Neural correlates of stress-reactive rumination in depression - The role of childhood trauma and social anxiety.

Recent work showed an association of prefrontal dysfunctions in patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and social stress induced rumination. However, up to date it is unclear which etiological features of MDD might cause prefrontal dysfunctions. In the study at hand, we aimed to replicate recent findings, that showed prefrontal activation alterations during the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and subsequently increased stress-reactive rumination in MDD compared to healthy controls.

In situ fNIRS measurements during cognitive behavioral emotion regulation training in rumination-focused therapy: A randomized-controlled trial.

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT), including rumination, plays a key role in various psychopathologies. Although several psychotherapeutic treatments have been developed to reduce RNT, the neural correlates of those specific treatments and of psychotherapy in general are largely unknown. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) offers the potential to investigate the neural correlates of psychotherapeutic techniques in situ.

Insights from a laboratory and naturalistic investigation on stress, rumination and frontal brain functioning in MDD: An fNIRS study.

Recent research has emphasized rumination as an important maintaining factor in various mental disorders. However, operationalization and therefore induction of rumination in experimental settings poses a major challenge in terms of ecological validity. As stress seems to play a key role in everyday situations eliciting rumination, we conducted two stress paradigms while assessing behavioral and neurophysiological measures.

Risk stratification for short-term mortality at hospital admission for acute exacerbations of COPD.

Background And Objective: Exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (ECOPD) are associated with increased in-hospital and short-term mortality. Developing an easy-to-use model to predict adverse outcomes will be useful in daily clinical practice and will facilitate management decisions. We aimed to assess mortality rates and potential predictors for short-term mortality after severe ECOPD.

Exploring the idiographic dynamics of mood and anxiety via network analysis.

Individual variation is increasingly recognized as important to psychopathology research. Concurrently, new methods of analysis based on network models are bringing new perspectives on mental (dys)function. This current work analyzed idiographic multivariate time series data using a novel network methodology that incorporates contemporaneous and lagged associations in mood and anxiety symptomatology.

The global spread of HIV-1 subtype B epidemic.

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) was discovered in the early 1980s when the virus had already established a pandemic. For at least three decades the epidemic in the Western World has been dominated by subtype B infections, as part of a sub-epidemic that traveled from Africa through Haiti to United States. However, the pattern of the subsequent spread still remains poorly understood.

Measuring the potential of individual airports for pandemic spread over the world airline network.

Background: Massive growth in human mobility has dramatically increased the risk and rate of pandemic spread. Macro-level descriptors of the topology of the World Airline Network (WAN) explains middle and late stage dynamics of pandemic spread mediated by this network, but necessarily regard early stage variation as stochastic. We propose that much of this early stage variation can be explained by appropriately characterizing the local network topology surrounding an outbreak's debut location.

Understanding the influence of all nodes in a network.

Centrality measures such as the degree, k-shell, or eigenvalue centrality can identify a network's most influential nodes, but are rarely usefully accurate in quantifying the spreading power of the vast majority of nodes which are not highly influential. The spreading power of all network nodes is better explained by considering, from a continuous-time epidemiological perspective, the distribution of the force of infection each node generates. The resulting metric, the expected force, accurately quantifies node spreading power under all primary epidemiological models across a wide range of archetypical human contact networks.

Evolution of hepatitis C virus quasispecies during repeated treatment with the NS3/4A protease inhibitor telaprevir.

In treating hepatitis B virus (HBV) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections, the rapid reselection of resistance-associated variants (RAVs) is well known in patients with repeated exposure to the same class of antiviral agents. For chronic hepatitis C patients who have experienced virologic failure with direct-acting antiviral drugs, the potential for the reselection of persistent RAVs is unknown. Nine patients who received 14 days of telaprevir monotherapy were retreated with telaprevir-based triple therapy 4.

COMET: adaptive context-based modeling for ultrafast HIV-1 subtype identification.

Viral sequence classification has wide applications in clinical, epidemiological, structural and functional categorization studies. Most existing approaches rely on an initial alignment step followed by classification based on phylogenetic or statistical algorithms. Here we present an ultrafast alignment-free subtyping tool for human immunodeficiency virus type one (HIV-1) adapted from Prediction by Partial Matching compression.

Genotyping hepatitis B virus dual infections using population-based sequence data.

The hepatitis B virus (HBV) is classified into distinct genotypes A-H that are characterized by different progression of hepatitis B and sensitivity to interferon treatment. Previous computational genotyping methods are not robust enough regarding HBV dual infections with different genotypes. The correct classification of HBV sequences into the present genotypes is impaired due to multiple ambiguous sequence positions.

Endogenous or exogenous spreading of HIV-1 in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, investigated by phylodynamic analysis of the RESINA Study cohort.

HIV's genetic instability means that sequence similarity can illuminate the underlying transmission network. Previous application of such methods to samples from the United Kingdom has suggested that as many as 86% of UK infections arose outside of the country, a conclusion contrary to usual patterns of disease spread. We investigated transmission networks in the Resina cohort, a 2,747 member sample from Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany, sequenced at therapy start.

Novel search method for the discovery of functional relationships.

