Negative symptoms and sex differences in first episode schizophrenia: What's their role in the functional outcome? A longitudinal study.

Introduction: Negative symptoms (NS) include asociality, avolition, anhedonia, alogia, and blunted affect and are linked to poor prognosis. It has been suggested that they reflect two different factors: diminished expression (EXP) (blunted affect and alogia) and amotivation/pleasure (MAP) (anhedonia, avolition, asociality). The aim of this article was to examine potential sex differences among first-episode schizophrenia (FES) patients and analyze sex-related predictors of two NS symptoms factors (EXP and MAP) and functional outcome.

Emotion dysregulation in bipolar disorder compared to other mental illnesses: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

People with bipolar disorder (BD) often present emotion dysregulation (ED), a pattern of emotional expression interfering with goal-directed behavior. ED is a transdiagnostic construct, and it is unclear whether it manifests itself similarly in other conditions, such as major depressive disorder (MDD) or borderline personality disorder (BPD), or has specific features in BD. The present systematic review and meta-analysis explored ED and adopted emotion regulation (ER) strategies in BD compared with other psychiatric conditions.

New insights into the genetic etiology of Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.

Characterization of the genetic landscape of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and related dementias (ADD) provides a unique opportunity for a better understanding of the associated pathophysiological processes. We performed a two-stage genome-wide association study totaling 111,326 clinically diagnosed/'proxy' AD cases and 677,663 controls. We found 75 risk loci, of which 42 were new at the time of analysis.

Automatized FACEmemory® scoring is related to Alzheimer's disease phenotype and biomarkers in early-onset mild cognitive impairment: the BIOFACE cohort.

Background: FACEmemory® is the first computerized, self-administered verbal episodic memory test with voice recognition. It can be conducted under minimal supervision and contains an automatic scoring system to avoid administrator errors. Moreover, it is suitable for discriminating between cognitively healthy and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) individuals, and it is associated with Alzheimer's disease (AD) cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) biomarkers.

Neuropsychiatric Profile as a Predictor of Cognitive Decline in Mild Cognitive Impairment.

Mild cognitive impairment is often associated with affective and other neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS). This co-occurrence might have a relevant impact on disease progression, from MCI to dementia. The aim of this study was to explore the trajectories of cognitive decline in an MCI sample from a memory clinic, taking into consideration a perspective of isolated cognitive functions and based on NPS clusters, accounting for the different comorbid symptoms collected at their baseline visit.

Common variants in Alzheimer's disease and risk stratification by polygenic risk scores.

Genetic discoveries of Alzheimer's disease are the drivers of our understanding, and together with polygenetic risk stratification can contribute towards planning of feasible and efficient preventive and curative clinical trials. We first perform a large genetic association study by merging all available case-control datasets and by-proxy study results (discovery n = 409,435 and validation size n = 58,190). Here, we add six variants associated with Alzheimer's disease risk (near APP, CHRNE, PRKD3/NDUFAF7, PLCG2 and two exonic variants in the SHARPIN gene).

Neuropsychiatric profiles and conversion to dementia in mild cognitive impairment, a latent class analysis.

Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) have been recently addressed as risk factors of conversion to Alzheimer's disease (AD) and other dementia types in patients diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). Our aim was to determine profiles based on the prominent NPS in MCI patients and to explore the predictive value of these profiles on conversion to specific types of dementia. A total of 2137 MCI patients monitored in a memory clinic were included in the study.

Interaction of neuropsychiatric symptoms with APOE ε4 and conversion to dementia in MCI patients in a Memory Clinic.

To date, very few studies have been focused on the impact of the convergence of neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) and APOE ε4 on the conversion to dementia in patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment patients (MCI), and none has been based in a clinical setting. The objective of the study is to determine the predictive value of additive and multiplicative interactions of NPS and APOE ε4 status on the prediction of incident dementia among MCI patients monitored in a Memory Clinic. 1512 patients (aged 60 and older) with prevalent MCI were followed for a mean of 2 years.

A computerized version of the Short Form of the Face-Name Associative Memory Exam (FACEmemory®) for the early detection of Alzheimer's disease.

Background: Computerized neuropsychological tests for early detection of Alzheimer's disease (AD) have attracted increasing interest. Memory for faces and proper names is a complex task because its association is arbitrary. It implicates associative occipito-temporal cerebral regions, which are disrupted in AD.

Assessing the Psychedelic "After-Glow" in Ayahuasca Users: Post-Acute Neurometabolic and Functional Connectivity Changes Are Associated with Enhanced Mindfulness Capacities.

Background: Ayahuasca is a plant tea containing the psychedelic 5-HT2A agonist N,N-dimethyltryptamine and harmala monoamine-oxidase inhibitors. Acute administration leads to neurophysiological modifications in brain regions of the default mode network, purportedly through a glutamatergic mechanism. Post-acutely, ayahuasca potentiates mindfulness capacities in volunteers and induces rapid and sustained antidepressant effects in treatment-resistant patients.