Identifying digital biomarkers of illness activity and treatment response in bipolar disorder with a novel wearable device (TIMEBASE): protocol for a pragmatic observational clinical study.

BACKGROUND: Bipolar disorder is highly prevalent and consists of biphasic recurrent mood episodes of mania and depression, which translate into altered mood, sleep and activity alongside their physiological expressions. AIMS: The IdenTifying dIgital bioMarkers of illnEss activity and treatment response in BipolAr diSordEr with a novel wearable device (TIMEBASE) project aims to identify digital biomarkers of illness activity and treatment response in bipolar disorder. METHOD: We designed a longitudinal observational study including 84 individuals. Group A comprises people with acute episode of mania (n = 12), depression (n = 12 with bipolar disorder and n = 12 with major depressive disorder (MDD)) and bipolar disorder with mixed features (n = 12). Physiological data will be recorded during 48 h with a research-grade wearable (Empatica E4) across four consecutive time points (acute, response, remission and episode recovery). Group B comprises 12 people with euthymic bipolar disorder and 12 with MDD, and group C comprises 12 healthy controls who will be recorded cross-sectionally. Psychopathological symptoms, disease severity, functioning and physical activity will be assessed with standardised psychometric scales. Physiological data will include acceleration, temperature, blood volume pulse, heart rate and electrodermal activity. Machine learning models will be developed to link physiological data to illness activity and treatment response. Generalisation performance will be tested in data from unseen patients. RESULTS: Recruitment is ongoing. CONCLUSIONS: This project should contribute to understanding the pathophysiology of affective disorders. The potential digital biomarkers of illness activity and treatment response in bipolar disorder could be implemented in a real-world clinical setting for clinical monitoring and identification of prodromal symptoms. This would allow early intervention and prevention of affective relapses, as well as personalisation of treatment.

Cognitive correlates of psychopathology in functional/dissociative seizures and non-lesional epilepsy: An exploratory study.

OBJECTIVE: To explore the relationship between cognitive functioning and psychopathological features in Functional/Dissociative Seizures (FDS), and test whether this differs from that observed in epilepsy. METHODS: We recruited a cross-sectional sample of adults (age > 18) with a diagnosis of non-lesional epilepsy or FDS between January 2021 and July 2022 (n = 73). Participants completed a series of psychiatric questionnaires and neuropsychological measures. Spearman's Correlation Coefficient was computed between each of the psychiatric and cognitive measures in each group. Fisher's Z test of significance for independent correlation coefficients then tested the significance of the difference between correlation coefficients for the two groups. RESULTS: There were no group differences in neuropsychological test scores. However, people with FDS reported higher seizure severity, depression levels, number of medically unexplained somatic symptoms, and exposure to traumatic events compared to epilepsy. Results of the Fisher's Z-test revealed significant differences in correlation coefficients between groups in two instances. First, in the association between the number of traumatic experiences and cognitive switching (z = 2.77, p = 0.006); the number of traumatic experiences were positively associated with cognitive switching in epilepsy but showed a non-significant negative trend in FDS. Secondly, in the association between vocabulary abilities and the number of medically unexplained symptoms (z = -2.71; p = 0.007); higher vocabulary ability was associated with fewer somatic symptoms in epilepsy, while no such correlation was observed in FDS. SIGNIFICANCE: This study provides preliminary evidence for the complex interplay between cognitive functioning and psychopathology in FDS and epilepsy. Neurocognitive functioning such as vocabulary abilities or attentional switching may play a role in the expression or maintenance of pathological features of FDS.

The Tightrope Study: A cadaveric, biomechanical comparison of generations of suspensory fixation with internal brace for Rockwood grade V AC joint injuries.

