How come Denmark is planning to increase the annual budget for psychiatry by almost 20 percent?

In Denmark, a 10-year plan for psychiatry has been agreed on. The content of the plan was developed in collaboration between the Danish Health Authority and the Danish Authority for Social Services and Housing, and it involved many stakeholders. Recently, the government presented a planned investment that would increase the overall budget in Danish regions and municipalities by almost 20 percent over a 10-year period.

Reward Processing as an Indicator of Vulnerability or Compensatory Resilience in Psychoses? Results From a Twin Study.

Background: Findings of reward disturbances in unaffected relatives of patients with schizophrenia suggest reward disturbances as an endophenotype for schizophrenia. Twin studies, where 1 twin has been diagnosed with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder, can further explore this.

Methods: We used Danish registries to identify twin pairs with at least 1 twin having a schizophrenia spectrum disorder diagnosis and control twin pairs matched on age, sex, and zygosity.

[Digital innovation provides new perspectives in psychiatry].

Digital health technology is promising for improving mental healthcare by enabling continuous monitoring of behaviour by smartphones and wearables, new paradigms for testing in virtual reality, and analysis of big data through machine learning for prediction models. This might advance prevention efforts, and contribute to diagnostics and treatment; however, high quality studies of clinical effects and applicability are needed before implementation. In this review, we summarize the current status of the field relevant for a Danish mental healthcare setting, and comment on challenges.

Heritability of specific cognitive functions and associations with schizophrenia spectrum disorders using CANTAB: a nation-wide twin study.

Background: Many cognitive functions are under strong genetic control and twin studies have demonstrated genetic overlap between some aspects of cognition and schizophrenia. How the genetic relationship between specific cognitive functions and schizophrenia is influenced by IQ is currently unknown.

Methods: We applied selected tests from the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) to examine the heritability of specific cognitive functions and associations with schizophrenia liability.

Heritability of Cerebral Blood Flow and the Correlation to Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: A Pseudo-continuous Arterial Spin Labeling Twin Study.

Whether aberrant cerebral blood flow (CBF) in schizophrenia is affected by genetic influences, and consequently a potential marker for genetic susceptibility, is unknown. Our aims were to determine the heritability of CBF in thalamic, frontal, and striatal areas, and to ascertain if associations with disease were under genetic influence. Monozygotic (MZ) twin pairs concordant (n = 2) or discordant (n = 20) for schizophrenia spectrum disorders (ICD-10 F2x.

Heritability of cerebral glutamate levels and their association with schizophrenia spectrum disorders: a [H]-spectroscopy twin study.

Research findings implicate cerebral glutamate in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia, including genetic studies reporting associations with glutamatergic neurotransmission. The extent to which aberrant glutamate levels can be explained by genetic factors is unknown, and if glutamate can serve as a marker of genetic susceptibility for schizophrenia remains to be established. We investigated the heritability of cerebral glutamate levels and whether a potential association with schizophrenia spectrum disorders could be explained by genetic factors.