Publications by authors named "Nic Van Der Wee"

Article Synopsis
  • Longitudinal rs-fMRI studies on adolescent internalizing psychopathology are limited; this study investigates functional connectivity (FC) in amygdala subregions and whole-brain networks in treatment-naïve adolescents with clinical depression and anxiety.
  • The study involved 23 adolescents starting treatment and 24 healthy controls, assessing FC changes over three months focusing on the laterobasal amygdala (LBA) and centromedial amygdala (CMA).
  • Results indicated significant differences in FC development between the groups, with specific changes linked to symptom improvement, underscoring the need to consider amygdala subregions in neuroimaging research for better understanding of mental health in adolescents.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are linked to long-term mental health issues like PTSD, and are notably more common in military personnel who must preserve mental health for their duties.
  • A study with 752 recruits from the Japan Air Self-Defense Force found that self-compassion, which involves treating oneself kindly, significantly reduces PTSD symptoms and is negatively impacted by ACEs.
  • The research indicated that self-compassion only partially mediates the relationship between ACEs and PTSD symptoms, suggesting the need for further studies to develop educational programs aimed at increasing self-compassion in individuals with ACEs to help lessen PTSD symptoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Subcortical brain structures play a crucial role in various developmental and psychiatric disorders, and a study analyzed brain volumes in 74,898 individuals, identifying 254 genetic loci linked to these volumes, which accounted for up to 35% of variation.
  • The research included exploring gene expression in specific neural cell types, focusing on genes involved in intracellular signaling and processes related to brain aging.
  • The findings suggest that certain genetic variants not only influence brain volume but also have potential causal links to conditions like Parkinson’s disease and ADHD, highlighting the genetic basis for risks associated with neuropsychiatric disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Subcortical brain structures play a crucial role in various disorders, and a study analyzed the genetic basis of brain volumes in nearly 75,000 individuals of European ancestry, revealing 254 loci linked to these volumes.
  • The research identified significant gene expression in neural cells, relating to brain aging and signaling, and found that polygenic scores could predict brain volumes across different ancestries.
  • The study highlights genetic connections between brain volumes and conditions like Parkinson's disease and ADHD, suggesting specific gene expression patterns could be involved in neuropsychiatric disorders.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Recently the 1/f signal of human electroencephalography has attracted attention, as it could potentially reveal a quantitative measure of neural excitation and inhibition in the brain, that may be relevant in a clinical setting. The purpose of this short article is to show that the 1/f signal depends on the vigilance state of the brain in both humans and mice. Therefore, proper labelling of the EEG signal is important as improper labelling may obscure disease-related changes in the 1/f signal.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: Peacekeepers in United Nations missions experience potentially traumatic events, resulting in increased risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Understanding the course and risk factors of PTSD symptom severity is crucial to ensure personnel safety.

