Publications by authors named "Herta Flor"

Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) is a chronic disorder characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain, fatigue and tenderness and closely associated with high levels of stress. FMS is therefore often considered a stress-related disease. A comparative study was conducted with 99 individuals diagnosed with FMS and a control group of 50 pain-free individuals.

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Introduction: A growing literature has shown that exposure to adverse life events during childhood or adolescence is associated with the presence of psychotic-like experiences (PLEs), which is in turn associated with the risk of psychotic outcomes. Ruminative thinking, i.e.

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  • This study uses multi-modal MRI to investigate neurobiological differences between anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN), revealing structural and functional brain changes linked to these eating disorders.
  • Key findings include reduced gray matter volume in specific brain regions (like the orbitofrontal cortex) and decreased cortical thickness, particularly in anorexia patients, which are associated with impulsivity and cognitive restraint regarding eating behaviors.
  • The results suggest that these brain changes affect reward processing and contribute to the persistence of eating disorder symptoms, highlighting potential targets for future treatment interventions.
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  • * A study utilizing the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development cohort revealed seven genomic regions where gene-environment interactions affect gray matter volume, tied to metabolic and inflammatory processes, as well as synaptic plasticity.
  • * The analysis highlighted that socioeconomic status, rather than family environment, plays a crucial role in how maternal education influences genetic effects on neurodevelopment, offering insights into the biological and social mechanisms involved.
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Background: Psychotic symptoms in adolescence are associated with social adversity and genetic risk for schizophrenia. This gene-environment interplay may be mediated by personality, which also develops during adolescence. We hypothesized that (i) personality development predicts later Psychosis Proneness Signs (PPS), and (ii) personality traits mediate the association between genetic risk for schizophrenia, social adversities, and psychosis.

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  • This study investigates structural brain aging by analyzing both cross-sectional and longitudinal data from over 37,000 healthy individuals in the UK Biobank, identifying two distinct patterns of brain aging.
  • Participants showing signs of accelerated brain aging also experienced faster biological aging, cognitive decline, and higher genetic risks for neuropsychiatric disorders.
  • The research supports the 'last in, first out' hypothesis linking brain aging to brain development, and includes genomic analysis to uncover genetic factors influencing both accelerated brain aging and delayed development.
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  • Resilience to emotional disorders in adolescents, particularly after childhood abuse, is influenced by brain responses to environmental stressors, but the specific brain signatures of resilience are still being studied.
  • Research identified two brain networks linked to resilience, with a notable finding that girls with greater activation in a specific orbitofrontal network experienced fewer emotional symptoms after childhood abuse when they had a higher genetic risk for depression.
  • The study suggests these genetic influences on brain activity can predict emotional disorders in late adolescence, highlighting the potential for developing resilience-based interventions to improve adolescent mental health.
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Neural variability, or variation in brain signals, facilitates dynamic brain responses to ongoing demands. This flexibility is important during development from childhood to young adulthood, a period characterized by rapid changes in experience. However, little is known about how variability in the engagement of recurring brain states changes during development.

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  • Once a threat is gone, getting rid of the associated fear is helpful to conserve resources, but anxiety disorders can make this process difficult.
  • Studies on animals show that oxytocin (OT) helps fear extinction if given before fear conditioning, but hurts it if given before extinction learning.
  • This human study found that OT consistently impaired fear extinction learning and altered brain activity, leading to new insights for future research and treatment options.
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Human brain morphology undergoes complex changes over the lifespan. Despite recent progress in tracking brain development via normative models, current knowledge of underlying biological mechanisms is highly limited. We demonstrate that human cortical thickness development and aging trajectories unfold along patterns of molecular and cellular brain organization, traceable from population-level to individual developmental trajectories.

