Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry
October 2024
Amidst rising concerns about mental health in adolescents, the role of social media (SM), particularly highly visual platforms such as TikTok, has become a growing focus of investigation. In the extant literature, conclusive evidence is limited by the aggregate analysis of very heterogeneous SM platforms. This systematic scoping review examines the relationship between TikTok and mental health in adolescents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), do often present in comorbidity among them and with other medical conditions, including sleep and gastrointestinal (GI) disorders and somatic complaints. An anonymous online survey based on standardized questionnaires (SDSC, KL-ASD, APSI, ROME V CRITERIA, CPRS, CBCL) was completed by the parents of 46 preschoolers diagnosed with ASD. A high prevalence (47%) of ADHD symptoms in this population was found, surpassing previous estimates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: 1.
Background: Autism spectrum disorder and psychotic risk show several overlapping symptoms, so differential diagnosis is often difficult. In addition, there is a high rate of comorbidity between the two conditions, which further complicates the work of clinicians.
Aim: Concerns have been raised about possible neuropsychiatric sequelae of COVID-19. The objective of this study was to examine the plausibility of long-term mental health consequences of COVID-19 by assessing a sample of children after the resolution of the acute SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Method: As part of a systematic follow-up assessment of pediatric patients with COVID-19 conducted at two university children's hospitals, 50 children (56% males) aged 8 to 17 years (median 11.
Each year, 275 million children worldwide are exposed to domestic violence (DV) and suffer negative mental and physical health consequences; however, only a small proportion receive assistance. Pediatricians and child psychiatrists can play a central role in identifying threatened children. We reviewed experiences of DV screening in pediatric and child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) to understand its feasibility and provide clues for its implementation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: By forcing closure of schools, curtailing outpatient services, and imposing strict social distancing, the COVID-19 pandemic has abruptly affected the daily life of millions worldwide, with still unclear consequences for mental health. This study aimed to evaluate if and how child and adolescent psychiatric visits to hospital emergency departments (EDs) changed during the pandemic lockdown, which started in Italy on February 24, 2020.
Methods: We examined all ED visits by patients under 18 years of age in the 7 weeks prior to February 24, 2020, and in the subsequent 8 weeks of COVID-19 lockdown at two urban university hospitals, in Turin and Rome, Italy.
Introduction: The last decade has witnessed a resurgence of interest in the clinician's subjectivity and its role in the diagnostic assessment. Integrating the criteriological, third-person approach to patient evaluation and psychiatric diagnosis with other approaches that take into account the patient's subjective and intersubjective experience may bear particular importance in the assessment of very young patients. The ACSE (Assessment of Clinician's Subjective Experience) instrument may provide a practical way to probe the intersubjective field of the clinical examination; however, its reliability and validity in child and adolescent psychiatrists seeing very young patients is still to be determined.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown measures drastically changed health care and emergency services utilization. This study evaluated trends in emergency department (ED) access for seizure-related reasons in the first 8 weeks of lockdown in Italy.
Methods: All ED accesses of children (<14 years of age) at two university hospitals, in Turin and Rome, Italy, between January 6, 2020 and April 21, 2020, were examined and compared with the corresponding periods of 2019.