Objective: To investigate the incidence of PTSD, symptom severity trajectories, and potential risk factors associated with adverse trajectories among Japanese peacekeepers deployed in South Sudan.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Social dysfunction is a common feature of neuropsychiatric disorders like Schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease, impacting socioaffective neural processing.
  • A study analyzed how social dysfunction correlates with brain system activity in SZ and AD patients through fMRI tasks, revealing patterns related to emotional responses.
  • The research found that severe behavioral social dysfunction linked to hyperactivity and hypoactivity in specific brain regions, highlighting the potential for tailored care based on individual social behavior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The ENIGMA Anxiety Working Group studied brain structural differences between individuals with specific phobias and healthy participants, focusing on subtypes of phobias like animal and blood-injection-injury (BII) while examining how these differences relate to symptom severity and age.
  • - A total of 1,452 participants with phobias and 2,991 healthy subjects were analyzed, revealing that those with phobias exhibited smaller subcortical volumes and varying cortical thickness, especially noted in adults rather than youths.
  • - The results indicate that brain alterations in specific phobias are more significant than in other anxiety disorders, revealing distinct neural underpinnings linked to fear processing across different phobia types, highlighting a
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Anxiety disorders are very prevalent and often persistent mental disorders, with a considerable rate of treatment resistance which requires regulatory clinical trials of innovative therapeutic interventions. However, an explicit definition of treatment-resistant anxiety disorders (TR-AD) informing such trials is currently lacking. We used a Delphi method-based consensus approach to provide internationally agreed, consistent and clinically useful operational criteria for TR-AD in adults.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Machine learning (ML) techniques have gained popularity in the neuroimaging field due to their potential for classifying neuropsychiatric disorders. However, the diagnostic predictive power of the existing algorithms has been limited by small sample sizes, lack of representativeness, data leakage, and/or overfitting. Here, we overcome these limitations with the largest multi-site sample size to date (N = 5365) to provide a generalizable ML classification benchmark of major depressive disorder (MDD) using shallow linear and non-linear models.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Acute withdrawal of headache medication in chronic migraine patients with medication overuse may lead to a dramatic reduction in headache frequency and severity. However, the brain networks underlying chronic migraine and a favorable response to acute withdrawal are still poorly understood. The goal of the present study was to characterize the pattern of intrinsic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) functional connectivity (FC) specific to chronic migraine and to identify changes in FC that characterize subjects with CM reverting to less frequent headaches.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) often is a recurrent and chronic disorder. We investigated the neurocognitive underpinnings of the incremental risk for poor disease course by exploring relations between enduring depression and brain functioning during regulation of negative and positive emotions using cognitive reappraisal. We used fMRI-data from the longitudinal Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety acquired during an emotion regulation task in 77 individuals with MDD.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The current neuropsychiatric nosological categories underlie pragmatic treatment choice, regulation and clinical research but does not encompass biological rationale. However, subgroups of patients suffering from schizophrenia or Alzheimer's disease have more in common than the neuropsychiatric nature of their condition, such as the expression of social dysfunction. The PRISM project presents here initial quantitative biological insights allowing the first steps toward a novel trans-diagnostic classification of psychiatric and neurological symptomatology intended to reinvigorate drug discovery in this area.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * Researchers utilized various MRI data types to identify brain features that can distinguish PTSD from controls, revealing that classification accuracy decreases significantly when using multi-site data compared to single-site studies.
  • * The denoising variational autoencoder (DVAE) model showed improved generalization on new datasets, indicating its potential for better classification of PTSD, although overall performance still remained only slightly above chance levels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Lithium is widely used as treatment of acute mania and as prophylactic therapy for bipolar disorder. International and national guidelines also consider lithium as a possible treatment of acute bipolar depression. Research on the use of lithium in bipolar depression, however, seems to be limited compared to the data available for its efficacy in the other phases of bipolar disorder.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Circadian rhythms have evolved in almost all organisms enabling them to anticipate alternating changes in the environment. As a consequence, the circadian clock controls a broad range of bodily functions including appetite, sleep, activity and cortisol levels. The circadian clock synchronizes itself to the external world mainly by environmental light cues and can be disturbed by a variety of factors, including shift-work, jet-lag, stress, ageing and artificial light at night.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

After the Great East Japan Earthquake [GEJE], approximately 70,000 Japan Ground Self Defense Force [JGSDF] personnel were deployed, risking Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD]. The network approach to psychopathology suggests that symptoms may cause and exacerbate each other, resulting in the emergence and maintenance of disorders, including PTSD. It is therefore important to further explore the temporal interplay between symptoms.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * The researchers used information from many brain scans (fMRI) to see what was different in how people with BD respond to emotions, rewards, and remember things.
  • * They found that people with BD showed more activity in certain brain areas, like the amygdala and hippocampus, which are important for emotions and memory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The short-term and long-term outcome of inflammatory neuropsychiatric SLE (NPSLE) with immunosuppressive treatment is largely unknown. We used clinical data from our tertiary referral centre for NPSLE to investigate the type of inflammatory NPSLE manifestations, type of immunosuppressive treatment prescribed for these manifestations and clinical outcomes.

Methods: All patients with SLE visiting the Leiden University Medical Centre NPSLE clinic between 2007 and 2021 receiving immunosuppressive therapy for neuropsychiatric symptoms were included.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

There is limited convergence in neuroimaging investigations into volumes of subcortical brain regions in social anxiety disorder (SAD). The inconsistent findings may arise from variations in methodological approaches across studies, including sample selection based on age and clinical characteristics. The ENIGMA-Anxiety Working Group initiated a global mega-analysis to determine whether differences in subcortical volumes can be detected in adults and adolescents with SAD relative to healthy controls.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Temperament involves stable behavioral and emotional tendencies that differ between individuals, which can be first observed in infancy or early childhood and relate to behavior in many contexts and over many years. One of the most rigorously characterized temperament classifications relates to the tendency of individuals to avoid the unfamiliar and to withdraw from unfamiliar people, objects, and unexpected events. This temperament is referred to as behavioral inhibition or inhibited temperament (IT).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Insights into the neurobiological basis of resilience can have important implications for the prevention and treatment of stress-related disorders, especially in populations that are subjected to high-stress environments. Evaluating large-scale resting-state networks (RSNs) can provide information regarding resilient specific brain function which may be useful in understanding resilience. This study aimed to explore functional connectivity patterns specific for (high) resilience in Dutch policemen after exposure to multiple work-related traumatic events.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Structural brain alterations are observed in major depressive disorder (MDD). However, MDD is a highly heterogeneous disorder and specific clinical or biological characteristics of depression might relate to specific structural brain alterations. Clinical symptom subtypes of depression, as well as immuno-metabolic dysregulation associated with subtypes of depression, have been associated with brain alterations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF