Publications by authors named "Pedro Mario Pan"

Background: Prior studies suggest that childhood maltreatment is associated with altered hippocampal volume. However, longitudinal studies are currently scarce, making it difficult to determine how alterations in hippocampal volume evolve over time. The current study examined the relationship between childhood maltreatment and hippocampal volumetric development across childhood and adolescence in a community sample.

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Importance: Tablet use continues to increase in preschool-aged children. The use of mobile devices has been linked to child emotional dysregulation. However, few studies have been able to show a clear direction of association between child tablet use and the development of self-regulation skills.

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Epigenetic processes, such as DNA methylation, show potential as biological markers and mechanisms underlying gene-environment interplay in the prediction of mental health and other brain-based phenotypes. However, little is known about how peripheral epigenetic patterns relate to individual differences in the brain itself. An increasingly popular approach to address this is by combining epigenetic and neuroimaging data; yet, research in this area is almost entirely comprised of cross-sectional studies in adults.

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Many countries implement a double-shift schooling system, offering morning or afternoon shifts, driven by diverse factors. Young people with ADHD may face educational problems attending morning shifts compared to afternoon shifts. To investigate this, we used data from a Brazilian school-based cohort (n = 2.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explores the idea that shared environmental factors during pregnancy and infancy could contribute to the occurrence of multiple mental disorders in children.
  • Researchers analyzed data from 2,231 children aged 6-14 and their parents to investigate how these early influences correlate with different types of psychiatric disorders.
  • Findings suggest that common risk factors, such as maternal smoking and education level, can influence a general susceptibility to mental health issues while also affecting specific types of symptoms like fear, distress, and external behaviors.
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Background: Semi-structured diagnostic interviews and symptom checklists present similar internal reliability. We aim to investigate whether they differ in predicting poor life outcomes in the transition from childhood to young adulthood.

Methods: For this longitudinal study, we used data from the Brazilian High Risk Cohort Study for Childhood Mental Health Conditions.

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Breastfeeding has been associated with several short- and long-term health benefits, including positive cognitive and behavioral outcomes. However, the impact of breastfeeding on structural brain development over time remains unclear. We aimed to assess the association between breastfeeding duration in childhood and the developmental trajectory of overall cortical thickness, cortical area, and total intracranial volume during the transition from childhood to early adulthood.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to evaluate how sociodemographic, clinical, and biological factors affect the long-term cognitive outcomes in patients who survived moderate to severe COVID-19.
  • Researchers assessed 710 adults about 6 to 11 months post-hospital discharge, using a thorough cognitive battery and various evaluations, ultimately looking for links between cognitive impairment and several health markers.
  • Results showed that while a significant number of participants reported cognitive decline, sociodemographic factors were more closely associated with cognitive performance than clinical and inflammatory factors, suggesting these health markers may not be as influential in long-term cognitive deficits after COVID-19.
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Recently, several studies have investigated the neurodevelopment of psychiatric disorders using brain data acquired via structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI). These analyses have shown the potential of sMRI data to provide a relatively precise characterization of brain structural biomarkers. Despite these advances, a relatively unexplored question is how reliable and consistent a model is when assessing subjects from other independent datasets.

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Gene-environment interactions (GxE) have been increasingly explored in psychiatry but with low replication rates. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a suitable candidate for studying GxE due to its high heritability and well-defined environmental risk factors. Here, we explored GxE using polygenic risk score (PRS) to represent the genetic liability to ADHD (ADHD-PRS) and environmental risk score (ERS) to represent the combined effects of environmental risk factors.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study examines how different item harmonization strategies affect data aggregation in mental health research, focusing on the influence on measurement precision using target and proxy questionnaires.
  • - Using data from the Brazilian High-Risk Study for Mental Conditions and the Healthy Brain Network, researchers tested six harmonization strategies, finding that expert-based semantic item harmonization yielded the best results, ensuring scalar invariance in models.
  • - The expert-based harmonization significantly improved specific factor correlations within bifactor models, demonstrating that particular item harmonization methods are crucial for understanding relationships between measures, even though they had minimal impact on broader factor models in this context.
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Aim: School teachers face the paradox of being in a privileged position to act in youth mental health prevention, but in a vulnerable position for not receiving adequate training and personal support. Digital interventions can provide unexpensive tools and narrow this gap in a large scale without major structural changes. We aimed to synthesize the evidence for digital mental health interventions for school teachers.

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Objective: To provide practical norms for measuring depressive symptoms using the Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9) in Brazil using a state-of-art psychometrics analysis.