BACKGROUND: Surgical treatment of Rockwood grade V AC joint injuries remains varied. We hypothesized that the addition of a second suspensory device between the clavicle and coracoid would yield superior biomechanical results over a single device. We also hypothesized that the addition of an internal brace across the AC joint to a suspensory device would yield superior results over the suspensory device in isolation. METHODS: A total of 24 cadaveric shoulders were dissected and randomized to four groups with four different constructs implanted: Group A: Single AC TightRope (Arthrex Inc., Naples, FL, USA) Group B: Double AC TightRope Group C: Single Knotless AC TightRope (Arthrex Inc., Naples, FL, USA) Group D: Single Knotless AC TightRope with AC InternalBrace Ligament Augmentation (Arthrex Inc., Naples, FL, USA) These were then loaded in the Robotic arm (SIMVITRO) where 250 cycles of 50N of force in the superior plane was applied. Dynamic creep, displacement, translation and stiffness were assessed. RESULTS: Testing was successfully completed for all specimens. There were no failures due to fracture or translation of the clavicle greater than 5mm from the starting position. Reduction was maintained with a mean superior displacement of 1.7 mm (± 1.4 mm). The mean peak to peak displacement, superior and posterior translation, dynamic creep and stiffness did not differ significantly between construct groups. CONCLUSION: This study did not demonstrate any significant biomechanical differences between groups in terms of displacement, translation, creep or stiffness.

Home-based transcranial direct current stimulation in bipolar depression: an open-label treatment study of clinical outcomes, acceptability and adverse events.

BACKGROUND: Current treatments for bipolar depression have limited effectiveness, tolerability and acceptability. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a novel non-invasive brain stimulation method that has demonstrated treatment efficacy for major depressive episodes. tDCS is portable, safe, and individuals like having sessions at home. We developed a home-based protocol with real-time remote supervision. In the present study, we have examined the clinical outcomes, acceptability and feasibility of home-based tDCS treatment in bipolar depression. RESULTS: Participants were 44 individuals with bipolar disorder (31 women), mean age 47.27 ± 12.89 years, in current depressive episode of at least moderate severity (mean Montgomery Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) score 24.59 ± 2.64). tDCS was provided in bilateral frontal montage, F3 anode, F4 cathode, 2 mA, for 30 min, in a 6-week trial, for total 21 sessions, a follow up visit was conducted 5 months from baseline. Participants maintained their current treatment (psychotherapy, antidepressant or mood stabilising medication) or maintained being medication-free. A research team member was present by video conference at each session. 93.2% participants (n = 41) completed the 6-week treatment and 72.7% of participants (n = 32) completed the 5 month follow up. There was a significant improvement in depressive symptoms following treatment (mean MADRS 8.77 ± 5.37) which was maintained at the 5 month follow up (mean MADRS 10.86 ± 6.90), rate of clinical response was 77.3% (MADRS improvement of 50% or greater from baseline), and rate of clinical remission was 47.7% (MADRS rating of 9 or less). Acceptability was endorsed as "very acceptable" or "quite acceptable" by all participants. No participants developed mania or hypomania. CONCLUSIONS: In summary, home-based tDCS with real-time supervision was associated with significant clinical improvements and high acceptability in bipolar depression. Due to the open-label design, efficacy findings are preliminary. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov number NCT05436613 registered on 23 June 2022 https//www. CLINICALTRIALS: gov/study/NCT05436613.

Altered oxidative neurometabolic response to methylene blue in bipolar disorder revealed by quantitative neuroimaging.

BACKGROUND: Cerebral mitochondrial and hemodynamic abnormalities have been implicated in Bipolar Disorder pathophysiology, likely contributing to neurometabolic vulnerability-leading to worsen clinical outcomes and mood instability. To investigate neurometabolic vulnerability in patients with BD, we combined multi-modal quantitative MRI assessment of cerebral oxygenation with acute administration of Methylene Blue, a neurometabolic/hemodynamic modulator acting on cerebral mitochondria. METHODS: Fifteen euthymic patients with chronic BD-type 1, and fifteen age/gender-matched healthy controls underwent two separate MRI sessions in a single-blinded randomized cross-over design, each after intravenous infusion of either MB (0.5 mg/kg) or placebo. MRI-based measures of Cerebral Blood Flow and Oxygen Extraction Fraction were integrated to compute Cerebral Metabolic Rate of Oxygen in Frontal Lobe, Anterior Cingulate, and Hippocampus-implicated in BD neurometabolic pathophysiology. Inter-daily variation in mood rating was used to assess mood instability. RESULTS: A decrease in global CBF and CMRO2 was observed after acutely administrating MB to all participants. Greater regional CMRO2 reductions were observed after MB, in patients compared to controls in FL (mean = -14.2 ± 19.5 % versus 2.3 ± 14.8 %), ACC (mean = -14.8 ± 23.7 % versus 2.4 ± 15.7 %). The effects on CMRO2 in those regions were primarily driven by patients with longer disease duration and higher mood instability. LIMITATIONS: Sample size; medications potentially impacting on response to MB. CONCLUSIONS: An altered neurometabolic response to MB, a mitochondrial/hemodynamic modulator, was observed in patients, supporting the hypothesis of vulnerability to neurometabolic stress in BD. Integrating quantitative imaging of cerebral oxygen metabolism with a mitochondrial-targeting pharmacological challenge could provide a novel biomarker of neurometabolic and cerebrovascular pathophysiology in BD.

