes. However, it is currently challenging to handle data on multiple subjects since most of the existing methods are applicable only on a subject-by-subject basis or for analysis of an average group network. The main limitation of per-subject models is that there is no obvious way to combine the results for group comparisons, and of group-averaged models that they do not reflect the variability between subjects.

Long-term Influences of Prenatal Maternal Depressive Symptoms on the Amygdala-Prefrontal Circuitry of the Offspring From Birth to Early Childhood.

Background: Prenatal maternal depression may have long-term impacts on amygdala-cortical development. This study explored associations of prenatal maternal depressive symptoms on the amygdala-cortical structural covariance of the offspring from birth to early childhood, derived from a longitudinal birth cohort.

Methods: Structural magnetic resonance imaging was performed to obtain the amygdala volume and cortical thickness at each time point.

Improving mass-univariate analysis of neuroimaging data by modelling important unknown covariates: Application to Epigenome-Wide Association Studies.

Statistical inference on neuroimaging data is often conducted using a mass-univariate model, equivalent to fitting a linear model at every voxel with a known set of covariates. Due to the large number of linear models, it is challenging to check if the selection of covariates is appropriate and to modify this selection adequately. The use of standard diagnostics, such as residual plotting, is clearly not practical for neuroimaging data.

FKBP5 Moderates the Association between Antenatal Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Neonatal Brain Morphology.

Antenatal maternal depressive symptoms influence fetal brain development and increase the risk for depression in offspring. Such vulnerability is often moderated by the offspring's genetic variants. This study aimed to examine whether FKBP5, a key regulator of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, moderates the association between antenatal maternal depressive symptoms and in utero brain development, using an Asian cohort with 161 mother-offspring dyads.

A Set-Based Mixed Effect Model for Gene-Environment Interaction and Its Application to Neuroimaging Phenotypes.

Imaging genetics is an emerging field for the investigation of neuro-mechanisms linked to genetic variation. Although imaging genetics has recently shown great promise in understanding biological mechanisms for brain development and psychiatric disorders, studying the link between genetic variants and neuroimaging phenotypes remains statistically challenging due to the high-dimensionality of both genetic and neuroimaging data. This becomes even more challenging when studying gene-environment interaction (G×E) on neuroimaging phenotypes.

Fast and accurate modelling of longitudinal and repeated measures neuroimaging data.

Despite the growing importance of longitudinal data in neuroimaging, the standard analysis methods make restrictive or unrealistic assumptions (e.g., assumption of Compound Symmetry--the state of all equal variances and equal correlations--or spatially homogeneous longitudinal correlations).