Methods: We used a large and representative Brazilian dataset from the 'Pesquisa Nacional de Saúde - 2019'(PNS-2019), which includes 90,846 Brazilian citizens. First, to assess the scale structure, we assessed the unidimensional model using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

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Neuroimaging studies suggest that brain development mechanisms might explain at least some behavioural and cognitive attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms. However, the putative mechanisms by which genetic susceptibility factors influence clinical features via alterations of brain development remain largely unknown. Here, we set out to integrate genomics and connectomics tools by investigating the associations between an ADHD polygenic risk score (ADHD-PRS) and functional segregation of large-scale brain networks.

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Article Synopsis
  • Extracellular vesicles (EVs) play a key role in biological processes like cell communication and contain microRNAs (miRNAs) linked to mental health disorders.* -
  • The study analyzed miRNA expression in serum EVs from 116 adolescents over two time points to compare those with Major Depressive Disorder, Anxiety disorders, and ADHD to those without psychiatric diagnoses.* -
  • While the longitudinal analysis showed no significant results, the cross-sectional findings indicated specific miRNA changes associated with ADHD, MDD, and ANX, highlighting their potential role in mental health. *
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Objectives: Little is known about the relationship between depression in mothers and problematic gaming in their children. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the potential role of mothers' depression in childhood as a risk factor for problematic gaming in their offspring in late adolescence/young adulthood.

Methods: We assessed data from 1557 participants on three waves (T0 collected in 2010/2011, T1 in 2013/2014, and T2 in 2018/2019) of a large Brazilian school-based cohort.

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Aims: Mental health problems early in life can negatively impact educational attainment, which in turn have negative long-term effects on health, social and economic opportunities. Our aims were to: (i) estimate the impacts of different types of psychiatric conditions on educational outcomes and (ii) to estimate the proportion of adverse educational outcomes which can be attributed to psychiatric conditions.

Methods: Participants ( = 2511) were from a school-based community cohort of Brazilian children and adolescents aged 6-14 years enriched for high family risk of psychiatric conditions.

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Background: The high level of care needs for adolescents with mental health conditions represents a challenge to the public sector, especially in low and middle-income countries. We estimated the costs to the public purse of health, education, criminal justice and social care service use associated with psychiatric conditions among adolescents in Brazil; and examined whether the trajectory of psychopathology and its impact on daily life, and parental stigma towards mental illness, was associated with service utilisation and costs.

Methods: Data on reported service use among adolescents from a prospective community cohort (n = 1,400) were combined with Brazilian unit costs.

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Crime is a major public problem in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and its preventive measures could have great social impact. The extent to which multiple modifiable risk factors among children and families influence juvenile criminal conviction in an LMIC remains unexplored; however, it is necessary to identify prevention targets. This study examined the association between 22 modifiable individual and family exposures assessed in childhood (5-14 years, n = 2511) and criminal conviction at a 7-year follow-up (13-21 years, n = 1905, 76% retention rate) in a cohort of young people in Brazil.

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The neurobiological factors associated with the emergence of major depressive disorder (MDD) in adolescence are still unclear. Previous cross-sectional studies have documented aberrant connectivity in resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) networks. However, whether these findings precede MDD onset has not been established.

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Background: Young people can receive mental health care from many sources, from formal and informal sectors. Caregiver characteristics/experiences/beliefs may influence whether young people get help and the type of care or support used by their child. We investigate facilitators/barriers to receiving formal and/or informal care, particularly those related to the caregiver's profile.

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Most early children's experiences will occur in a family context; therefore, the quality of this environment is critical for development outcomes. Not many studies have assessed the correlations between brain functional connectivity (FC) in important areas such as the default mode network (DMN) and the quality of parent-child relationships in school-age children and early adolescence. The quality of family relationships and maternal behavior have been suggested to modulate DMN FC once they act as external regulators of children's affect and behavior.

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Objective: Research in adolescent depression has found aberrant intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) among the ventral striatum (VS) and several brain regions implicated in reward processing. The present study probes this question by taking advantage of the availability of data from a large youth cohort, the IMAGEN Consortium.

Methods: iFC data from 303 adolescents (48% of them female) were used to examine associations of VS connectivity at baseline (at age 14) with depressive disorders at baseline and at 2-year (N=250) and 4-year (N=219) follow-ups.

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Objective: The present study aims to investigate the occurrence of psychiatric and cognitive impairments in a cohort of survivors of moderate or severe forms of COVID-19.

Method: 425 adults were assessed 6 to 9 months after hospital discharge with a structured psychiatric interview, psychometric tests and a cognitive battery. A large, multidisciplinary, set of clinical data depicting the acute phase of the disease, along with relevant psychosocial variables, were used to predict psychiatric and cognitive outcomes using the 'Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator' (LASSO) method.

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