Introduction: US child firearm fatality rates have risen since 2013. Child Access Prevention (CAP) laws aimed at reducing minors' access to firearms have existed since the 1980s. However, specific requirements for safe storage of firearms, standards of negligence, and penalties for offenders vary significantly by state, yielding a heterogeneous body of CAP legislation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: This scoping review aimed to characterise near-death experiences in the setting of cardiac arrest, a phenomenon that is poorly understood and may have clinical consequences.
Method: PubMed/MEDLINE was searched to 23 July 2023 for prospective studies describing near-death experiences in cardiac arrest. PRISMA-ScR guidelines were adhered to.
Major depressive disorder represents a serious public health challenge worldwide; however, the underlying cellular and molecular mechanisms are mostly unknown. Here, we profile the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of female cynomolgus macaques with social stress-associated depressive-like behaviors using single-nucleus RNA-sequencing and spatial transcriptomics. We find gene expression changes associated with depressive-like behaviors mostly in microglia, and we report a pro-inflammatory microglia subpopulation enriched in the depressive-like condition.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Depression is the leading cause of global disability and can develop following the change in body image and functional capacity associated with stoma surgery. However, reported prevalence across the literature is unknown. Accordingly, we performed a systematic review and meta-analysis aiming to characterise depressive symptoms after stoma surgery and potential predictive factors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClinical and animal studies have shown that gut microbiome disturbances can affect neural function and behaviors via the microbiota-gut-brain axis, and may be implicated in the pathogenesis of several brain diseases. However, exactly how the gut microbiome modulates nervous system activity remains obscure. Here, using a single-cell nucleus sequencing approach, we sought to characterize the cell type-specific transcriptomic changes in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus derived from germ-free (GF), specific pathogen free, and colonized-GF mice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Affect Disord
November 2022
Objective: This study aimed to explore the gender specificity of gut microbiome in patients with unipolar and bipolar depression disorder by analyzing the data of gut microbiome in this two mental disorders and healthy people.
Methods: A case-control study using 16S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing from fecal samples of MDD (male set, n = 43; female set, n = 77) and BD (male set, n = 82; female set, n = 83) compared with HCs (male set, n = 71; female set, n = 100) was conducted. Linear discriminant analysis was used to identify microbial characteristics.
Machine learning may assist in medical student evaluation. This study involved scoring short answer questions administered at three centres. Bidirectional encoder representations from transformers were particularly effective for professionalism question scoring (accuracy ranging from 41.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMajor depressive disorder (MDD) is a debilitating mental disease, but its underlying molecular mechanisms remain obscure. Our previously established model of naturally occurring depression-like (DL) behaviors in Macaca fascicularis, which is characterized by microbiota-gut-brain (MGB) axis disturbances, can be used to interrogate how a disturbed gut ecosystem may impact the molecular pathology of MDD. Here, gut metagenomics were used to characterize how gut virus and bacterial species, and associated metabolites, change in depression-like monkey model.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo utilise effectively tools that employ machine learning (ML) in clinical practice medical students and doctors will require a degree of understanding of ML models. To evaluate current levels of understanding, a formative examination and survey was conducted across three centres in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Of the 245 individuals who participated in the study (response rate = 45.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGut microbiome disturbances have been implicated in major depressive disorder (MDD). However, little is known about how the gut virome, microbiome, and fecal metabolome change, and how they interact in MDD. Here, using whole-genome shotgun metagenomic and untargeted metabolomic methods, we identified 3 bacteriophages, 47 bacterial species, and 50 fecal metabolites showing notable differences in abundance between MDD patients and healthy controls (HCs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVariations in anxiety-related behavior are associated with individual allostatic set-points in chronically stressed rats. Actively offensive rats with the externalizing indicators of sniffling and climbing the stimulus and material tearing during 10 days of predator scent stress had reduced plasma corticosterone, increased striatal glutamate metabolites, and increased adrenal 11-dehydrocorticosterone content compared to passively defensive rats with the internalizing indicators of freezing and grooming, as well as to controls without any behavioral changes. These findings suggest that rats that display active offensive activity in response to stress develop anxiety associated with decreased allostatic set-points and increased resistance to stress.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmerging research demonstrates that microbiota-gut-brain (MGB) axis changes are associated with depression onset, but the mechanisms underlying this observation remain largely unknown. The gut microbiome of nonhuman primates is highly similar to that of humans, and some subordinate monkeys naturally display depressive-like behaviors, making them an ideal model for studying these phenomena. Here, we characterized microbial composition and function, and gut-brain metabolic signatures, in female cynomolgus macaque (Macaca fascicularis) displaying naturally occurring depressive-like behaviors.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Depression and obesity are significant global health concerns that commonly occur together. An integrated group cognitive behavioural therapy program was therefore developed to simultaneously address comorbid depression and obesity.
Methods: Twenty-four participants (63% women, mean age 46 years) who screened positively for depression with a body mass index ≥25 were recruited from a self-referred general population sample.
Discriminating depressive episodes of bipolar disorder (BD) from major depressive disorder (MDD) is a major clinical challenge. Recently, gut microbiome alterations are implicated in these two mood disorders; however, little is known about the shared and distinct microbial characteristics in MDD versus BD. Here, using 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene sequencing, the microbial compositions of 165 subjects with MDD are compared with 217 BD, and 217 healthy controls (HCs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMyasthenia gravis (MG) is a devastating acquired autoimmune disease. Emerging evidence indicates that the gut microbiome plays a key role in maintaining immune system homeostasis. This work reports that MG is characterized by decreased α-phylogenetic diversity, and significantly disturbed gut microbiome and fecal metabolome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: With the high and rising total cost of medical school, medical student debt is an increasing concern for medical students and graduates, with significant potential to impact the well-being of physicians and their patients. We hypothesised that medical student debt levels would be negatively correlated with mental health and academic performance, and would influence career direction (ie, medical specialty choice).
Design: We performed a systematic literature review to identify articles that assessed associations between medical student mental health, academic performance, specialty choice and debt.
The concepts of allostatic load and overload, i. e., a dramatic increase in the allostatic load that predisposes to disease, have been extensively described in the literature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchizophrenia (SCZ) is a devastating mental disorder with poorly defined underlying molecular mechanisms. The gut microbiome can modulate brain function and behaviors through the microbiota-gut-brain axis. Here, we found that unmedicated and medicated patients with SCZ had a decreased microbiome α-diversity index and marked disturbances of gut microbial composition versus healthy controls (HCs).
View Article and Find Full Text PDF