Nationwide trends in diagnosed sedative, hypnotic or anxiolytic use disorders in adolescents and young adults enrolled in Medicaid: 2001-2019.

Background And Aim: Sedative, hypnotic or anxiolytic use disorders (SHA-UD) are defined by significant impairment or distress caused by recurrent sedative, hypnotic or anxiolytic use. This study aimed to measure trends in the prevalence of SHA-UD diagnoses in adolescent and young adult US Medicaid enrollees from 2001 to 2019.

Design: Annual, cross-sectional study, 2001-2019.

Can a brief guided nature walk reduce distress and improve resilience, mindful attention, and sleep quality? Evidence from a pilot study with two-week follow-up.

Despite trends of deteriorating mental health globally, help-seeking remains suboptimal. Identifying less stigmatising, low-cost, and scalable approaches to mental health care is critical. We investigated the acceptability and psychological benefits of a 30-minute guided nature walk programme in an accessible country park in Hong Kong among 100 community members.

The left amygdala is genetically sexually-dimorphic: multi-omics analysis of structural MRI volumes.

Brain anatomy plays a key role in complex behaviors and mental disorders that are sexually divergent. While our understanding of the sex differences in the brain anatomy remains relatively limited, particularly of the underlying genetic and molecular mechanisms that contribute to these differences. We performed the largest study of sex differences in brain volumes (N = 33,208) by examining sex differences both in the raw brain volumes and after controlling the whole brain volumes.

Microglia modulate the cerebrovascular reactivity through ectonucleotidase CD39.

Microglia and the border-associated macrophages contribute to the modulation of cerebral blood flow, but the mechanisms have remained uncertain. Here, we show that microglia regulate the cerebral blood flow baseline and the responses to whisker stimulation or intra-cisternal magna injection of adenosine triphosphate, but not intra-cisternal magna injection of adenosine in mice model. Notably, microglia repopulation corrects these cerebral blood flow anomalies.

Towards a characterization of human spatial exploration behavior.

Spatial exploration is a complex behavior that can be used to gain information about developmental processes, personality traits, or mental disorders. Typically, this is done by analyzing movement throughout an unknown environment. However, in human research, until now there has been no overview on how to analyze movement trajectories with regard to exploration.

Endocannabinoid contributions to the perception of socially relevant, affective touch in humans.

Social relationships are central to well-being. A subgroup of afferent nerve fibers, C-tactile (CT) afferents, are primed to respond to affective, socially relevant touch and may mitigate the effects of stress. The endocannabinoid ligand anandamide (AEA) modulates both social reward and stress.

A network analysis of postpartum depression and mother-to-infant bonding shows common and unique symptom-level connections across three postpartum periods.

Postpartum depression and mother-to-infant bonding difficulties (MIBD), two issues crucial to maternal and infant mental health, often coexist and affect each other. Our study aims to dissect their complex relationship through a graphical LASSO network analysis of individual symptoms in 5594 Japanese postpartum women, whose geographical distribution was nationally representative. We identified 'fear', 'enjoyment', 'overwhelm', and 'insomnia' as common bridge symptoms linking postpartum depression and MIBD across three distinct postpartum periods.

Practice Elements Used in Child Mass Trauma Interventions: A Systematic Review.

Purpose Of Review: The goals of this analysis were to identify practice elements frequently used in child mass trauma interventions and to determine if these elements differed across interventions with respect to type of event addressed.

Recent Findings: The most frequent elements used were psychoeducation for the child, affect modulation, relaxation, cognitive techniques, exposure, support networking, and narrative. The most frequently used elements were similar for political violence and natural disaster interventions but differed for COVID-19 interventions.

Caregiver report of infant behavior associated with autism likelihood in first year of life.

Background: Identification of prodromal indicators of autism in infancy has the potential to identify behaviors relevant to early autism screening.

Methods: We report on data from a prospective general population birth cohort with maternal reported measures at 9 and 12 months: the Survey of Well-Being of Young Children (SWYC; general developmental surveillance) and the First Year Inventory-Lite v3.1b (FYI-Lite; autism specific parent report research tool).

Self-reports map the landscape of task states derived from brain imaging.

Psychological states influence our happiness and productivity; however, estimates of their impact have historically been assumed to be limited by the accuracy with which introspection can quantify them. Over the last two decades, studies have shown that introspective descriptions of psychological states correlate with objective indicators of cognition, including task performance and metrics of brain function, using techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Such evidence suggests it may be possible to quantify the mapping between self-reports of experience and objective representations of those states (e.

Genomics yields biological and phenotypic insights into bipolar disorder.

Bipolar disorder is a leading contributor to the global burden of disease. Despite high heritability (60-80%), the majority of the underlying genetic determinants remain unknown. We analysed data from participants of European, East Asian, African American and Latino ancestries (n = 158,036 cases with bipolar disorder, 2.

Experience-dependent dopamine modulation of male aggression.

Numerous studies support the role of dopamine in modulating aggression, but the exact neural mechanisms remain elusive. Here we show that dopaminergic cells in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) can bidirectionally modulate aggression in male mice in an experience-dependent manner. Although VTA dopaminergic cells strongly influence aggression in novice aggressors, they become ineffective in expert aggressors.

Resolving native GABA receptor structures from the human brain.

