Publications by authors named "Vinkers C"
Background: This scoping review focuses on the occurrence of tachyphylaxis, defined as reduced responsiveness upon reinitiating a previously effective medication. This phenomenon is previously documented in antidepressants and mood stabilizers.
Aim: To explore the frequency, treatment strategies, and predictability of tachyphylaxis across all psychotropic medications.
[Discontinuation of psychotropic medication: a critical review of the evidence].
Tijdschr Psychiatr
January 2025
Background: Pharmacotherapy is an effective treatment strategy for psychiatric disorders. Nevertheless, many patients discontinue their medication at some point. Evidence-based practices for patients, clinicians, and policymakers to discontinue psychotropic medication properly are therefore important.
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- The study explores the biological differences linked to PTSD by examining DNA methylation changes in blood, suggesting they could indicate susceptibility or effects of trauma.
- Conducted by the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, the research included nearly 5,100 participants to identify specific genetic markers associated with PTSD.
- Results showed 11 significant CpG sites related to PTSD, with some also showing correlations between blood and brain tissue methylation, highlighting their potential role in understanding PTSD biology.
Introduction: Inflammatory and metabolic processes are linked to depression, but only 25-30% of depressed patients show low-grade inflammation and metabolic dysregulation associated with atypical, energy-related symptoms (AES). Interventions targeting immuno-metabolic dysregulation could benefit depressed patients, but currently no consensus exists how to best select patients with immuno-metabolic dysregulations. Therefore, we investigated which combinations of circulating C-reactive protein (CRP) and AES could identify those depressed individuals with significant immuno-metabolic dysregulation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImportance: Schizophrenia is associated with increased age-related morbidity, mortality, and frailty, which are not entirely explained by behavioral factors. Prior studies using epigenetic clocks have suggested that schizophrenia is associated with accelerated aging, however these studies have primarily used unidimensional clocks that summarize aging as a single "biological age" score.
Objective: This meta-analysis uses multidimensional epigenetic clocks that split aging into multiple scores to analyze biological aging in schizophrenia.
Article Synopsis
- - Narcolepsy type 1 (NT1) is characterized by low hypocretin levels and changes in stress hormone activity, particularly a loss of corticotrophin-releasing hormone (CRH) linked to the body's stress response system.
- - A study involving NT1 patients and healthy controls utilized the Trier Social Stress Test to measure physiological and psychological responses to stress, including changes in ACTH, cortisol, heart rate, and subjective stress levels.
- - Results indicated participants with NT1 felt more stressed, but their hormone and heart rate responses were similar to controls, although men with NT1 had notably lower cortisol levels after stress than their control counterparts, suggesting further exploration is necessary for understanding CRH's role and gender effects
Article Synopsis
- There is a lack of comprehensive information on the environmental effects of psychotropic medications, leading to the proposal of Environmentally Conscious Psychopharmacotherapy (ECP), which aims to balance patient needs with environmental concerns.
- The authors identified actionable steps for reducing the environmental impact of these medications across different sectors, focusing on careful treatment selection, limiting overprescribing, proper medication disposal, and transparent environmental risk reporting.
- They emphasize that many of these ECP practices not only benefit the environment but also improve outcomes for patients and clinicians, while highlighting the need for further research on the environmental impacts of psychotropic medications.
Effective personalized well-being interventions require the ability to predict who will thrive or not, and the understanding of underlying mechanisms. Here, using longitudinal data of a large population cohort (the Netherlands Twin Register, collected 1991-2022), we aim to build machine learning prediction models for adult well-being from the exposome and genome, and identify the most predictive factors ( between 702 and 5874). The specific exposome was captured by parent and self-reports of psychosocial factors from childhood to adulthood, the genome was described by polygenic scores, and the general exposome was captured by linkage of participants' postal codes to objective, registry-based exposures.
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- Patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) often face cognitive impairments due to structural disconnections in the brain, affecting how different regions communicate dynamically for normal cognitive function.* -
- The study analyzed brain imaging data from a cohort of MS patients, categorizing them based on cognitive function and identifying different functional networks involved, such as the visual and default mode networks.* -
- Cognitively impaired patients showed less frequent transitions between brain connectivity states and required more energy to make these transitions, suggesting that their brains struggle to adapt functionally compared to cognitively preserved patients.*
Article Synopsis
- Researchers aimed to create and validate Methylation Risk Scores (MRS) using machine learning to identify individuals at risk for PTSD based on genomic and trauma exposure data.
- The study developed three models: eMRS (which combines trauma exposure and methylation data), MoRS (which relies only on methylation data), and MoRSAE (which adjusts MoRS for trauma exposure).
- The eMRS model showed the best performance with a 92% accuracy, and all models were able to predict post-deployment PTSD significantly, suggesting that including trauma exposure improves risk assessment.