Motivation: Numerous annotations are available that functionally characterize genes and proteins with regard to molecular process, cellular localization, tissue expression, protein domain composition, protein interaction, disease association and other properties. Searching this steadily growing amount of information can lead to the discovery of new biological relationships between genes and proteins. To facilitate the searches, methods are required that measure the annotation similarity of genes and proteins.

HIV-1 mutational pathways under multidrug therapy.

Background: Genotype-derived drug resistance profiles are a valuable asset in HIV-1 therapy decisions. Therapy decisions could be further improved, both in terms of predicting length of current therapy success and in preserving followup therapy options, through better knowledge of mutational pathways- here defined as specific locations on the viral genome which, when mutant, alter the risk that additional specific mutations arise. We limit the search to locations in the reverse transcriptase region of the HIV-1 genome which host resistance mutations to nucleoside (NRTI) and non-nucleoside (NNRTI) reverse transcriptase inhibitors (as listed in the 2008 International AIDS Society report), or which were mutant at therapy start in 5% or more of the therapies studied.

Amphetamine dependence and co-morbid alcohol abuse: associations to brain cortical thickness.

Background: Long-term amphetamine and methamphetamine dependence has been linked to cerebral blood perfusion, metabolic, and white matter abnormalities. Several studies have linked methamphetamine abuse to cortical grey matter reduction, though with divergent findings. Few publications investigate unmethylated amphetamine's potential effects on cortical grey matter.

Investigating relationships between cortical thickness and cognitive performance in patients with schizophrenia and healthy adults.

Relationships between prefrontal and temporal lobe grey matter volumes as assessed by magnetic resonance imaging and neurocognitive test results have been reported in schizophrenia. This investigation aimed to localize brain regions where cortical thickness and neurocognitive performance were related, and investigate if such relationships might differ in schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. Sixty-seven patients with schizophrenia and 69 healthy controls were characterized by neurocognitive testing and by brain cortical thickness maps.

Cerebral cortical thickness and a history of obstetric complications in schizophrenia.

Introduction: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies have demonstrated that patients with schizophrenia have thinner brain cortices compared with healthy control subjects. Neurodevelopment is vulnerable to obstetric complications (OCs) such as hypoxia and birth trauma, factors that are also related to increased risk of developing schizophrenia. With the hypothesis that OCs might explain the thinner cortices found in schizophrenia, we studied patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls subjects for association between number and severity of OCs and variation in cortical thickness.

The relationship between symptom severity and regional cortical and grey matter volumes in schizophrenia.

Objective: To investigate the relationship between symptom severity and cortical and grey matter volumes in schizophrenia.

Method: Fifty-three outpatients with schizophrenia were assessed by the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms and the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms. Symptoms were grouped into five factors (negative, relational, inattention, disorganization, and reality distortion).

Local and covariate-modulated false discovery rates applied in neuroimaging.

False discovery rate (FDR) control has become a standard technique in neuroimaging. Recent work has shown that a finer grained estimate of the FDR is obtained by estimating, at a specific value of the test statistic, the scaled ratio of the null density to the observed density of the test statistic. The method can be extended by allowing an external covariate, also measured on the points where the hypothesis was tested, to modulate estimation of this local FDR.

Investigating possible subtypes of schizophrenia patients and controls based on brain cortical thickness.

Schizophrenia is a heterogeneous disease in which different dimensions could be associated with localized subtypes in cortical thickness of the brain. Subtypes in data that includes patients and controls could be associated with patient/control could associate with patient/control groupings. Testing for subtypes provides a non-parametric investigation of group differences.

Grey and white matter proportional relationships in the cerebellar vermis altered in schizophrenia.

Magnetic resonance imaging studies frequently report abnormalities of the cerebellar vermis in schizophrenia, though with some discrepancies as to the nature and location of such abnormalities. Imaging studies typically investigate volumetric differences between groups. Yet substantial evidence supports the hypothesis that grey and white matter proportions in the mammalian brain are controlled by scaling relationships.

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor polymorphisms and frontal cortex morphology in schizophrenia.

Objective: To investigate associations between brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene polymorphisms and regional frontal cortical thickness and volume in patients with schizophrenia and healthy control participants.

Methods: BDNF genotyping was performed using polymerase chain reaction and pyrosequencing techniques in 96 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 104 healthy control participants. Cortical morphology was analyzed by processing magnetic resonance brain images with the FreeSurfer software package.

Regional thinning of the cerebral cortex in schizophrenia: effects of diagnosis, age and antipsychotic medication.

Morphological abnormalities of the cerebral cortex have been reported in a number of MRI-studies in schizophrenia. Uncertainty remains regarding cause, mechanism and progression of the alterations. It has been suggested that antipsychotic medication reduces total gray matter volumes, but results are inconsistent.

Potential genetic variants in schizophrenia: a Bayesian analysis.

A number of different gene polymorphisms have been found to dispose for the development of schizophrenia. However, no single gene polymorphism is sufficient for the precipitation of schizophrenia. Swedish psychosis patients (n=103) and control subjects (n=89) were analyzed for 36 single nucleotide polymorphisms in 30 candidate genes for schizophrenia.