Publications by authors named "Kerri L Kim"

Article Synopsis
  • Irritability in children and adolescents is a frequent reason for seeking psychiatric help, and there's ongoing research into its brain and behavioral causes.
  • Clinicians often aren't kept in the loop with this research, but the article outlines key methods used to study irritability in various disorders like bipolar disorder and ADHD.
  • By improving access to this research, clinicians may enhance their treatment approaches, similar to advancements seen in childhood leukemia care.
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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigated how facial emotion recognition deficits are linked to mood symptoms in young adults with childhood-onset bipolar disorder (BD) compared to typically developing controls (TDCs).
  • It found that individuals with BD made more mistakes in recognizing child emotional expressions, which correlated with their mood trajectories over time, impacting their levels of mania and depression.
  • The results suggest that improving facial emotion recognition could be a valuable target for treatment and understanding of mood disorders in those with childhood-onset BD.
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Article Synopsis
  • - Previous research has established that children and adolescents with bipolar disorder (BD) struggle with cognitive flexibility (CF), which involves adapting to changing rewards and punishments, but the link between CF and white matter microstructure in these youths hadn't been explored before.
  • - This study used specific cognitive tests and advanced imaging techniques to find that the relationship between microstructural integrity of white matter and CF performance was significantly different in youth with BD compared to typically developing controls.
  • - The findings suggest that there is an unusual relationship between CF and white matter in youths with BD, highlighting the need for more research to understand how these brain structures evolve over time in relation to CF and the progression of BD.
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Background: A precision medicine approach to bipolar disorder (BD) requires greater knowledge of neural mechanisms, especially within the BD phenotype. The present study evaluated differences in resting state functional connectivity (RSFC) between young adults followed longitudinally since childhood with full-threshold type I BD (BD-I)-characterized by distinct manic episodes-or a more sub-syndromal presentation of BD (BD Not Otherwise Specified [BD-NOS]), compared to one another and to healthy controls (HC). Independent Components Analysis (ICA), a multivariate data-driven method, and dual regression were used to explore whether connectivity within resting state networks (RSNs) differentiated the groups, especially for characteristic fronto-limbic alterations in BD.

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Background: Despite gains made in the study of childhood anxiety, differential diagnosis remains challenging because of indistinct boundaries between disorders and high comorbidity. This is certainly true for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) as they share multiple cognitive processes (e.g.

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Background: Childhood-onset bipolar disorder (BD) is a serious condition that affects the patient and family. While research has documented familial dysfunction in individuals with BD, no studies have compared developmental differences in family functioning in youths with BD vs. adults with prospectively verified childhood-onset BD.

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Background: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a severe mental illness that can have high costs for youths (<18 years old) and adults. Relative to healthy controls (HC), individuals with BD often show impaired attention, working memory, executive function, and cognitive flexibility (the ability to adapt to changing reward/punishment contingencies). In our study of youths and young adults with BD, we investigated 1) how cognitive flexibility varies developmentally in BD, and 2) whether it is independent of other executive function deficits associated with BD.

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Bipolar disorder (BD) is among the most impairing psychiatric disorders affecting children and adolescents, despite our best psychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatments. Cognitive remediation, defined as a behavioral intervention designed to improve cognitive functions so as to reduce psychiatric illness, is an emerging brain-based treatment approach that has thus far not been studied in pediatric BD. The present article reviews the basic principles of cognitive remediation, describes what is known about cognitive remediation in psychiatric disorders, and delineates potential brain/behavior alterations implicated in pediatric BD that might be targets for cognitive remediation.

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Objectives: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a severe mental illness with high healthcare costs and poor outcomes. Increasing numbers of youths are diagnosed with BD, and many adults with BD report that their symptoms started in childhood, suggesting that BD can be a developmental disorder. Studies advancing our understanding of BD have shown alterations in facial emotion recognition both in children and adults with BD compared to healthy comparison (HC) participants, but none have evaluated the development of these deficits.

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High rates of comorbidity and overlapping diagnostic criteria between pediatric bipolar disorder (BD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) contribute to diagnostic and treatment confusion. To advance what is known about both disorders, we compared effect of emotional stimuli on response control in children with primary BD, primary ADHD and typically developing controls (TDC). Participants included 7-17 year olds with either "narrow-phenotype" pediatric BD (n = 25), ADHD (n = 25) or TDC (n = 25).

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Importance: Bipolar disorder (BD) is a debilitating mental illness associated with high costs to diagnosed individuals and society. Within the past 2 decades, increasing numbers of children and adolescents have been diagnosed as having BD. While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have begun to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying BD, few have directly compared differences in youths with BD and adults with BD (hereafter BD-youths and BD-adults, respectively).

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Pediatric bipolar disorder (BD) rates have notably increased over the past three decades. Given the significant morbidity and mortality associated with BD, efforts are needed to identify factors useful in earlier detection to help address this serious public health concern. Sleep is particularly important to consider given the sequelae of disrupted sleep on normative functioning and that sleep is included in diagnostic criteria for both Major Depressive and Manic Episodes.

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Background: Rates of diagnosis and treatment for bipolar disorder (BD) in youth continue to rise. Researchers and clinicians experience difficulty differentiating between BD in youth and other conditions that are commonly comorbid or share similar clinical features with BD, especially attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Comparative studies of the phenomenology and psychosocial correlates of these conditions help to address this.

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