Article Synopsis
- The study investigates the link between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and differences in DNA methylation, a type of gene regulation, in blood samples from individuals diagnosed with PTSD compared to trauma-exposed controls.
- Researchers conducted a large-scale analysis involving over 5,000 participants from various civilian and military studies, using standardized procedures for PTSD assessment and DNA methylation testing.
- The results revealed 11 specific DNA methylation sites associated with PTSD, and found similarities in methylation patterns between blood and brain tissues, suggesting a biological basis for the condition.
Despite the availability of various treatment approaches for patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), some patients do not respond to these therapies, and novel treatment approaches are needed. This study investigated the efficacy of mifepristone, a glucocorticoid receptor antagonist, in treatment-resistant PTSD patients. Three patients with PTSD who were resistant to standard psychological and pharmacological treatments were prescribed mifepristone (600-1,200 mg/day) for 1 week.
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- PTSD genetics have been difficult to study compared to other psychiatric disorders, limiting our biological understanding of the condition.
- A large-scale meta-analysis involving over 1.2 million individuals identified 95 genome-wide significant loci, with 80 being new discoveries related to PTSD.
- Researchers identified 43 potential causal genes linked to neurotransmitter activity, developmental processes, synaptic function, and immune regulation, enhancing our knowledge of the neurobiological systems involved in PTSD.
Pharmacotherapy is an effective treatment modality across psychiatric disorders. Nevertheless, many patients discontinue their medication at some point. Evidence-based guidance for patients, clinicians, and policymakers on rational discontinuation strategies is vital to enable the best, personalized treatment for any given patient.
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- The study investigates how childhood trauma (CT) affects both explicit (reflective) and implicit (associative) self-esteem, and whether this self-esteem influences the link between CT and depression/anxiety.
- In a sample of 1,479 adults, results showed that those with CT had lower explicit self-esteem, while implicit self-esteem was only lower in cases of emotional neglect.
- Explicit self-esteem was found to mediate the relationship between CT and symptoms of depression/anxiety, indicating it could be an important focus for treatment in individuals affected by CT.
Background: Incorporating genomic data into risk prediction has become an increasingly useful approach for rapid identification of individuals most at risk for complex disorders such as PTSD. Our goal was to develop and validate Methylation Risk Scores (MRS) using machine learning to distinguish individuals who have PTSD from those who do not.
Methods: Elastic Net was used to develop three risk score models using a discovery dataset (n = 1226; 314 cases, 912 controls) comprised of 5 diverse cohorts with available blood-derived DNA methylation (DNAm) measured on the Illumina Epic BeadChip.
Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and anxiety disorders are highly comorbid recurrent psychiatric disorders. Reduced dynamic reconfiguration of brain regions across subnetworks may play a critical role underlying these deficits, with indications of normalization after treatment with antidepressants. This study investigated dynamic reconfigurations in controls and individuals with a current MDD and/or anxiety disorder including antidepressant users and non-users in a large sample (N = 207) of adults.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: There is debate about the generalisability of results from randomised clinical trials (RCTs) to real-world settings. Studying outcomes of treatments for schizophrenia can shed light on this issue and inform treatment guidelines. We therefore compared the efficacy and effectiveness of antipsychotics for relapse prevention in schizophrenia and estimated overall treatment effects using all available RCT and real-world evidence.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFContext: Synthetic glucocorticoids are widely used to treat patients with a broad range of diseases. While efficacious, glucocorticoids can be accompanied by neuropsychiatric adverse effects.
Objective: This systematic review and meta-analysis assesses and quantifies the proportion of different neuropsychiatric adverse effects in patients using synthetic glucocorticoids.
Background: Childhood maltreatment (CM) is a strong risk factor for psychiatric disorders but serves in its current definitions as an umbrella for various fundamentally different childhood experiences. As first step toward a more refined analysis of the impact of CM, our objective is to revisit the relation of abuse and neglect, major subtypes of CM, with symptoms across disorders.
Methods: Three longitudinal studies of major depressive disorder (MDD, = 1240), bipolar disorder (BD, = 1339), and schizophrenia (SCZ, = 577), each including controls ( = 881), were analyzed.
Article Synopsis
- Childhood trauma (CT) is linked to metabolic syndrome (MetS), with this study examining its long-term impact over nine years on metabolic health indicators.
- The study involved 2,958 participants who were assessed multiple times using retrospective interviews to evaluate childhood experiences and various metabolic health components.
- Findings revealed that individuals with CT had poorer metabolic outcomes, including increased waist circumference and glucose levels, and lower HDL cholesterol, indicating a higher risk for cardiometabolic diseases, necessitating early monitoring and interventions.
Background: Childhood trauma (CT) may increase vulnerability to psychopathology through affective dysregulation (greater variability, autocorrelation, and instability of emotional symptoms). However, CT associations with dynamic affect fluctuations while considering differences in mean affect levels across CT status have been understudied.
Methods: 346 adults (age = 49.