Estimating health state utilities for aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase deficiency (AADCd) in the United States.

Background: AADCd is a rare neurometabolic disorder presenting in infancy. Children with AADCd have motor dysfunction and development delays that result in the need for lifelong care; quality of life is greatly impacted. Current characterizations of health-related quality of life and associated health state utilities (HSUs) may be underestimated in AADCd.

Daily Social Isolation Maps Onto Distinctive Features of Anhedonic Behavior: A Combined Ecological and Computational Investigation.

Background: Loneliness and social isolation have detrimental consequences for mental health and act as vulnerability factors for the development of depressive symptoms, such as anhedonia. The mitigation strategies used to contain COVID-19, such as social distancing and lockdowns, allowed us to investigate putative associations between daily objective and perceived social isolation and anhedonic-like behavior.

Methods: Reward-related functioning was objectively assessed using the Probabilistic Reward Task.

Specific emotion regulation difficulties mediate the relationship between personal distress and depressive symptoms in medical students.

Several studies indicate a link between personal distress and vulnerability to depression. The literature also suggests that personal distress is associated with emotion dysregulation and that emotion dysregulation plays a role in depression. However, which of the various emotion regulation difficulties mediates the relationship between personal distress and depression remains unexplored.

Effects of acute stress on reward processing: A comprehensive meta-analysis of rodent and human studies.

Stressors can initiate a cascade of central and peripheral changes that modulate mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic circuits and, ultimately, behavioral response to rewards. Driven by the absence of conclusive evidence on this topic and the Research Domain Criteria framework, random-effects meta-analyses were adopted to quantify the effects of acute stressors on reward responsiveness, valuation, and learning in rodent and human subjects. In rodents, acute stress reduced reward responsiveness ( = -1.