Activation of the interleukin-23/Th17 axis in major depression: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

The interleukin-23/Th17 axis is a promising modifiable target for depression. However, its association with depression has not been systematically evaluated. We systematically searched four databases (EMBASE, Web of Science, Pubmed and PsycINFO) for studies comparing patients with major depression and healthy controls for plasma/serum levels of Th17 cells and their canonical cytokines (interleukin-17A [IL-17A], IL-22, granulocyte macrophage colony stimulating factor [GM-CSF]). We also compared counts of Th1, Th2 and Th9 cells between depressed/non-depressed patients and their respective canonical cytokines. We performed random-effects meta-analysis of the standardised mean difference (SMD) in immune measures between groups. Risk of bias was assessed using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale. Of 3154 studies screened, 36 studies were included in meta-analysis. Patients with depression had elevated IL-17A compared to controls (SMD = 0.80 [95% CI 0.03 to 1.58], p = 0.042), an association moderated by antidepressant use (Z = 2.12, p = 0.034). Patients with depression had elevated GM-CSF (SMD = 0.54 [95% CI 0.16 to 0.91], p = 0.0047), and a trend towards higher Th17 counts (SMD = 0.44 [- 0.01 to 0.88], p = 0.052). Whilst the Th2-associated cytokine IL-5 was elevated in depression (SMD = 0.36 [95% CI 0.05 to 0.66], p = 0.02), Th2 cell counts (p = 0.97), Th1 cell counts (p = 0.17) and interferon-γ (p = 0.22) were not. Data for Th9 cells, IL-9 and IL-22 were insufficient for meta-analysis. Respectively, 22, 25 and 5 studies were good, fair and poor in quality. Patients with major depression show peripheral over-activation of the IL-23/Th17 axis. Future interventional studies should test whether this is a modifiable target for depression.

Wearable Data From Subjects Playing Super Mario, Taking University Exams, or Performing Physical Exercise Help Detect Acute Mood Disorder Episodes via Self-Supervised Learning: Prospective, Exploratory, Observational Study.

BACKGROUND: Personal sensing, leveraging data passively and near-continuously collected with wearables from patients in their ecological environment, is a promising paradigm to monitor mood disorders (MDs), a major determinant of the worldwide disease burden. However, collecting and annotating wearable data is resource intensive. Studies of this kind can thus typically afford to recruit only a few dozen patients. This constitutes one of the major obstacles to applying modern supervised machine learning techniques to MD detection. OBJECTIVE: In this paper, we overcame this data bottleneck and advanced the detection of acute MD episodes from wearables' data on the back of recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL). This approach leverages unlabeled data to learn representations during pretraining, subsequently exploited for a supervised task. METHODS: We collected open access data sets recording with the Empatica E4 wristband spanning different, unrelated to MD monitoring, personal sensing tasks-from emotion recognition in Super Mario players to stress detection in undergraduates-and devised a preprocessing pipeline performing on-/off-body detection, sleep/wake detection, segmentation, and (optionally) feature extraction. With 161 E4-recorded subjects, we introduced E4SelfLearning, the largest-to-date open access collection, and its preprocessing pipeline. We developed a novel E4-tailored transformer (E4mer) architecture, serving as the blueprint for both SSL and fully supervised learning; we assessed whether and under which conditions self-supervised pretraining led to an improvement over fully supervised baselines (ie, the fully supervised E4mer and pre-deep learning algorithms) in detecting acute MD episodes from recording segments taken in 64 (n=32, 50%, acute, n=32, 50%, stable) patients. RESULTS: SSL significantly outperformed fully supervised pipelines using either our novel E4mer or extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost): n=3353 (81.23%) against n=3110 (75.35%; E4mer) and n=2973 (72.02%; XGBoost) correctly classified recording segments from a total of 4128 segments. SSL performance was strongly associated with the specific surrogate task used for pretraining, as well as with unlabeled data availability. CONCLUSIONS: We showed that SSL, a paradigm where a model is pretrained on unlabeled data with no need for human annotations before deployment on the supervised target task of interest, helps overcome the annotation bottleneck; the choice of the pretraining surrogate task and the size of unlabeled data for pretraining are key determinants of SSL success. We introduced E4mer, which can be used for SSL, and shared the E4SelfLearning collection, along with its preprocessing pipeline, which can foster and expedite future research into SSL for personal sensing.

