Person-level contributions of bipolar polygenic risk score to the prediction of new-onset bipolar disorder in at-risk offspring.

Background: Previous work indicates that polygenic risk scores (PRS) for bipolar disorder (BD) are elevated in adults and youth with BD, but whether BD-PRS can inform person-level diagnostic prediction is unknown. Here, we test whether BD-PRS improves performance of a previously published risk calculator (RC) for BD.

Methods: 156 parents with BD-I/II and their offspring ages 6-18 were recruited and evaluated with standardized diagnostic assessments every two years for >12 years.

Lifetime depression and mania/hypomania risk predicted by neural markers in three independent young adult samples during working memory and emotional regulation.

Objective markers of pathophysiological processes underlying lifetime depression and mania/hypomania risk can provide biologically informed targets for novel interventions to help prevent the onset of affective disorders in individuals with subsyndromal symptoms. Greater activity within and functional connectivity (FC) between the central executive network (CEN), supporting emotional regulation (ER) subcomponent processes such as working memory (WM), the default mode network (DMN), supporting self-related information processing, and the salience network (SN), is thought to interfere with cognitive functioning and predispose to depressive disorders. Using an emotional n-back paradigm designed to examine WM and ER capacity, we examined in young adults: (1) relationships among activity and FC in these networks and lifetime depression and mania/hypomania risk; (2) the extent to which these relationships were specific to lifetime depression risk versus lifetime mania/hypomania risk; (3) whether findings in a first, Discovery sample n = 101, 63 female, age = 23.

Long-wavelength traveling waves of vasomotion modulate the perfusion of cortex.

Brain arterioles are active, multicellular complexes whose diameters oscillate at ∼ 0.1 Hz. We assess the physiological impact and spatiotemporal dynamics of vaso-oscillations in the awake mouse.

Identifying tripartite relationship among cortical thickness, neuroticism, and mood and anxiety disorders.

The number of young adults seeking help for emotional distress, subsyndromal-syndromal mood/anxiety symptoms, including those associated with neuroticism, is rising and can be an early manifestation of mood/anxiety disorders. Identification of gray matter (GM) thickness alterations and their relationship with neuroticism and mood/anxiety symptoms can aid in earlier diagnosis and prevention of risk for future mood and anxiety disorders. In a transdiagnostic sample of young adults (n = 252;177 females; age 21.

Specific Patterns of Endogenous Functional Connectivity Are Associated With Harm Avoidance in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Background: Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) show persistent avoidance behaviors, often in the absence of actual threat. Quality-of-life costs and heterogeneity support the need for novel brain-behavior intervention targets. Informed by mechanistic and anatomical studies of persistent avoidance in rodents and nonhuman primates, our goal was to test whether connections within a hypothesized persistent avoidance-related network predicted OCD-related harm avoidance (HA), a trait measure of persistent avoidance.

Diagnostically distinct resting state fMRI energy distributions: A subject-specific maximum entropy modeling study.

Objective: Existing neuroimaging studies of psychotic and mood disorders have reported brain activation differences (first-order properties) and altered pairwise correlation-based functional connectivity (second-order properties). However, both approaches have certain limitations that can be overcome by integrating them in a pairwise maximum entropy model (MEM) that better represents a comprehensive picture of fMRI signal patterns and provides a system-wide summary measure called energy. This study examines the applicability of individual-level MEM for psychiatry and identifies image-derived model coefficients related to model parameters.

Feasibility and acceptability of the Indian Autism Screening Questionnaire in clinical and community settings.

We developed and tested the Indian Autism Screening Questionnaire (IASQ), which was reported to be reliable and valid as compared to the Indian Scale for Assessment of Autism (ISAA) and the Childhood Autism Rating Scale -2 (CARS2). The present study describes the feasibility, acceptability, sociodemographic and developmental details of IASQ study participants in 5 settings- a psychiatry outpatients' clinic (n = 145), a specialised paediatric clinic (n = 24), a speciality disability centre (n = 174), a primary school (n = 41) and a government housing colony (n = 255). The IASQ could be easily administered and understood.

