Publications by authors named "Jacobus J"

Introduction: There is ongoing concern about the impact of increasing use of social media and digital devices on unhealthy behaviors such as substance use in youth. Mobile phone and social media use have been associated with substance use in adolescent and young adult samples, but few studies have evaluated these relationships in younger samples.

Methods: This secondary analysis of data drawn from the ABCD Study examined associations between youth-reported mobile phone ownership and social media use at age 11-12 and use of alcohol, nicotine/tobacco, and cannabis over the next 18 months.

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Introduction: Chronic use of nicotine and tobacco products (NTP) continues to be a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. Uptake is most common among youth and young adults but knowledge about effective prevention and intervention approaches is insufficient. The goal of the present study was to examine the impact of social cognitive factors on NTP risk over time among youth in the national ABCD cohort.

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Article Synopsis
  • * A new method was developed that combines MEG with electromyography (EMG) to accurately locate early-stage motor cortex activity during self-paced finger movements without averaging multiple trials over a minute-long recording.
  • * The study found that this EMG-projected MEG technique effectively identified motor cortex activity in both healthy participants and presurgical patients, even when muscle movements were irregular, shedding light on how the brain communicates with muscles during various frequency bands.
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Background: With the advent of electronic nicotine delivery systems, the use of nicotine and tobacco products (NTPs) among adolescents and young adults remains high in the US. Use of e-cigarettes additionally elevates the risk of problematic use of other substances like cannabis, which is often co-used with NTPs. However, their effects on brain health, particularly the hippocampus, and cognition during this neurodevelopmental period are poorly understood.

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  • Research highlights a critical gap in understanding long COVID (PASC) in children and emphasizes the need for studies that define its characteristics in this age group.
  • The objective is to identify common prolonged symptoms in children aged 6 to 17 post-SARS-CoV-2 infection, examining differences between school-age kids and adolescents, as well as potential symptom clusters for future research.
  • A multicenter study involved nearly 5,000 participants, revealing that certain symptoms were significantly more prevalent in those with a history of COVID-19 compared to those without.
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Objectives: Cannabis legalization has triggered an increase in prenatal cannabis use. Given that tobacco is commonly co-used with cannabis, determining outcomes associated with prenatal cannabis and tobacco co-exposure is crucial. While literature exists regarding the individual effects of prenatal cannabis and tobacco exposure on childhood behaviour, there is a gap regarding their combined use, which may have interactive effects.

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Introduction: Cannabis and nicotine/tobacco products (NTP) are commonly co-used in adolescence and young adulthood; however, limited research has been done on predictive health behaviors to co-use. The current study is a preliminary investigation into the relationships of modifiable health behaviors on cannabis and NTP co-use in adolescents and young adults.

Method: 221 participants (ages 16-22) were characterized into cannabis use only (N = 55), NTP use only (N = 20), cannabis and NTP co-use (used cannabis and NTP; N = 96) and control (no use; N = 50) groups based on past 30-day use.

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Importance: The prevalence, pathophysiology, and long-term outcomes of COVID-19 (post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 [PASC] or "Long COVID") in children and young adults remain unknown. Studies must address the urgent need to define PASC, its mechanisms, and potential treatment targets in children and young adults.

Observations: We describe the protocol for the Pediatric Observational Cohort Study of the NIH's REsearching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) Initiative.

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Background: Young adults have historically high levels of cannabis use at a time which coincides with emotional and cognitive development. Age of regular onset of cannabis use and sex at birth are hypothesized to influence the relationship between cannabis use and cognition. Here we investigated past 6-month cannabis use in relation to emotional and executive functioning.

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Introduction: Despite evidence suggesting deleterious effects of cannabis and nicotine tobacco product (NTP) use on white matter integrity, there have been limited studies examining white matter integrity among users of both cannabis and nicotine. Further, updated white matter methodology provides opportunities to investigate use patterns on neurite orientation dispersion and density (NODDI) indices and subtle tissue changes related to the intra- and extra-neurite compartment. We aimed to investigate how cannabis and NTP use among adolescents and young adults interacts to impact the white matter integrity microstructure.

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Early life substance use, including cannabis and nicotine, may result in deleterious effects on the maturation of brain tissue and gray matter cortical development. The current study employed linear regression models to investigate the main and interactive effects of past-year nicotine and cannabis use on gray matter cortical thickness estimates in 11 bilateral independent frontal cortical regions in 223 16-22-year-olds. As the frontal cortex develops throughout late adolescence and young adulthood, this period becomes crucial for studying the impact of substance use on brain structure.

