Background: The hippocampal formation represents a key region in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Aerobic exercise poses a promising add-on treatment to potentially counteract structural impairments of the hippocampal formation and associated symptomatic burden. However, current evidence regarding exercise effects on the hippocampal formation in schizophrenia is largely heterogeneous.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMajor depressive disorder in old age can cause changes in the cerebral cortex that might lead to postural imbalance and thus increase fall risk. We aim to examine cortical activation during standing balance in depressed older patients compared to healthy controls and to determine how an additional cognitive task affects this activation. Eleven older patients (age ≥65 years) diagnosed with major depressive disorder and sixteen age-matched healthy controls participated in the study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRepetitive subconcussive head impacts (RSHI) are believed to induce sub-clinical brain injuries, potentially resulting in cumulative, long-term brain alterations. This study explores patterns of longitudinal brain white matter changes across sports with RSHI-exposure. A systematic literature search identified 22 datasets with longitudinal diffusion magnetic resonance imaging data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci
September 2024
Exercise interventions are nowadays considered as effective add-on treatments in people with schizophrenia but are usually associated with high dropout rates. Therefore, the present study investigated potential predictors of adherence from a large multicenter study, encompassing two types of exercise training, conducted over a 6-month period with individuals with schizophrenia. First, we examined the role of multiple participants' characteristics, including levels of functioning, symptom severity, cognitive performance, quality of life, and physical fitness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCurrent treatment methods do not achieve recovery for most individuals with schizophrenia, and symptoms such as negative symptoms and cognitive deficits often persist. Aerobic endurance training has been suggested as a potential add-on treatment targeting both physical and mental health. We performed a large-scale multicenter, rater-blind, parallel-group randomized controlled clinical trial in individuals with stable schizophrenia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground And Hypothesis: Aerobic exercise interventions in people with schizophrenia have been demonstrated to improve clinical outcomes, but findings regarding the underlying neural mechanisms are limited and mainly focus on the hippocampal formation. Therefore, we conducted a global exploratory analysis of structural and functional neural adaptations after exercise and explored their clinical implications.
Study Design: In this randomized controlled trial, structural and functional MRI data were available for 91 patients with schizophrenia who performed either aerobic exercise on a bicycle ergometer or underwent a flexibility, strengthening, and balance training as control group.
Evidence for the effectiveness of physical activity (PA) in the treatment of depression prevails for outpatients with mild and moderate symptom levels. For inpatient treatment of severe depression, evidence-based effectiveness exists only for structured and supervised group PA interventions. The Step Away from Depression (SAD) study investigated the effectiveness of an individual pedometer intervention (PI) combined with an activity diary added to inpatient treatment as usual (TAU).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Depression in old age is associated with an increased fall risk. Especially in cognitively challenging situations, fall-promoting gait deviations could appear due to depression- and age-related cognitive deficits.
Aim: This study investigates (i) whether there are differences in gait performance between depressed older patients and healthy controls and (ii) if gait patterns aggravate when performing a cognitive task whilst walking.
Background: Whereas short and problematic sleep are associated with psychological problems in adolescence, causality remains to be elucidated. This study therefore utilized the discordant monozygotic cotwin design and cross-lagged models to investigate how short and problematic sleep affect psychological functioning.
Methods: Adolescent twins (N = 12,803, 13-20 years, 42% male) completed questionnaires on sleep and psychological functioning repeatedly over a two-year interval.
Understanding the sources of the large individual differences in sedentary behavior is of great importance as this behavior is associated with pre-mature mortality and non-communicable diseases. Here, we report on the contribution of genetic and environmental factors to the variation in objectively assessed (accelerometer) sedentary behavior and self-reported sitting and their shared genetic basis. In addition, the overlap of the genetic risk factors influencing sedentary time and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) was estimated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: A higher prevalence of obesity in lower socioeconomic classes is common in Western societies. This study examined the role of gene-environment interactions in the association between parental education and body mass index (BMI) from infancy to the onset of adulthood.
Methods: Parentally reported BMI from 1 to 13 and self-reported BMI from 14 to 20 years of age were collected in 16,646 complete Dutch twin pairs and analyzed by genetic twin modeling.
Exercise behavior during leisure time is a major source of health-promoting physical activity and moderately tracks across childhood and adolescence. This study aims to investigate the absolute and relative contribution of genes and the environment to variance in exercise behavior from age 7 to 18, and to elucidate the stability and change of genetic and shared environmental factors that underlie this behavior. The Netherlands Twin Register collected data on exercise behavior in twins aged approximately 7, 10, 12, 14, 16 and 18 years (N = 27,332 twins; 48 % males; 47 % with longitudinal assessments).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrior searches for genetic variants (GVs) implicated in initiation of cannabis use have been limited to common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) typed in HapMap samples. Denser SNPs are now available with the completion of the 1000 Genomes and the Genome of the Netherlands projects. More densely distributed SNPs are expected to track the causal variants better.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOver the past decades, Internet use has grown substantially, and it now serves people as a supportive tool that is used regularly and-in large parts of the world-inevitably. Some people develop problematic Internet use, which may lead to addictive behavior and it is becoming important to explore the risk factors for compulsive Internet use. Data were analyzed on compulsive Internet use [with the Compulsive Internet Use Scale (CIUS)] from 5247 monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) adolescent twins registered with the Netherlands Twin Register.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Cigarette smoking and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are highly comorbid. One explanation is that individuals with ADHD use cigarettes as "self-medication" to alleviate their attention problems. However, animal studies reported that exposure to nicotine during adolescence influences the developing brain and negatively affects attention.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSocial cognitive models of health behavior propose that individual differences in leisure time exercise behavior are influenced by the attitudes towards exercise. At the same time, large scale twin-family studies show a significant influence of genetic factors on regular exercise behavior. This twin-sibling study aimed to unite these findings by demonstrating that exercise attitudes can be heritable themselves.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Twin studies provide evidence that genetic influences contribute strongly to individual differences in exercise behavior. We hypothesize that part of this heritability is explained by genetic variation in the dopaminergic reward system. Eight single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs in DRD1: rs265981, DRD2: rs6275, rs1800497, DRD3: rs6280, DRD4: rs1800955, DBH: rs1611115, rs2519152, and in COMT: rs4680) and three variable number of tandem repeats (VNTRs in DRD4, upstream of DRD5, and in DAT1) were investigated for an association with regular leisure time exercise behavior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Netherlands Twin Register (NTR) began in 1987 with data collection in twins and their families, including families with newborn twins and triplets. Twenty-five years later, the NTR has collected at least one survey for 70,784 children, born after 1985. For the majority of twins, longitudinal data collection has been done by age-specific surveys.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The aim of this study was to investigate the relative influence of genetic and environmental factors on children's leisure time exercise behavior through the classic twin design.
Methods: Data were taken from The Netherlands Twin Register. The twins were 7 (n = 3966 subjects), 10 (n = 3562), and 12-yr-olds (n = 8687), with longitudinal data for 27% of the sample.