Psychological dimensions in alcohol use disorder: comparing active drinkers and abstinent patients.

Background: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a major public health concern due to its various physical, psychological, and social consequences. Despite regulatory differences, abstinence remains the primary treatment objective. Addressing the multifaceted nature of alcohol use disorder requires a comprehensive approach. Methods: 150 AUD patients (66%male) with a mean age of 54.10 ± 11.3 years were recruited for the study. Depression, impulsivity, alexithymia, and hopelessness were assessed to determine if there were significant differences in these dimensions between abstinent (N=72) and active drinkers (N=78). Results: The study found significant differences in the psychological dimensions scores, active drinkers exhibited higher levels of depression, impulsivity, alexithymia, and hopelessness compared to abstinent patients. Conclusion: Treatment outcomes for patients with AUD vary between regulatory agencies, but abstinence remains the safest and most preferred objective in managing AUD. Prioritizing abstinence-oriented interventions is crucial for achieving long term recovery and minimizing relapse risk. These results emphasize the intricate relationship between AUD and mental health issues, highlighting the need for comprehensive interventions addressing both alcohol consumption and associated psychological distress. Promoting abstinence (or at least reducing alcohol consumption) not only preserves mental health but also prevents life-threatening consequences such as suicide.

Reduction of peripersonal comfort space correlate with eating disorder symptoms in young adolescents: a network analysis approach.

Background: Peripersonal Space (PS) is represented as the immediate area surrounding an individual. The extent of PS changes in relation to several factors, including emotional states, type of relationship or psychopathology. Attachment anxiety has an impact on the social adaptability of peripersonal space and anxiety and fear are associated with an expansion of peripersonal space, possibly serving as a mechanism of self-protection. Peripersonal space appears to be intricately linked to various psychiatric conditions like anxiety disorders and converging evidence suggests that social maladjustment may predict or exacerbate eating disorder symptoms expression. Methods: Fifty-eight healthy adolescents (38F, 20M) performed a comfort distance estimation task to assess peripersonal space. The Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile (AASP) was used to assess sensory profiles and the SAFA protocol to investigate psychopathological aspects. Data was analysed using Network Analysis, estimating a Gaussian Graphical Models with a Bayesian approach. Results: We found that the task related to comfort estimation distance demonstrated a correlation with the visual scale of the Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile (AASP). Additionally, a correlation was observed with the Eating Disorder scale of the SAFA protocol. The touch scale also was negatively correlated with Eating disorder symptoms but not with the comfort estimation task. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate a relation between peripersonal space and eating disorder symptoms in healthy adolescents in line with previous findings in adults with eating disorders diagnosis. These findings suggest that socio-emotional difficulties may be possible precursors or reinforce for the development of an eating disorder symptoms.

T-cell immunophenotype correlations with cortical thickness and white matter microstructure in bipolar disorder.

BACKGROUND: Inflammation and immunological alterations, such as T-cell and cytokine changes, are implicated in bipolar disorder (BD), with some evidence linking them to brain structural changes (e.g., cortical thickness (CT), gray matter (GM) volume and white matter (WM) microstructure). However, the connection between specific peripheral cell types, such as T-cells, and neuroimaging in BD remains scarcely investigated. AIMS OF THE STUDY: This study aims to explore the link between T-cell immunophenotype and neuroradiological findings in BD. METHODS: Our study investigated 43 type I BD subjects (22 depressive, 21 manic) and 26 healthy controls (HC), analyzing T lymphocyte immunophenotype and employing neuroimaging to assess CT for GM and fractional anisotropy (FA) for WM. RESULTS: In lymphocyte populations, BD patients exhibited elevated CD4+ and CD4+ central memory (TCM) cells frequencies, but lower CD8+ effector memory (TEM) and terminal effector memory (TTEM) cells. Neuroimaging analysis revealed reduced CT in multiple brain regions in BD patients; and significant negative correlations between CD4 + TCM levels and CT of precuneus and fusiform gyrus. Tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) analysis showed widespread alteration in WM microstructure in BD patients, with negative and positive correlations respectively between FA and radial diffusivity (RD) and CD4 + TCM. Additionally, positive and negative correlations were found respectively between FA and RD and the CD8 + TEM and CD8 + TTEM subsets. CONCLUSIONS: Our research revealed distinct T lymphocyte changes and brain structure alterations in BD, underscoring possible immune-brain interactions, warranting further study and therapeutic exploration.

Sensation seeking correlates with increased white matter integrity of structures associated with visuospatial processing in healthy adults.

Introduction: The ability to process sensory information is an essential adaptive function, and hyper- or hypo-sensitive maladaptive profiles of responses to environmental stimuli generate sensory processing disorders linked to cognitive, affective, and behavioral alterations. Consequently, assessing sensory processing profiles might help research the vulnerability and resilience to mental disorders. The research on neuroradiological correlates of the sensory processing profiles is mainly limited to the young-age population or neurodevelopmental disorders. So, this study aims to examine the structural MRI correlates of sensory profiles in a sample of typically developed adults. Methods: We investigated structural cortical thickness (CT) and white matter integrity, through Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI), correlates of Adolescent/Adult Sensory Profile (AASP) questionnaire subscales in 57 typical developing subjects (34F; mean age: 32.7 ± 9.3). Results: We found significant results only for the sensation seeking (STS) subscale. Positive and negative correlations emerged with fractional anisotropy (FA) and radial diffusivity (RD) in anterior thalamic radiation, optic radiation, superior longitudinal fasciculus, corpus callosum, and the cingulum bundle. No correlation between sensation seeking and whole brain cortical thickness was found. Discussion: Overall, our results suggest a positive correlation between sensation seeking and higher white matter structural integrity in those tracts mainly involved in visuospatial processing but no correlation with gray matter structure. The enhanced structural integrity associated with sensation seeking may reflect a neurobiological substrate linked to active research of sensory stimuli and resilience to major psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression.

