Revisiting the Defeatist Performance Belief Scale in Adults With Schizophrenia and Youth at Clinical High-Risk for Psychosis: A Comprehensive Psychometric Analysis.

Background And Hypothesis: In accordance with the Cognitive Model of Negative Symptoms, defeatist performance beliefs (DPBs) are an important psychosocial mechanism of negative symptoms in schizophrenia-spectrum groups. DPBs are also mediators of negative symptom improvement in clinical trials. Despite the clinical significance of DPBs and their inclusion as a mechanism of change measure in clinical trials, the psychometric properties of the DPB scale have not been examined in any schizophrenia-spectrum group.

Categorical and Dimensional Approaches for Psychiatric Classification and Treatment Targeting: Considerations from Psychosis Biotypes.

Categorical diagnosis, a pillar of the medical model, has not worked well in psychiatry where most diagnoses are still exclusively symptom based. Uncertainty continues about whether categories or dimensions work better for the assessment and treatment of idiopathic psychoses. The Bipolar Schizophrenia Network for Intermediate Phenotypes (B-SNIP) examined multiple cognitive and electrophysiological biomarkers across a large transdiagnostic psychosis data set.

A Method for Multimodal IVA Fusion Within a MISA Unified Model Reveals Markers of Age, Sex, Cognition, and Schizophrenia in Large Neuroimaging Studies.

With the increasing availability of large-scale multimodal neuroimaging datasets, it is necessary to develop data fusion methods which can extract cross-modal features. A general framework, multidataset independent subspace analysis (MISA), has been developed to encompass multiple blind source separation approaches and identify linked cross-modal sources in multiple datasets. In this work, we utilized the multimodal independent vector analysis (MMIVA) model in MISA to directly identify meaningful linked features across three neuroimaging modalities-structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), resting state functional MRI and diffusion MRI-in two large independent datasets, one comprising of control subjects and the other including patients with schizophrenia.

Differing Pattern of Mismatch Negativity Responses in Clinical and Nonclinical Voice Hearers Challenge Predictive Coding Accounts of Psychosis.

Background: Among people with schizophrenia (PSZ), reduced mismatch negativity (MMN) is conceptualized as evidence of disrupted prediction error signaling that underlies positive symptoms. However, this conceptualization has been challenged by observations that MMN and positive symptoms are often uncorrelated. In the current study, we tested the hypothesis that reduced MMN is associated with the presence of hallucinations and delusions specifically rather than the presence of a psychiatric illness.

A Site-Wise Reliability Analysis of the ABCD Diffusion Fractional Anisotropy and Cortical Thickness: Impact of Scanner Platforms.

The Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) project is the largest study of adolescent brain development. ABCD longitudinally tracks 11,868 participants aged 9-10 years from 21 sites using standardized protocols for multi-site MRI data collection and analysis. While the multi-site and multi-scanner study design enhances the robustness and generalizability of analysis results, it may also introduce nonbiological variances including scanner-related variations, subject motion, and deviations from protocols.

Age-related decline in blood-brain barrier function is more pronounced in males than females in parietal and temporal regions.

The blood-brain barrier (BBB) plays a pivotal role in protecting the central nervous system (CNS), and shielding it from potential harmful entities. A natural decline of BBB function with aging has been reported in both animal and human studies, which may contribute to cognitive decline and neurodegenerative disorders. Limited data also suggest that being female may be associated with protective effects on BBB function.

Tobacco Smoking Functional Networks: A Whole-Brain Connectome Analysis in 24,539 Individuals.

Introduction: Nicotine addiction, a multifaceted neuropsychiatric disorder, profoundly impacts brain functions through interactions with neural pathways. Despite its significance, the impact of tobacco smoking on the whole-brain functional connectome remains largely unexplored.

Methods: We conducted a whole-brain analysis on 24,539 adults aged 40 and above from the UK Biobank cohort.

Nongenetic and Genetic Factors Associated with White Matter Brain Aging: Exposome-Wide and Genome-Wide Association Study.

Background/objectives: Human brain aging is a complex process that affects various aspects of brain function and structure, increasing susceptibility to neurological and psychiatric disorders. A number of nongenetic (e.g.

Aberrant salience signaling in auditory processing in schizophrenia: Evidence for abnormalities in both sensory processing and emotional reactivity.

It has been long known that people with schizophrenia (SZ) have deficits in perceptual processing, including in the auditory domain. Furthermore, they often experience increased emotional responsivity and dysregulation, which further impacts overall functioning. Increased emotional responsivity to auditory stimuli is also seen in people with misophonia, a condition in which specific sounds elicit robust negative emotional responses.

Clinician-Reported Negative Symptom Scales: A Systematic Review of Measurement Properties.

Background: Negative symptoms of schizophrenia are correlated with reduction of normal function and lower quality of life. They were newly defined by the NIMH-MATRICS Consensus in 2005, dividing the rating tools to assess them into first-generation scales, developed before the Consensus, and second-generation scales, based on the recently introduced definitions.