Multipronged investigation of morphometry and connectivity of hippocampal network in relation to risk for psychosis using ultrahigh field MRI.

Hippocampal abnormalities are associated with psychosis-risk states. Given the complexity of hippocampal anatomy, we conducted a multipronged examination of morphometry of regions connected with hippocampus, and structural covariance network (SCN) and diffusion-weighted circuitry among 27 familial high-risk (FHR) individuals who were past the highest risk for conversion to psychoses and 41 healthy controls using ultrahigh-field high-resolution 7 Tesla (7T) structural and diffusion MRI data. We obtained fractional anisotropy and diffusion streams of white matter connections and examined correspondence of diffusion streams with SCN edges.

Threshold Selection for Brain Connectomes.

Structural and functional brain connectomes represent macroscale data collected through techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Connectomes may contain noise that contributes to false-positive edges, thereby obscuring structure-function relationships and data interpretation. Thresholding procedures can be applied to reduce network density by removing low-signal edges, but there is limited consensus on appropriate selection of thresholds.

Adolescents' Hormonal Responses to Social Stress and Associations with Adolescent Social Anxiety and Maternal Comfort: A Preliminary Study.

Both social support and social stress can impact adolescent physiology including hormonal responses during the sensitive transition to adolescence. Social support from parents continues to play an important role in socioemotional development during adolescence. Sources of social support and stress may be particularly impactful for adolescents with social anxiety symptoms.

Mother-child neural synchronization is time linked to mother-child positive affective state matching.

In the first years of life, in which self-regulation occurs via external means, mother-child synchronization of positive affect (PA) facilitates regulation of child homeostatic systems. Mother-child affective synchrony may contribute to mother-child synchronization of neural systems, but limited research has explored this possibility. Participants were 41 healthy mother-child dyads (56% girls; Mage = 24.

Early indicators of bipolar risk in preschool offspring of parents with bipolar disorder.

Background: Offspring of parents with bipolar disorder (BD-I/II) are at increased risk to develop the disorder. Previous work indicates that bipolar spectrum disorder (BPSD) is often preceded by mood/anxiety symptoms. In school-age offspring of parents with BD, we previously built a risk calculator to predict BPSD onset, which generates person-level risk scores.

The Role of Puberty and Sex on Brain Structure in Adolescents With Anxiety Following Concussion.

Background: Adolescence represents a window of vulnerability for developing psychological symptoms following concussion, especially in girls. Concussion-related lesions in emotion regulation circuits may help explain these symptoms. However, the contribution of sex and pubertal maturation remains unclear.

Altered patterns of central executive, default mode and salience network activity and connectivity are associated with current and future depression risk in two independent young adult samples.

Neural markers of pathophysiological processes underlying the dimension of subsyndromal-syndromal-level depression severity can provide objective, biologically informed targets for novel interventions to help prevent the onset of depressive and other affective disorders in individuals with subsyndromal symptoms, and prevent worsening symptom severity in those with these disorders. Greater functional connectivity (FC) among the central executive network (CEN), supporting emotional regulation (ER) subcomponent processes such as working memory (WM), the default mode network (DMN), supporting self-related information processing, and the salience network (SN), is thought to interfere with cognitive functioning and predispose to depressive disorders. We examined in young adults (1) relationships among activity and FC in these networks and current depression severity, using a paradigm designed to examine WM and ER capacity in n = 90, age = 21.

Working memory updating in individuals with bipolar and unipolar depression: fMRI study.

Understanding neurobiological characteristics of cognitive dysfunction in distinct psychiatric disorders remains challenging. In this secondary data analysis, we examined neurobiological differences in brain response during working memory updating among individuals with bipolar disorder (BD), those with unipolar depression (UD), and healthy controls (HC). Individuals between 18-45 years of age with BD (n = 100), UD (n = 109), and HC (n = 172) were scanned using fMRI while performing 0-back (easy) and 2-back (difficult) tasks with letters as the stimuli and happy, fearful, or neutral faces as distractors.