Neuroanatomical dimensions in medication-free individuals with major depressive disorder and treatment response to SSRI antidepressant medications or placebo.

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a heterogeneous clinical syndrome with widespread subtle neuroanatomical correlates. Our objective was to identify the neuroanatomical dimensions that characterize MDD and predict treatment response to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants or placebo. In the COORDINATE-MDD consortium, raw MRI data were shared from international samples (N = 1,384) of medication-free individuals with first-episode and recurrent MDD (N = 685) in a current depressive episode of at least moderate severity, but not treatment-resistant depression, as well as healthy controls (N = 699). Prospective longitudinal data on treatment response were available for a subset of MDD individuals (N = 359). Treatments were either SSRI antidepressant medication (escitalopram, citalopram, sertraline) or placebo. Multi-center MRI data were harmonized, and HYDRA, a semi-supervised machine-learning clustering algorithm, was utilized to identify patterns in regional brain volumes that are associated with disease. MDD was optimally characterized by two neuroanatomical dimensions that exhibited distinct treatment responses to placebo and SSRI antidepressant medications. Dimension 1 was characterized by preserved gray and white matter (N = 290 MDD), whereas Dimension 2 was characterized by widespread subtle reductions in gray and white matter (N = 395 MDD) relative to healthy controls. Although there were no significant differences in age of onset, years of illness, number of episodes, or duration of current episode between dimensions, there was a significant interaction effect between dimensions and treatment response. Dimension 1 showed a significant improvement in depressive symptoms following treatment with SSRI medication (51.1%) but limited changes following placebo (28.6%). By contrast, Dimension 2 showed comparable improvements to either SSRI (46.9%) or placebo (42.2%) (ß = -18.3, 95% CI (-34.3 to -2.3), P = 0.03). Findings from this case-control study indicate that neuroimaging-based markers can help identify the disease-based dimensions that constitute MDD and predict treatment response.

Safety and tolerability of esketamine nasal spray versus quetiapine extended release in patients with treatment resistant depression.

In ESCAPE-TRD (NCT04338321), esketamine nasal spray (NS) significantly increased the probability of remission at Week 8, and of being relapse-free through Week 32 after remission at Week 8, versus quetiapine extended release (XR) in patients with treatment resistant depression (TRD). Here, we explore the time course, burden and consequences of treatment emergent adverse events (TEAEs) in the phase IIIb ESCAPE­TRD trial. Patients with TRD were randomised 1:1 to esketamine NS or quetiapine XR, dosed per label alongside an ongoing selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor/serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor. In this secondary publication, safety analyses (comprising patients who received ≥1 dose of study treatment) included incidence, severity and durations (Kaplan­Meier method) of TEAEs, and subsequent dispositional changes. P values were not adjusted for multiple testing. 336 patients were randomised to esketamine NS and 340 to quetiapine XR; 334 and 336 received ≥1 dose of study treatment, respectively. TEAEs were significantly more common with esketamine NS than quetiapine XR (91.9 % versus 78.0 %; p < 0.001), but were typically mild/moderate and transient in nature: a greater proportion resolved on the same-day (92.0 % versus 12.1 %) and lead to treatment discontinuation in significantly fewer patients (4.2 % versus 11.0 %, respectively; p < 0.001). The proportion of days spent with TEAEs was significantly lower with esketamine NS than quetiapine XR (median: 11.9 % versus 21.3 %; p < 0.001). Although more frequent with esketamine NS, TEAEs were typically transient and mild, with discontinuation less likely versus quetiapine XR. Data were consistent with established safety profiles, with no new safety signals identified. Alongside greater efficacy, the demonstrably more favourable tolerability profile of esketamine NS versus quetiapine XR further supports its use for TRD.

