Aberrant salience relationship with first rank symptoms.

Background: Aberrant salience is the incorrect assignment of salience, significance, or value to different innocuous stimuli that might precede the onset of psychotic symptoms. The present study aimed to perform a preliminary evaluation of potentially different correlations between the Aberrant Salience Inventory (ASI) score and dimensional or categorical diagnostic approaches.

Methods: 168 adult outpatients with a current psychiatric diagnosis were consecutively enrolled.

Immune environment of the brain in schizophrenia and during the psychotic episode: A human post-mortem study.

A causal relationship between immune dysregulation and schizophrenia has been supported by genome-wide association studies and epidemiological evidence. It remains unclear to what extent the brain immune environment is implicated in this hypothesis. We investigated the immunophenotype of microglia and the presence of perivascular macrophages and T lymphocytes in post-mortem brain tissue.

BDNF and Artemin are increased in drug-naïve non-depressed GAD patients: preliminary data.

Objective: While the role of neuronal and glial plasticity are well established in the pathophysiology of mood disorders, the pattern and measures of neuronal and glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factors are unknown in generalized anxiety disorder (GAD). The present study evaluates brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and Artemin (ARTN) plasma levels in GAD patients.

Methods: Fourteen drug-naïve GAD patients without major depression were enrolled and plasmatic levels of BDNF and ARTN mRNA were measured by RT-PCR, and compared to matched healthy controls.