Background: Extant literature indicates that Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) may be reliably assessed in adolescence. Sharp and colleagues' (2011) suggested that mentalization could be an important early target for intervention in BPD adolescents and showed that hypermentalizing may represent an important marker to distinguish emerging BPD from adolescent turmoil. We aimed at testing if both dimensionally-assessed and categorically-diagnosed BPD was selectively associated with hypermentalizing errors on the Movie for the Assessment of Social Cognition (MASC) task in Italian adolescent inpatients and community adolescents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTrait-like anomalies of subjective experience (aka, Basic Self-disturbance or Self-disorder, SD) have been empirically identified as schizophrenia-specific markers of vulnerability in several clinical and genetic high-risk populations. However, such specificity is still to be tested in developmental years, where emerging psychopathology is less crystallized and diagnostic boundaries more blurred. Thus, the current study explores the distribution of SD in adolescent help-seekers (age range 14 to 18) and tests the specificity of SD with respect to the severity of their diagnostic staging (Early Onset schizophrenia-spectrum psychosis [EOP], ultra high-risk [UHR] and clinical help-seeking controls [CHSC]).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychiatry Res
July 2017
Social and occupational impairments are present in the schizophrenia prodrome, and poor social functioning predicts transition to psychosis in Ultra-High Risk (UHR) individuals. We aimed to: 1) validate the Italian version of the Global Functioning: Social (GF: S) and Global Functioning: Role (GF: S) scales; 2) evaluate their association with UHR criteria. Participants were 12-21-years-old (age, mean=15.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: This study was conducted to assess treatment decision-making capacity (TDMC) in a child and adolescent psychiatric sample and to verify possible associations between TDMC, psychiatric symptom severity, and cognitive functioning.
Methods: Twenty-two consecutively recruited patients hospitalized for an acute mental disorder, aged 11-18 years, underwent measurement of TDMC by the MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool for Treatment (MacCAT-T). The MacCAT-T interview focused on patients' current treatment, which comprised second-generation antipsychotics (45.
Background: The DSM-5 Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD) provides the opportunity to integrate the needed developmental perspective in the assessment of personality pathology. Based on this model, Krueger and colleagues (2012) developed the Personality Inventory for DSM-5 (PID-5), which operationalizes the proposed DSM-5 traits.
Methods: Eighty-five consecutively admitted Italian adolescent inpatients were administered the Italian translation of the PID-5, in order to obtain preliminary data on PID-5 reliability and clinical usefulness in clinically referred adolescents.
Unlabelled: Homocystinuria due to cystathionine-β-synthase deficiency (CBS deficiency) usually presents with ectopia lentis, myopia, intellectual disability, skeletal anomalies resembling Marfan syndrome, and thromboembolic events. Whereas neurodevelopment impairments have been often described in untreated homocystinuria adult patients, acute psychosis has rarely been reported as a presenting symptom of the disease. Here, we describe a 17-year-old girl affected by CBS deficiency presenting acute onset of visual hallucinations, behavioral perseverance, psychomotor hyperactivity, and affective inappropriateness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The aim was to perform a meta-analysis on the efficacy, safety and tolerability of antipsychotic drugs in adolescents aged between 13 and 17 suffering from schizophrenia.
Methods: Enclosed studies - were multicentric, randomized, double-blind clinical trials; - included only adolescents (aged 13-17) with DSM-IV diagnosis of schizophrenia; - used standardized scales to assess efficacy, safety and tolerability of antipsychotics.
Results: All treatments resulted in significant improvements in Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) total score (p < 0.
This work reports the results of an environmental survey carried out in an industrial area in the Province of Turin: its main aim is to assess the levels of iron and aluminium in the outside air during the period from July to September to assess the influence of industrial activity (a cast-iron and aluminium foundry) which is interrupted during the month of August, on the level of metals present in the air. Conducting the analysis during this period of time made it possible to avoid the confounding effect of pollution due to domestic central heating. The measurements were taken from nine areas at different distances from the foundry in the area and according to the direction of the prevailing winds, as deduced from the historical data.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: In a cross-sectional case-control study conducted in northern Italy, 64 former aluminium dust-exposed workers were compared with 32 unexposed controls from other companies matched for age, professional training, economic status, educational and clinical features. The findings lead the authors to suggest a possible role of the inhalation of aluminium dust in pre-clinical mild cognitive disorder which might prelude Alzheimer's disease (AD) or AD-like neurological deterioration.
Methods: The investigation involved a standardised occupational and medical history with particular attention to exposure and symptoms, assessments of neurotoxic metals in serum: aluminium (Al-s), copper (Cu-s) and zinc (Zn-s), and in blood: manganese (Mn-b), lead (Pb-b) and iron (Fe-b).