Type A GABA (γ-aminobutyric acid) receptors (GABA receptors) mediate most fast inhibitory signalling in the brain and are targets for drugs that treat epilepsy, anxiety, depression and insomnia and for anaesthetics. These receptors comprise a complex array of 19 related subunits, which form pentameric ligand-gated ion channels. The composition and structure of native GABA receptors in the human brain have been inferred from subunit localization in tissue, functional measurements and structural analysis from recombinant expression and in mice.

Transgender History, Part I: An Anthropology of Gender-Nonconformity Across Ages and Cultures.

Transgender experiences have been attested since the dawn of civilization. Long before gender was reinterpreted as socially constructed and non-binary by 20th-century Western scholarship, concepts such as not belonging to the gender assigned at birth, transitioning, and being "neither a man nor a woman" integrated the belief systems and practices of various societies worldwide. This review examines anthropological and historical records of trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming behavior spanning six continents and five millennia.

An Exploratory Investigation of Heritage and Educational Language Exposures as Factors in Medical Student Spanish Language Proficiency.

Background: Prior to enrolling in medical Spanish courses, students typically acquire their Spanish skills either through formal second language education only (L2 learners) or by being exposed to Spanish during childhood at home (heritage learners).

Objective: To categorize the language exposures of medical students who participated in a medical Spanish course and explore the associations of exposures with their medical language proficiency score on the Physician Oral Language Observation Matrix (POLOM).

Setting And Participants: Forty-one fourth-year medical students (2021-2022) self-reported demographics and prior language exposures and participated in videorecorded POLOM-rated Spanish standardized patient encounters.

Validating the RISE Communication Play Protocol as a Diagnostic Tool for Autism in Early Childhood: A Pilot Study.

There are few validated remote tools that can be used to assess for autism and to capture subtle changes in children's social communication over time. Recently, user-centered design principles were applied to develop a parent-mediated remote assessment, the Reciprocal Imitation and Social Engagement Child Play Protocol (RISE CPP) to enable researchers to capture micro-level behaviors in children, while promoting useability for researchers and families, reducing caregiver burden, and maintaining reliability. This paper describes a pilot study to validate the RISE CPP as a tool to support clinician diagnosis of autism.

Clinical and genetic spectrum of patients with IRF2BPL syndrome.

Interferon regulatory factor 2 binding protein-like (IRF2BPL) is a single-exon gene that is ubiquitously expressed in various tissues, including the brain. IRF2BPL encodes a transcription factor with two zinc-finger domains that potentially downregulate WNT signaling in the nervous system. Pathogenic IRF2BPL variants have been reported to cause developmental delay, seizures, myoclonus epilepsies, autistic spectrum disorder, and other neurodevelopmental disorders.

Challenges and applications of artificial intelligence in infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed infectious disease control, enhancing rapid diagnosis and antibiotic discovery. While conventional tests delay diagnosis, AI-driven methods like machine learning and deep learning assist in pathogen detection, resistance prediction, and drug discovery. These tools improve antibiotic stewardship and identify effective compounds such as antimicrobial peptides and small molecules.

Longitudinal evolution of the transdiagnostic prodrome to severe mental disorders: a dynamic temporal network analysis informed by natural language processing and electronic health records.

Modelling the prodrome to severe mental disorders (SMD), including unipolar mood disorders (UMD), bipolar mood disorders (BMD) and psychotic disorders (PSY), should consider both the evolution and interactions of symptoms and substance use (prodromal features) over time. Temporal network analysis can detect causal dependence between and within prodromal features by representing prodromal features as nodes, with their connections (edges) indicating the likelihood of one feature preceding the other. In SMD, node centrality could reveal insights into important prodromal features and potential intervention targets.

Enhancing social functioning using multi-user, immersive virtual reality.

Rates of loneliness and other forms of social disconnection have been increasing worldwide. Prior studies have suggested that brief behavioral interventions can teach skills that may improve social functioning and connection but, currently, access to such interventions is limited. One previously untested approach for addressing this gap is to teach these skills using immersive, multi-user virtual reality (VR).

Disrupted microsaccade responses in late-life depression.

Late-life depression (LLD) is a psychiatric disorder in older adults, characterized by high prevalence and significant mortality rates. Thus, it is imperative to develop objective and cost-effective methods for detecting LLD. Individuals with depression often exhibit disrupted levels of arousal, and microsaccades, as a type of fixational eye movement that can be measured non-invasively, are known to be modulated by arousal.

Nonapoptotic caspase-3 guides C1q-dependent synaptic phagocytosis by microglia.

Caspases are known to mediate neuronal apoptosis during brain development. However, here we show that nonapoptotic activation of caspase-3 at presynapses drives microglial synaptic phagocytosis. Real-time observation and spatiotemporal manipulation of synaptic caspase-3 in the newly established, mouse-derived culture system demonstrate that increased neuronal activity triggers localized presynaptic caspase-3 activation, facilitating synaptic tagging by complements.

Causal associations between iron levels in subcortical brain regions and psychiatric disorders: a Mendelian randomization study.

Despite observational studies linking brain iron levels to psychiatric disorders, the exact causal relationship remains poorly understood. This study aims to examine the relationship between iron levels in specific subcortical brain regions and the risk of psychiatric disorders. Utilizing two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) analysis, this study investigates the causal associations between iron level changes in 16 subcortical nuclei and eight major psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia (SCZ), major depressive disorder (MDD), autism spectrum disorders (ASD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and insomnia.