Face masks affect perception of happy faces in deaf people.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led significant social repercussions and forced people to wear face masks. Recent research has demonstrated that the human ability to infer emotions from facial configurations is significantly reduced when face masks are worn. Since the mouth region is specifically crucial for deaf people who speak sign language, the current study assessed the impact of face masks on inferring emotional facial expressions in a population of adult deaf signers. A group of 34 congenitally deaf individuals and 34 normal-hearing individuals were asked to identify happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and neutral expression on static human pictures with and without facial masks presented through smartphones. For each emotion, the percentage of correct responses with and without face masks was calculated and compared between groups. Results indicated that face masks, such as those worn due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, limit the ability of people to infer emotions from facial expressions. The negative impact of face masks is significantly pronounced when deaf people have to recognize low-intensity expressions of happiness. These findings are of essential importance because difficulties in recognizing emotions from facial expressions due to mask wearing may contribute to the communication challenges experienced by the deaf community during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, generating feelings of frustration and exclusion.

COVID-19 and psychiatric disorders: The impact of face masks in emotion recognition face masks and emotion recognition in psychiatry.

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, reading facial expressions has become more complex due to face masks covering the lower part of people's faces. A history of psychiatric illness has been associated with higher rates of complications, hospitalization, and mortality due to COVID-19. Psychiatric patients have well-documented difficulties reading emotions from facial expressions; accordingly, this study assesses how using face masks, such as those worn for preventing COVID-19 transmission, impacts the emotion recognition skills of patients with psychiatric disorders. To this end, the current study asked patients with bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, and healthy individuals to identify facial emotions on face images with and without facial masks. Results demonstrate that the emotion recognition skills of all participants were negatively influenced by face masks. Moreover, the main insight of the study is that the impairment is crucially significant when patients with major depressive disorder and schizophrenia had to identify happiness at a low-intensity level. These findings have important implications for satisfactory social relationships and well-being. If emotions with positive valence are hardly understood by specific psychiatric patients, there is an even greater requirement for doctor-patient interactions in public primary care.

Time in schizophrenia: a link between psychopathology, psychophysics and technology.

It has been widely demonstrated that time processing is altered in patients with schizophrenia. This perspective review delves into such temporal deficit and highlights its link to low-level sensory alterations, which are often overlooked in rehabilitation protocols for psychosis. However, if temporal impairment at the sensory level is inherent to the disease, new interventions should focus on this dimension. Beyond more traditional types of intervention, here we review the most recent digital technologies for rehabilitation and the most promising ones for sensory training. The overall aim is to synthesise existing literature on time in schizophrenia linking psychopathology, psychophysics, and technology to help future developments.

Expression of type 1 cannabinoid receptor gene in bipolar disorder.

BACKGROUND: The Endocannabinoid System (ECBs) may have a crucial role in bipolar disorder (BD). Previous reports have not detected abnormalities in the expression of the cannabinoid receptor gene CNR1, encoding for CB1. However, we hypothesized that differentiating between mania and depression may uncover differences in CNR1 expression levels. METHODS: We recruited 44 subjects with BD type I (BD-I), in mania (n = 22) and depression (n = 22) and 25 Healthy Controls (HC). CNR1 gene expression was analyzed using a quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction from peripheral blood mononuclear cells. Data were analyzed using frequentist non-parametric and Bayesian approaches (generalized location-scale model based on lognormal and gamma distributions). RESULTS: Using the frequentist non-parametric approach, the depression group had lower CNR1 expression compared to the mania group (p = 0.004). In addition, there was a negative correlation between CNR1 expression and Hamilton Depression Scale score (rho = -0.37; p = 0.007). Bayesian analyses further revealed that CNR1 expression in the mania group was higher and less variable than among HC (>95% probability), while CNR1 expression in the depression group was lower and more variable than among HC (100% probability). LIMITATIONS: Lack of participants with bipolar disorder in the euthymic phase, lack of toxicology screening and evaluation of CNR1 variants. CONCLUSION: CNR1 expression is higher and less variable in mania than in depression. It is highly probable that these differences also distinguish individuals in different illness phases from healthy controls. Future studies are needed to clarify the role of the endocannabinoid system in bipolar disorder.

Cannabinoid use and self-injurious behaviours: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: The increasing availability of high-potency cannabis-derived compounds and the use of synthetic cannabinoids may be responsible for severe side effects like cognitive impairment, psychosis or self-injurious behaviours (SIB). In particular, SIB like non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) and deliberate self-harm (DSH) raise growing concern as a possible consequence of cannabis use. However, the research to date has not addressed the relationship between cannabinoid use and SIB systematically. METHODS: We conducted a systematic review on PubMed up to March 2020, using search terms related to cannabinoids and SIB. RESULTS: The search yielded a total of 440 abstracts. Of those, 37 studies published between 1995 and 2020 were eligible for inclusion. Cannabinoid use was significantly associated with SIB at the cross-sectional (OR=1.569, 95%CI [1.167-2.108]) and longitudinal (OR=2.569, 95%CI [2.207-3.256]) level. Chronic use, presence of mental disorders, depressive symptoms, emotional dysregulation and impulsive traits might further increase the likelihood of self-harm in cannabis users. Synthetic cannabinoids may trigger highly destructive SIB mainly through the psychotomimetic properties of these compounds. CONCLUSION: Cannabinoid use was associated with an increased prevalence of self-injury and may act as a causative factor with a duration-dependent manner. Emotional regulation and behavioural impulsivity functions might crucially moderate this association. Future studies should further investigate the mechanisms underlying this association, while exploring potential therapeutic applications of substances modulating the endocannabinoid system.