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Adolescent traumatic brain injury (TBI) has long-term effects on brain functioning and behavior, impacting neural activity under cognitive load, especially in the reward network. Adolescent TBI is also linked to risk-taking behaviors including alcohol misuse. It remains unclear how TBI and neural functioning interact to predict alcohol experimentation during adolescence.

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Background: Nicotine and tobacco product (NTP) and cannabis use are common in adolescence/young adulthood and increase risk for negative psychosocial outcomes. This study investigated associations among adolescent/young adults' initial experiences with NTPs, lifetime frequency of substance use, substance-related problems, and mental health symptoms.

Method: Adolescents and young adults enrolled in a study on NTP and cannabis use were asked at what age they initiated the use of NTPs and were assigned to groups based on which product or substance(s) they reported using at the earliest age.

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Introduction: Elevated levels of behavioral inhibition (BI) may connote risk for both anxiety and substance use disorders. BI has consistently been shown to be associated with increased levels of anxiety, while the association between BI and substance use has been mixed. It is possible that the relationship between BI and substance use varies by individual difference factors.

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Nicotine and tobacco product (NTP) use remains prevalent in adolescence/young adulthood. The effects of NTPs on markers of brain health during this vulnerable neurodevelopmental period remain largely unknown. This report investigates associations between NTP use and gray matter cerebral blood flow (CBF) in adolescents/young adults.

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Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a non-invasive functional imaging technique for pre-surgical mapping. However, movement-related MEG functional mapping of primary motor cortex (M1) has been challenging in presurgical patients with brain lesions and sensorimotor dysfunction due to the large numbers of trails needed to obtain adequate signal to noise. Moreover, it is not fully understood how effective the brain communication is with the muscles at frequencies above the movement frequency and its harmonics.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The RECOVER-Pediatrics study aims to investigate the prevalence and long-term effects of Long COVID (PASC) in children and young adults, addressing the need for more research in this area.
  • - The study recruits caregiver-child pairs and young adults across 100+ sites in the U.S., focusing on a diverse group of participants with and without prior SARS-CoV-2 infections, and will collect data over several years through various tiers of assessments.
  • - The ultimate goal of the study is to understand the clinical trajectory, mechanisms, and sociodemographic factors related to pediatric PASC, thereby contributing to potential treatments and public health responses.
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Aims: Substance use disorders (SUD) are associated with cognitive deficits that are not always addressed in current treatments, and this hampers recovery. Cognitive training and remediation interventions are well suited to fill the gap for managing cognitive deficits in SUD. We aimed to reach consensus on recommendations for developing and applying these interventions.

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Rationale: Greater risk-taking behaviors, such as alcohol experimentation, are associated with different patterns of brain functioning in regions implicated in reward (nucleus accumbens, NA) and cognitive control (inferior frontal gyrus, IFG). These neural features have been observed in youth with greater risk-taking tendencies prior to substance use initiation, suggesting NA-IFG disruption may serve as an early marker for subsequent substance use disorders. Prospective studies are needed to determine if NA-IFG neural disruption predicts future substance use in school-age children, including those with minimal use of alcohol (e.

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Irritability is a prevalent, impairing transdiagnostic symptom, especially during adolescence, yet little is known about irritability's neural mechanisms. A few studies examined the integrity of white matter tracts that facilitate neural communication in irritability, but only with extreme, disorder-related symptom presentations. In this preliminary study, we used a group connectometry approach to identify white matter tracts correlated with transdiagnostic irritability in a community/clinic-based sample of 35 adolescents (mean age = 14 years, SD = 2.

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Objective: Co-use of cannabis and nicotine and tobacco products (NTPs) in adolescence/young adulthood is common and associated with worse outcomes than the use of either substance in isolation. Despite this, little is known about the unique contributions of co-use to neurostructural microstructure during this neurodevelopmentally important period. This study sought to investigate the interactive effects of nicotine and cannabis co-use on white matter fiber tract microstructure in emerging adulthood.

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Article Synopsis
  • Temporal stability of individual differences in neurocognition is crucial for understanding relationships with real-world behaviors like substance abuse and mental health issues.
  • The study assessed neurocognitive changes in a diverse group of adolescents over two years, finding significant performance improvements with age, particularly in tasks related to pattern recognition and crystallized cognition.
  • While certain measures showed good stability, the findings suggest that some observed changes might be influenced by practice effects or differences in testing conditions, highlighting the need for careful interpretation of longitudinal data in neurocognitive development.
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Background: The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development ™ Study (ABCD Study®) is an open-science, multi-site, prospective, longitudinal study following over 11,800 9- and 10-year-old youth into early adulthood. The ABCD Study aims to prospectively examine the impact of substance use (SU) on neurocognitive and health outcomes. Although SU initiation typically occurs during teen years, relatively little is known about patterns of SU in children younger than 12.

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