Comparing the Indian Autism Screening Questionnaire (IASQ) and the Indian Scale for Assessment of Autism (ISAA) with the Childhood Autism Rating Scale-Second Edition (CARS2) in Indian settings.

Unlabelled: The Indian Autism Screening Questionnaire (IASQ), derived from the Indian Scale for Assessment of Autism ISAA (the mandated tool for autism in India), is an autism screening instrument for use in the general population by minimally trained workers. While ISAA has 40 items with four anchor points, the IASQ is a 10-item questionnaire with yes/no answers. It was initially validated using the ISAA.

The role of sleep quality on white matter integrity and concussion symptom severity in adolescents.

Background: Sleep problems are common after concussion; yet, to date, no study has evaluated the relationship between sleep, white matter integrity, and post-concussion symptoms in adolescents. Using self-reported quality of sleep measures within the first 10 days of injury, we aimed to determine if quality of sleep exerts a main effect on white matter integrity in major tracts, as measured by diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI), and further examine whether this effect can help explain the variance in post-concussion symptom severity in 12- to 17.9-year-old adolescents.

White Matter Correlates of Early-Onset Bipolar Illness and Predictors of One-Year Recurrence of Depression in Adults with Bipolar Disorder.

Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) studies have reported abnormalities in emotion regulation circuits in BD; however, no study has examined the contribution of previous illness on these mechanisms. Using global probabilistic tractography, we aimed to identify neural correlates of previous BD illness and the extent to which these can help predict one-year recurrence of depressive episodes. dMRI data were collected in 70 adults with early-onset BD who were clinically followed for up to 18 years and 39 healthy controls.

White matter predictors of worsening of subthreshold hypomania severity in non-bipolar young adults parallel abnormalities in individuals with bipolar disorder.

Background: Identifying neural predictors of worsening subthreshold hypomania severity can help identify risk of progression to BD. While diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI) studies reported white matter microstructural abnormalities in tracts supporting emotional regulation in individuals with BD, it remains unknown whether similar patterns of white matter microstructure predict worsening of subthreshold hypomania severity in non-BD individuals.

Methods: dMRI data were collected in: 81 non-BD individuals recruited across a range of subthreshold depression and hypomania, and followed for six months; and independent samples of 75 BD and 58 healthy individuals.

Care team and practice-level implementation strategies to optimize pediatric collaborative care: study protocol for a cluster-randomized hybrid type III trial.

Background: Implementation facilitation is an effective strategy to support the implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs), but our understanding of multilevel strategies and the mechanisms of change within the "black box" of implementation facilitation is limited. This implementation trial seeks to disentangle and evaluate the effects of facilitation strategies that separately target the care team and leadership levels on implementation of a collaborative care model in pediatric primary care. Strategies targeting the provider care team (TEAM) should engage team-level mechanisms, and strategies targeting leaders (LEAD) should engage organizational mechanisms.

Higher socioeconomic status and less parental psychopathology improve prognosis in youths with bipolar disorder.

Background: To identify prospectively ascertained individual and family factors that are associated with improvement in Bipolar Disorder (BD) among youths who initially presented with poor course.

Methods: 82 youths with BD with persistent poor mood symptomatology ("predominantly ill course") were compared to 70 youths with BD who at intake had poor course, but showed improvement during the follow-up ("ill with improving course"), (ages 12.3 ± 3.

Protocol for a machine learning algorithm predicting depressive disorders using the T1w/T2w ratio.

The T1w/T2w ratio is a novel magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) measure that is thought to be sensitive to cortical myelin. Using this novel measure requires developing novel pipelines for the data quality assurance, data analysis, and validation of the findings in order to apply the T1w/T2w ratio for classification of disorders associated with the changes in the myelin levels. In this article, we provide a detailed description of such a pipeline as well as the reference to the scripts used in our recent report that applied the T1w/T2w ratio and machine learning to classify individuals with depressive disorders from healthy controls.