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  • Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and unexplained pain often happen together, but their relationship during trauma isn't well understood.
  • This study used fMRI to examine how neural activations in women's brains respond to painful simulated trauma and how these reactions predict the occurrence of intrusive thoughts about the experience.
  • Results showed that areas of the brain linked to threat and pain—like the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex—predicted more frequent audiovisual intrusions, especially in those with a history of significant life stress.
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Definitions of human pain acknowledge at least two dimensions of pain, affective and sensory, described as separable and thus potentially differentially modifiable. Using electroencephalography, we investigated perceptual and neural changes of emotional pain modulation in healthy individuals. Painful electrical stimuli were applied after presentation of priming emotional pictures (negative, neutral, positive) and followed by pain intensity and unpleasantness ratings.

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  • * It analyzed over 1000 participants from ages 14 to 23 to determine if issues with sustained attention predict future substance use rather than being just a side effect.
  • * The results showed that strong brain connections related to sustained attention at age 14 can predict an increase in cannabis and cigarette use later, highlighting sustained attention as a key indicator of vulnerability to substance use.
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Background: The mental health benefits of cannabidiol (CBD) are promising but can be inconsistent, in part due to challenges in defining an individual's effective dosage. In schizophrenia, alterations in anandamide (AEA) concentrations, an endocannabinoid (eCB) agonist of the eCB system, reflect positively on treatment with CBD. Here, we expanded this assessment to include eCBs alongside AEA congeners, comparing phytocannabinoids and dosage in a clinical setting.

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Importance: The development of an alcohol use disorder in adolescence is associated with increased risk of future alcohol dependence. The differential associations of risk factors with alcohol use over the course of 8 years are important for preventive measures.

Objective: To determine the differential associations of risk-taking aspects of personality, social factors, brain functioning, and familial risk with hazardous alcohol use in adolescents over the course of 8 years.

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Incomplete Hippocampal Inversion (IHI), sometimes called hippocampal malrotation, is an atypical anatomical pattern of the hippocampus found in about 20% of the general population. IHI can be visually assessed on coronal slices of T1 weighted MR images, using a composite score that combines four anatomical criteria. IHI has been associated with several brain disorders (epilepsy, schizophrenia).

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  • * The study examined DMN in patients with chronic and subacute back pain and found notable DMN changes only in chronic pain patients, while also revealing a positive link between DMN changes and the duration of pain.
  • * Cognitive coping strategies were found to affect these DMN changes, suggesting that the way individuals adapt to pain could be important for understanding their neural responses and improving patient treatment strategies.
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Perseverative negative thoughts, known as rumination, might arise from emotional challenges and preclude mental health when transitioning into adulthood. Due to its multifaceted nature, rumination can take several ruminative response styles, that diverge in manifestations, severity, and mental health outcomes. Still, prospective ruminative phenotypes remain elusive insofar.

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  • - The study investigates how the balance between excitation and inhibition in brain cortex microcircuits changes during adolescence, a critical period for brain maturation.
  • - Using advanced simulations and resting-state fMRI data from two large groups, researchers found an increase in inhibition in certain brain regions (association cortices) as adolescents age, while sensorimotor areas showed more stable excitation levels.
  • - The findings suggest that there’s a consistent developmental pattern in the excitation-inhibition balance that can vary among individuals, providing a new computational method to study brain maturation at a personal level.
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Current psychiatric diagnoses are not defined by neurobiological measures which hinders the development of therapies targeting mechanisms underlying mental illness . Research confined to diagnostic boundaries yields heterogeneous biological results, whereas transdiagnostic studies often investigate individual symptoms in isolation. There is currently no paradigm available to comprehensively investigate the relationship between different clinical symptoms, individual disorders, and the underlying neurobiological mechanisms.

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Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD)-related neuropathological changes can occur decades before clinical symptoms. We aimed to investigate whether neurodevelopment and/or neurodegeneration affects the risk of AD, through reducing structural brain reserve and/or increasing brain atrophy, respectively.

Methods: We used bidirectional two-sample Mendelian randomisation to estimate the effects between genetic liability to AD and global and regional cortical thickness, estimated total intracranial volume, volume of subcortical structures and total white matter in 37 680 participants aged 8-81 years across 5 independent cohorts (Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development, Generation R, IMAGEN, Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children and UK Biobank).

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