Methods: The COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement Instrument (COSMIN) guidelines for systematic reviews were used to evaluate the quality of psychometric data of the first-generation scales that cover the 5 negative symptom domains of the NIMHS Consensus: the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS), the High Royds Evaluation of Negativity Scale (HEN), and the Negative Symptom Assessment-16 (NSA-16).

Opposite-Direction Spatial Working Memory Biases in People With Schizophrenia and Healthy Control Participants.

Background: People with schizophrenia (PSZ) show impaired accuracy in spatial working memory (sWM), which is thought to reflect abnormalities in the sustained firing of feature selective neurons that are critical for successful encoding and maintenance processes. Recent research has documented a new source of variance in the accuracy of sWM: In healthy adults, sWM representations are unconsciously biased by previous trials such that current-trial responses are attracted to previous-trial responses (serial dependence). This opens a new window to examine how schizophrenia impacts both the sustained neural firing representing the current-trial target and the longer-term synaptic plasticity that stores previous-trial information.

A breath-based in vitro diagnostic assay for the detection of lower respiratory tract infections.

An accurate diagnosis is critical to reducing mortality in people with lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs). Current microbiological culture is time-consuming, and nucleic acid amplification-based molecular technologies cannot distinguish between colonization and infection. Previously, we described developing a sampling system for effectively capturing biomolecules from human breath.

Increased Sensitivity to Effort and Perception of Effort in People with Schizophrenia.

Objective: Motivational deficits in schizophrenia are proposed to be attributable in part to abnormal effort-cost computations, calculations weighing the costs vs. the benefits of actions. Several reports have shown that people with schizophrenia display a reduced willingness to exert effort for monetary rewards when compared to controls.

Neuroactive Kynurenines as Pharmacological Targets: New Experimental Tools and Exciting Therapeutic Opportunities.

Both preclinical and clinical studies implicate functional impairments of several neuroactive metabolites of the kynurenine pathway (KP), the major degradative cascade of the essential amino acid tryptophan in mammals, in the pathophysiology of neurologic and psychiatric diseases. A number of KP enzymes, such as tryptophan 2,3-dioxygenase (TDO2), indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenases (IDO1 and IDO2), kynurenine aminotransferases (KATs), kynurenine 3-monooxygenase (KMO), 3-hydroxyanthranilic acid oxygenase (3-HAO), and quinolinic acid phosphoribosyltransferase (QPRT), control brain KP metabolism in health and disease and are therefore increasingly considered to be promising targets for the treatment of disorders of the nervous system. Understanding the distribution, cellular expression, and regulation of KP enzymes and KP metabolites in the brain is therefore critical for the conceptualization and implementation of successful therapeutic strategies.

Multivariate Association Between Functional Connectivity Gradients and Cognition in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders.

Background: Schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs), which are characterized by social cognitive deficits, have been associated with dysconnectivity in unimodal (e.g., visual, auditory) and multimodal (e.

Task-based functional neural correlates of social cognition across autism and schizophrenia spectrum disorders.

Background: Autism and schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) both feature atypical social cognition. Despite evidence for comparable group-level performance in lower-level emotion processing and higher-level mentalizing, limited research has examined the neural basis of social cognition across these conditions. Our goal was to compare the neural correlates of social cognition in autism, SSDs, and typically developing controls (TDCs).

Local-structure-preservation and redundancy-removal-based feature selection method and its application to the identification of biomarkers for schizophrenia.

Accurate diagnosis of mental disorders is expected to be achieved through the identification of reliable neuroimaging biomarkers with the help of cutting-edge feature selection techniques. However, existing feature selection methods often fall short in capturing the local structural characteristics among samples and effectively eliminating redundant features, resulting in inadequate performance in disorder prediction. To address this gap, we propose a novel supervised method named local-structure-preservation and redundancy-removal-based feature selection (LRFS), and then apply it to the identification of meaningful biomarkers for schizophrenia (SZ).

White matter and latency of visual evoked potentials during maturation: A miniature pig model of adolescent development.

Background: Continuous myelination of cerebral white matter (WM) during adolescence overlaps with the formation of higher cognitive skills and the onset of many neuropsychiatric disorders. We developed a miniature-pig model of adolescent brain development for neuroimaging and neurophysiological assessment during this critical period. Minipigs have gyroencephalic brains with a large cerebral WM compartment and a well-defined adolescence period.

Dysfunctional Alpha Modulation as a Mechanism of Working Memory Impairment in Serious Mental Illness.

Background: People with psychosis and mood disorders experience disruptions in working memory; however, the underlying mechanism remains unknown. We focused on 2 potential mechanisms: poor attentional engagement should be associated with elevated levels of prestimulus alpha-band activity within the electroencephalogram (EEG), whereas impaired working memory encoding should be associated with reduced poststimulus alpha suppression.

Methods: We collected EEG data from 68 people with schizophrenia, 43 people with bipolar disorder with a history of psychosis, 53 people with major depressive disorder, and 90 healthy comparison subjects while they completed a spatial working memory task.