Sleep-wake variations of electrodermal activity in bipolar disorder.

BACKGROUND: Affective states influence the sympathetic nervous system, inducing variations in electrodermal activity (EDA), however, EDA association with bipolar disorder (BD) remains uncertain in real-world settings due to confounders like physical activity and temperature. We analysed EDA separately during sleep and wakefulness due to varying confounders and potential differences in mood state discrimination capacities. METHODS: We monitored EDA from 102 participants with BD including 35 manic, 29 depressive, 38 euthymic patients, and 38 healthy controls (HC), for 48 h. Fifteen EDA features were inferred by mixed-effect models for repeated measures considering sleep state, group and covariates. RESULTS: Thirteen EDA feature models were significantly influenced by sleep state, notably including phasic peaks (p < 0.001). During wakefulness, phasic peaks showed different values for mania (M [SD] = 6.49 [5.74, 7.23]), euthymia (5.89 [4.83, 6.94]), HC (3.04 [1.65, 4.42]), and depression (3.00 [2.07, 3.92]). Four phasic features during wakefulness better discriminated between HC and mania or euthymia, and between depression and euthymia or mania, compared to sleep. Mixed symptoms, average skin temperature, and anticholinergic medication affected the models, while sex and age did not. CONCLUSION: EDA measured from awake recordings better distinguished between BD states than sleep recordings, when controlled by confounders.

Extended-release ketamine tablets for treatment-resistant depression: a randomized placebo-controlled phase 2 trial.

Ketamine has rapid-onset antidepressant activity in patients with treatment-resistant major depression (TRD). The safety and tolerability of racemic ketamine may be improved if given orally, as an extended-release tablet (R-107), compared with other routes of administration. In this phase 2 multicenter clinical trial, male and female adult patients with TRD and Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) scores ≥20 received open-label R-107 tablets 120 mg per day for 5 days and were assessed on day 8 (enrichment phase). On day 8, responders (MADRS scores ≤12 and reduction ≥50%) were randomized on a 1:1:1:1:1 basis to receive double-blind R-107 doses of 30, 60, 120 or 180 mg, or placebo, twice weekly for a further 12 weeks. Nonresponders on day 8 exited the study. The primary endpoint was least square mean change in MADRS for each active treatment compared with placebo at 13 weeks, starting with the 180 mg dose, using a fixed sequence step-down closed test procedure. Between May 2019 and August 2021, 329 individuals were screened for eligibility, 231 entered the open-label enrichment phase (days 1-8) and 168 responders were randomized to double-blind treatment. The primary objective was met; the least square mean difference of MADRS score for the 180 mg tablet group and placebo was -6.1 (95% confidence interval 1.0 to 11.16, P = 0.019) at 13 weeks. Relapse rates during double-blind treatment showed a dose response from 70.6% for placebo to 42.9% for 180 mg. Tolerability was excellent, with no changes in blood pressure, minimal reports of sedation and minimal dissociation. The most common adverse events were headache, dizziness and anxiety. During the randomized phase of the study, most patient dosing occurred at home. R-107 tablets were effective, safe and well tolerated in a patient population with TRD, enriched for initial response to R-107 tablets. ClinicalTrials.gov registration: ACTRN12618001042235 .

Update on the assessment of resistance to antidepressant treatment: Rationale for the Antidepressant Treatment History Form: Short Form-2 (ATHF-SF2).

