Publications by authors named "Rotem Dan"

Background: Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) and emotional maltreatment are salient risk factors for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD) in women. However, the type- and timing-specific effects of emotional maltreatment experienced during adolescence on future depressive symptomatology in women with CSA have not been explored. The goal of this study was to fill this gap.

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Perceived control is strongly related to mental health and well-being. Specifically, lack of perceived control has been associated with learned helplessness and stress-related disorders, such as depression and anxiety. However, it is unknown whether brain activation to control and its protective effect against stress can predict changes in quality of life.

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Clinical assessments often fail to discriminate between unipolar and bipolar depression and identify individuals who will develop future (hypo)manic episodes. To address this challenge, we developed a brain-based graph-theoretical predictive model (GPM) to prospectively map symptoms of anhedonia, impulsivity, and (hypo)mania. Individuals seeking treatment for mood disorders (n = 80) underwent an fMRI scan, including (i) resting-state and (ii) a reinforcement-learning (RL) task.

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Alterations in the default mode network (DMN) are associated with aging. We assessed age-dependent changes of DMN interactions and correlations with a battery of neuropsychological tests, to understand the differences of DMN directed connectivity between young and older subjects. Using a novel multivariate analysis method on resting-state functional MRI data from fifty young and thirty-one healthy older subjects, we calculated intra- and inter-DMN 4-nodes directed pathways.

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Introduction: Studies in the sensorimotor system of older versus young individuals have shown alterations in functional connectivity and organization. Our objective was to explore the implications of these differences in terms of local organizations, and to identify processes that correlate with neuropsychological parameters.

Methods: Using a novel multivariate analysis method on resting-state functional MRI data obtained from 50 young and 31 older healthy individuals, we identified directed 4-node functional pathways within the sensorimotor system and examined their correlations with neuropsychological assessments.

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Clinical assessments often fail to discriminate between unipolar and bipolar depression and identify individuals who will develop future (hypo)manic episodes. To address this challenge, we developed a brain-based graph-theoretical predictive model (GPM) to prospectively map symptoms of anhedonia, impulsivity, and (hypo)mania. Individuals seeking treatment for mood disorders (n = 80) underwent an fMRI scan, including (i) resting-state and (ii) a reinforcement-learning (RL) task.

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Background: Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is characterized by affective, cognitive, and physical symptoms, suggesting alterations at the brain network level. Women with PMDD demonstrate aberrant discrimination of facial emotions during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle and altered reactivity to emotional stimuli. However, previous studies assessing emotional task-related brain reactivity using region-of-interest or whole-brain analysis have reported conflicting findings.

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The conceptualization of emotional states as patterns of interactions between large-scale brain networks has recently gained support. Yet, few studies have directly examined the brain's network structure during emotional experiences. Here, we investigated the brain's functional network organization during experiences of sadness, amusement, and neutral states elicited by movies, in addition to a resting-state.

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Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) experience motor and non-motor symptoms, suggesting alterations of the motor and/or limbic system or more probably of their communications. We hypothesized that the communication between the insula (part of the limbic system) and sensorimotor cortex in PD is altered and hemispheric asymmetric. Furthermore, that this asymmetry relates to non-motor symptoms, and specifically, that apathy-related asymmetry is unique to PD.

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Dopamine depletion in the axons of Parkinson's disease (PD) patients precedes depletion in cell bodies thus proposing that macroscopic connectivity can be used to understand disease mechanism. A novel multivariate functional connectivity analysis, based on high order coherence among four fMRI BOLD signals was applied on resting-state fMRI data of controls and PD patients (OFF and ON medication states) and unidirectional multiple-region pathways in the sensorimotor system were identified. Pathways were classified as "preserved" (unaffected by the disease), "damaged" (not observed in patients) and "corrected" (observed in controls and in PD-ON state).

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Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been acknowledged as risk factors for increased mental health complications in adulthood, specifically increasing susceptibility to developing psychopathology upon exposure to trauma. Yet, little is known regarding the impact of mild ACEs on highly functioning population. In this study forty participants were selected from a group of 366 highly selected military parachute trainees using the self-report "childhood trauma questionnaire," and classified into two groups of 20 each, with and without ACEs.

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The female predominance in the prevalence of depression is partially accounted by reactivity to hormonal fluctuations. Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is a reproductive subtype of depression characterized by cyclic emotional and somatic symptoms that recur before menstruation. Despite the growing understanding that most psychiatric disorders arise from dysfunctions in distributed brain circuits, the brain's functional connectome and its network properties of segregation and integration were not investigated in PMDD.

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Emotional and cognitive impairments in Parkinson's disease (PD) are prevalent, hamper interpersonal relations and reduce quality of life. It is however unclear to what extent these domains interplay in PD-related deficits and how they are influenced by dopaminergic availability. This study examined the effect of cognitive impairment and dopaminergic medication on neural and behavioral mechanisms of facial emotion recognition in PD patients.

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Social interactions are essential to our daily life. We tested the hypothesis that social interactions during joint attention (JA) require bidirectional communication, each with a different mechanism. We used a novel multivariate functional connectivity analysis, which enables obtaining directed pathways between four regions at each time-frequency point, with hyper-scanning MRI data of real-time JA interaction.

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A multivariate measure of directed functional connectivity is used with resting-state fMRI data of 40 healthy subjects to identify directed pathways of signal progression in the human visual system. The method utilizes 4-nodes networks of mutual interacted BOLD signals to obtains their temporal hierarchy and functional connectivity. Patterns of signal progression were defined at frequency windows by appealing to a hierarchy based upon phase differences, and their significance was assessed by permutation testing.

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Sex differences in the neural processing of emotion are of special interest considering that mood and anxiety disorders predominant in females. However, these sex-related differences were typically studied without considering the hormonal status of female subjects, although emotion processing in the brain was shown to differ between phases of the menstrual cycle. In this functional MRI study, we demonstrated the influence of the menstrual cycle phase on sex differences in brain activity and functional connectivity during negative and positive emotions, using two different paradigms: emotion perception and emotion experience.

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Depression, anxiety and apathy are distinct neuropsychiatric symptoms that highly overlap in Parkinson's disease (PD). It remains unknown whether each symptom is uniquely associated with a functional network dysfunction. Here, we examined whether individual differences in each neuropsychiatric symptom predict functional connectivity patterns in PD patients while controlling for all other symptoms and motor function.

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We describe an analysis method that characterizes the correlation between coupled time-series functions by their frequencies and phases. It provides a unified framework for simultaneous assessment of frequency and latency of a coupled time-series. The analysis is demonstrated on resting-state functional MRI data of 34 healthy subjects.

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Network analysis is increasingly advancing the field of neuroimaging. Neural networks are generally constructed from pairwise interactions with an assumption of linear relations between them. Here, a high-order statistical framework to calculate directed functional connectivity among multiple regions, using wavelet analysis and spectral coherence has been presented.

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Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) is a severe form of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) reported to affect 3-8 % of women of reproductive age and resulting in marked emotional and occupational impairment. Despite its prevalence, the etiology of PMDD is largely unknown, and patients remain mostly undiagnosed and poorly treated. It has been suggested that PMDD is a manifestation of underlying depressive disorder which is associated with the inability to regulate emotions in an adaptive manner.

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