Background: Employment and relationship are crucial for social integration. However, individuals with major psychiatric disorders often face challenges in these domains.
Aims: We investigated employment and relationship status changes among patients across the affective and psychotic spectrum - in comparison with healthy controls, examining whether diagnostic groups or functional levels influence these transitions.
Older Adults with Bipolar Disorder (OABD) represent a heterogeneous group, including those with early and late onset of the disorder. Recent evidence shows both groups have distinct clinical, cognitive, and medical features, tied to different neurobiological profiles. This study explored the link between polygenic risk scores (PRS) for bipolar disorder (PRS-BD), schizophrenia (PRS-SCZ), and major depressive disorder (PRS-MDD) with age of onset in OABD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCourses of SARS-CoV-2 infections are highly variable, ranging from asymptomatic to lethal COVID-19. Though research has shown that host genetic factors contribute to this variability, cohort-based joint analyses of variants from the entire allelic spectrum in individuals with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections are still lacking. Here, we present the results of whole genome sequencing in 1,220 mainly vaccine-naïve individuals with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection, including 827 hospitalized COVID-19 cases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious studies have suggested that choroid plexus (ChP) enlargement occurs in individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD) and is associated with peripheral inflammation. However, it is unclear whether such an enlargement delineates a biologically defined subgroup of SSD. Moreover, it remains elusive how ChP is linked to brain regions associated with peripheral inflammation in SSD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany bipolar disorder (BD) patients are non-responsive to lithium. The mechanisms underlying lithium (non-)responsiveness are largely unknown. By using gene-set enrichment analysis methods, we found that core clock gene-sets are significantly associated with lithium response.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis review article provides insights into the role of genetic diagnostics in adult mental health disorders. The importance of genetic factors in the development of mental illnesses, from rare genetic syndromes to common complex genetic disorders, is described. Current clinical characteristics that may warrant a genetic diagnostic work-up are highlighted, including intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorders and severe psychiatric conditions with specific comorbidities, such as organ malformations or epilepsy.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Optical coherence tomography and electroretinography studies have revealed structural and functional retinal alterations in individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs). However, it remains unclear which specific retinal layers are affected; how the retina, brain, and clinical symptomatology are connected; and how alterations of the visual system are related to genetic disease risk.
Methods: Optical coherence tomography, electroretinography, and brain magnetic resonance imaging were applied to comprehensively investigate the visual system in a cohort of 103 patients with SSDs and 130 healthy control individuals.
Current approaches to the treatment of schizophrenia have mainly focused on the protein-coding part of the genome; in this context, the roles of microRNAs have received less attention. In the present study, we analyze the microRNAome in the blood and postmortem brains of schizophrenia patients, showing that the expression of miR-99b-5p is downregulated in both the prefrontal cortex and blood of patients. Lowering the amount of miR-99b-5p in mice leads to both schizophrenia-like phenotypes and inflammatory processes that are linked to synaptic pruning in microglia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the need to better define in-hospital transmissions, a need that extends to all other common infectious diseases encountered in clinical settings. To evaluate how whole viral genome sequencing can contribute to deciphering nosocomial SARS-CoV-2 transmission 926 SARS-CoV-2 viral genomes from 622 staff members and patients were collected between February 2020 and January 2021 at a university hospital in Munich, Germany, and analysed along with the place of work, duration of hospital stay, and ward transfers. Bioinformatically defined transmission clusters inferred from viral genome sequencing were compared to those inferred from interview-based contact tracing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Healthcare organizations strive to increase physician engagement and decrease attrition. However, little is known about which specific worklife areas may be targeted to improve physician engagement or retention, especially after stressful events such as a COVID19 surge. Our objective was to identify demographic characteristics and worklife areas most associated with increased physician engagement and decreased intent to leave in pediatric faculty.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) is a widely used resource that comprehensively organizes and defines the phenotypic features of human disease, enabling computational inference and supporting genomic and phenotypic analyses through semantic similarity and machine learning algorithms. The HPO has widespread applications in clinical diagnostics and translational research, including genomic diagnostics, gene-disease discovery, and cohort analytics. In recent years, groups around the world have developed translations of the HPO from English to other languages, and the HPO browser has been internationalized, allowing users to view HPO term labels and in many cases synonyms and definitions in ten languages in addition to English.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSupport is a valuable resource for ensuring employee health in the workplace. However, research on health-specific support behavior (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLithium is regarded as the first-line treatment for bipolar disorder (BD), a severe and disabling mental health disorder that affects about 1% of the population worldwide. Nevertheless, lithium is not consistently effective, with only 30% of patients showing a favorable response to treatment. To provide personalized treatment options for bipolar patients, it is essential to identify prediction biomarkers such as polygenic scores.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImmunocompromised individuals are at higher risk of developing protracted and severe COVID-19, and understanding individual disease courses and SARS-CoV-2 immune responses in these individuals is of the utmost importance. For more than two years, we followed an immunocompromised individual with a protracted SARS-CoV-2 infection that was eventually cleared in the absence of a humoral neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 antibody response. By conducting an in-depth examination of this individual's immune response and comparing it to a large cohort of convalescents who spontaneously cleared a SARS-CoV-2 infection, we shed light on the interplay between B- and T-cell immunity and how they interact in clearing SARS-CoV-2 infection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To systematically review the impact of choice architecture interventions (CAI) on the food choice of healthy adolescents in a secondary school setting. Factors potentially contributing to the effectiveness of CAI types and numbers implemented and its long-term success were examined.
Design: PUBMED and Web of Science were systematically searched in October 2021.
Objectives: Preoperative hypoalbuminaemia is associated with adverse outcome, including increased postoperative mortality in cardiovascular surgery, neurosurgery, trauma and orthopaedic surgery. However, much less is known about the association between preoperative serum albumin and clinical outcomes after liver surgery. In this study, we sought to determine whether hypoalbuminaemia before partial hepatectomy is associated with a worse postoperative outcome.
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