All definitions of treatment-resistant depression (TRD) require that patients have experienced insufficient benefit from one or more adequate antidepressant trials. Thus, identifying "failed, adequate trials" is key to the assessment of TRD. The Antidepressant Treatment History Form (ATHF) was one of the first and most widely used instruments that provided objective criteria in making these assessments. The original ATHF was updated in 2018 to the ATHF-SF, changing to a checklist format for scoring, and including specific pharmacotherapy, brain stimulation, and psychotherapy interventions as potentially adequate antidepressant treatments. The ATHF-SF2, presented here, is based on the consensus of the ATHF workgroup about the novel interventions introduced since the last revision and which should/should not be considered effective treatments for major depressive episodes. This document describes the rationale for these choices and, for each intervention, the minimal criteria for determining the adequacy of treatment administration. The Supplementary Material that accompanies this article provide the Scoring Checklist, Data Collection Forms (current episode and composite of previous episodes), and Instruction Manual for the ATHF-SF2.

Cognitive improvement in late-life depression treated with vortioxetine and duloxetine in an eight-week randomized controlled trial: The role of age at first onset and change in depressive symptoms.

BACKGROUND: Age at first onset of depression as a clinical factor affecting cognitive improvement in late life depression was investigated. METHODS: This is a secondary analysis of an eight-week randomized controlled trial involving 452 elderly patients treated by vortioxetine, duloxetine or placebo (1:1:1). Patients were subcategorized into early-onset (LLD-EO) and late-onset (LLD-LO) groups divided by onset age of 50. Cognitive performance was assessed by composite score of Digit Symbol Substitution Test (DSST) and the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) tasks, while depressive symptoms were assessed by Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS). RESULTS: Vortioxetine and duloxetine exhibited advantages versus placebo in improving cognitive performance in the LLD-LO group, yet not in the LLD-EO group after eight weeks. Patients in the LLD-EO group showed overall advantage to placebo in depressive symptoms before endpoint (week 8) of treatment, while patients in the LLO-LO group showed no advantage until endpoint. Path analysis suggested a direct effect of vortioxetine (B = 0.656, p = .036) and duloxetine (B = 0.726, p = .028) on improving cognition in the LLD-LO group, yet in all-patients treated set both medications improved cognition indirectly through changes of depressive symptoms. LIMITATION: Reliability of clinical history could raise caution as it was collected by subjective recall of patients. CONCLUSION: Age at first onset might affect cognitive improvement as well as change in depressive symptoms and its mediation towards cognitive improvement in late life depression treated with vortioxetine and duloxetine.

Neural responses to facial emotions and subsequent clinical outcomes in difficult-to-treat depression.

BACKGROUND: Amygdala and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex responses to facial emotions have shown promise in predicting treatment response in medication-free major depressive disorder (MDD). Here, we examined their role in the pathophysiology of clinical outcomes in more chronic, difficult-to-treat forms of MDD. METHODS: Forty-five people with current MDD who had not responded to ⩾2 serotonergic antidepressants (n = 42, meeting pre-defined fMRI minimum quality thresholds) were enrolled and followed up over four months of standard primary care. Prior to medication review, subliminal facial emotion fMRI was used to extract blood-oxygen level-dependent effects for sad v. happy faces from two pre-registered a priori defined regions: bilateral amygdala and dorsal/pregenual anterior cingulate cortex. Clinical outcome was the percentage change on the self-reported Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology (16-item). RESULTS: We corroborated our pre-registered hypothesis (NCT04342299) that lower bilateral amygdala activation for sad v. happy faces predicted favorable clinical outcomes (rs[38] = 0.40, p = 0.01). In contrast, there was no effect for dorsal/pregenual anterior cingulate cortex activation (rs[38] = 0.18, p = 0.29), nor when using voxel-based whole-brain analyses (voxel-based Family-Wise Error-corrected p < 0.05). Predictive effects were mainly driven by the right amygdala whose response to happy faces was reduced in patients with higher anxiety levels. CONCLUSIONS: We confirmed the prediction that a lower amygdala response to negative v. positive facial expressions might be an adaptive neural signature, which predicts subsequent symptom improvement also in difficult-to-treat MDD. Anxiety reduced adaptive amygdala responses.

Is it now time to prepare psychiatry for a psychedelic future?

Australia has just rescheduled two drugs controlled under the United Nations Psychotropic Drug Conventions, psilocybin and MDMA, as treatments for treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder respectively. This feature explores the reasons for these developments, the opportunities and challenges they provide to psychiatry communities and how along with health systems these communities might respond to these developments.

Effect of childhood emotional abuse on depression and anxiety in adulthood is partially mediated by neuroticism: Evidence from a large online sample.

Childhood trauma is widely recognized as a potential risk factor for psychiatric illness in adulthood, yet the precise mechanisms underlying this relationship remain incompletely understood. One proposed mechanism involves the impact of childhood trauma on personality development, particularly in relation to neuroticism, which may subsequently heighten susceptibility to psychiatric disorders. In this study, we aimed to investigate this hypothesis through an online survey involving 1116 participants (232 male, 21 %). Participants completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ), assessing emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, and physical neglect, along with the Trait Self-Description Inventory (TSDI) for personality assessment and the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 clinical questionnaires for depression and anxiety symptoms evaluation, respectively. Our analyses revealed significant positive correlations between all facets of childhood trauma and neuroticism (all p < .01). Linear regression analysis demonstrated that emotional abuse significantly contributed to neuroticism (ß = 0.267, p < .05), openness (ß = 0.142, p < .05), and agreeableness (ß = 0.089, p < .05), while sexual abuse was associated with agreeableness (ß = 0.137, p < .01) Emotional neglect was negatively correlated with conscientiousness (ß = -0.090, p < .01), extroversion (ß = -0.109, p < .01) and agreeableness (ß = -0.154, p < .01). Furthermore, linear regression analysis revealed that emotional abuse was positively and significantly correlated with PHQ-9 and GAD-7 scores (r = 0.330, p < .01 and r = 0.327, p < .01, respectively). Mediation analysis supported a significant mediating role of neuroticism in the association between childhood emotional abuse and both depression (PHQ-9) (z = 8.681, p < .01) and anxiety (GAD-7) (z = 9.206, p < .01). Notably, the correlation between childhood emotional abuse and psychiatric symptoms was attenuated but not eliminated after controlling for neuroticism, suggesting partial mediation. While our cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, our findings support the notion that childhood emotional abuse may contribute to increased neuroticism, thereby elevating vulnerability to affective disorders in adulthood. These results underscore the importance of considering personality factors in understanding the long-term consequences of childhood trauma on mental health outcomes.

Early life stress unravels epistatic genetic associations of cortisol pathway genes with depression.

Dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis represents one of the most consistent pathophysiological findings in depressive disorders. Cortisol signaling is affected by proteins that mediate its cellular responses or alters its availability to mineralocorticoid and glucocorticoid receptors. In our study, we evaluated candidate genes that may influence the risk for depression and suicide due to its involvement in cortisol signaling. The aim of the study was to assess whether the genotypes of these genes are associated with the risk for depression, severity of depressive symptoms, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. And whether there is interaction between genes and early-life stress. In this study, 100 healthy controls and 140 individuals with depression were included. The subjects were clinically assessed using the 21-item GRID-Hamilton questionnaires (GRID-HAMD-21), Beck Scale for Suicidal Ideation (BSI), and the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ). A robust multifactorial dimensionality reduction analysis was used to characterize the interactions between the genes HSD11B1, NR3C1, NR3C2, and MDR1 and early-life stress. It was found a significant association of the heterozygous genotype of the MDR1 gene rs1128503 polymorphism with reduced risk of at least one suicide attempt (OR: 0.08, p = 0.003*) and a reduction in the number of suicide attempts (ß = -0.79, p = 0.006*). Furthermore, it was found that the MDR1 rs1228503 and NR3C2 rs2070951 genes interact with early-life stress resulting in a strong association with depression (p = 0.001). Our findings suggest that polymorphisms in the MDR1 and NR3C2 genes and their interaction with childhood trauma may be important biomarkers for depression and suicidal behaviors.