Biological Psychiatry : Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging

BACKGROUND: RASopathies are a group of disorders characterized by pathogenic mutations in the Ras-mitogen-activated protein kinase (Ras/MAPK) signaling pathway. Distinct pathogenic variants in genes encoding proteins in the Ras/MAPK pathway cause Noonan syndrome (NS) and neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), which are associated with increased risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). METHODS: This study examines the effect RASopathies (NS and NF1) has on human neuroanatomy, specifically on surface area (SA), cortical thickness (CT), and subcortical volumes...

BACKGROUND: Better understanding apathy in late-life depression (LLD) would help predicting poor prognosis of the disease such as dementia. Actimetry provides an objective and ecological measure of apathy from patients' daily motor activity. We aimed to determine if patterns of motor activity were associated with apathy and brain connectivity in networks underlying goal-directed behaviors. METHODS: Resting-state functional MRI and diffusion MRI were collected from 38 non-demented LLD subjects...

BACKGROUND: Psilocybin is a widely studied psychedelic substance, which leads to the psychedelic state, a specific altered state of consciousness. To date, the relationship between the psychedelic state's neurobiological and experiential patterns remains under-characterized as they are often analyzed separately. We investigated the relationship between neurobiological and experiential patterns after psilocybin by focusing on the link between dynamic cerebral connectivity and retrospective questionnaire assessment...

BACKGROUND: Adolescence heralds the onset of much psychopathology, which may be conceptualized as an emergence of altered covariation between symptoms and brain measures. Multivariate methods can detect such modes of covariation or latent dimensions, but none specifically relating to psychopathology have yet been found using population-level structural brain data. Using voxel-wise (instead of parcellated) brain data may strengthen latent dimensions' brain-psychosocial relationships, but this creates computational challenges...

BACKGROUND: Postural instability and brain white matter hyperintensities (WMH) are both noted markers of normal aging and alcohol use disorder (AUD). Here, we questioned what variables contribute to sway path/WMH relations in individuals with AUD and healthy control participants. METHOD: The data comprised 404 balance platform sessions, yielding sway path length and MRI acquired cross-sectionally or longitudinally, in 102 control and 158 AUD participants, ages 25-80 years...

BACKGROUND: Family environment has long been known for shaping brain function and psychiatric phenotypes, especially in childhood and adolescence. Accumulating neuroimaging evidence suggests that across different psychiatric disorders, common phenotypes might share common neural bases, indicating latent brain-behavior relationships beyond diagnostic categories. However, the influence of family environment on the brain-behavior relationship from a transdiagnostic perspective remains unknown...

BACKGROUND: Females are more likely to develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than males. Impaired inhibition has been identified as mechanism for PTSD development, but studies on the potential sex differences of this neurobiological mechanism and how it relates to PTSD severity and progression are sparse. Here we examined sex differences in neural activation during response inhibition and PTSD following recent trauma. METHODS: Participants (N= 205, 138 female sex assigned at birth) were recruited from emergency departments within 72 hours of a traumatic event...

BACKGROUND: Childhood anxiety symptoms have been linked with alterations in cognitive control and error-processing, yet the diverse findings on neural markers of anxiety in young children, varying by severity and developmental stages, suggest a need for a wider perspective. Integrating new neural markers with established ones like the Error-Related Negativity (ERN), the Error Positivity (Pe) and frontal theta, could clarify this association. Error-Related Alpha Suppression (ERAS) is a recently proposed index of post-error attentional engagement not yet explored in anxious children...

BACKGROUND: Psychosis and depression patients exhibit widespread neurobiological abnormalities. The analysis of dynamic functional connectivity (dFC), allows for the detection of changes in complex brain activity patterns, providing insights into common and unique processes underlying these disorders. METHODS: In the present study, we report the analysis of dFC in a large patient sample including 127 clinical high-risk patients (CHR), 142 recent-onset psychosis (ROP) patients, 134 recent-onset depression (ROD) patients, and 256 healthy controls (HC)...

BACKGROUND: Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is associated with high rates of trauma, mood, and anxiety disorders. Individual symptoms highly overlap across diagnoses, highlighting the need for a transdiagnostic approach. Further, there is limited research on how transdiagnostic psychopathology impacts the neural correlates of AUD. Thus, we aimed to identify symptom factors spanning diagnoses and how they relate to the neurocircuitry of addiction. METHODS: Eighty-six Veterans with AUD completed self-report measures and reward, incentive salience and cognitive control fMRI tasks...

BACKGROUND: Preterm infants with low birthweight are at heightened risk of developmental sequelae, including neurological and cognitive dysfunction that can persist into adolescence or adulthood. In addition, preterm birth and low birthweight can provoke changes in endocrine and metabolic processes that likely impact brain health throughout development. However, few studies have examined associations among birthweight, pubertal endocrine process, long-term neurological and cognitive development...

BACKGROUND: Neuroimaging studies of major depression have been typically conducted using group-level approaches. However, given interindividual differences in brain systems, there is a need for individualized approaches to brain systems mapping and putative links toward diagnosis, symptoms, and behavior. METHOD: We used an iterative parcellation approach to map individualized brain systems in 328 participants from a multi-site, placebo-controlled clinical trial...

BACKGROUND: Neurocognitive factors including aberrant reward learning, blunted gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), and potentiated stress sensitivity have been linked to anhedonia, a hallmark depressive symptom, possibly in a sex-dependent manner. However, past research has not investigated the putative associations among these factors nor the extent to which they represent trait- or state-based vulnerabilities for depression. METHODS: Young adults with current major depressive disorder, (MDD; N=44), remitted MDD (rMDD; N=42), and healthy control participants (HC; N=44), stratified by sex, underwent magnetic resonance spectroscopy to assess GABA+ (macromolecular contaminated), and then a reward learning task before and after acute stress...

BACKGROUND: Deeper phenotyping may improve our understanding of depression. Because depression is heterogeneous, extracting cognitive signatures associated with severity of depressive symptoms, anhedonia, and affective states is a promising approach. METHODS: Sequential sampling models (SSMs) decomposed behavior from an adaptive approach-avoidance conflict (AAC) task into computational parameters quantifying latent cognitive signatures. Fifty unselected participants completed clinical scales and the AAC task by either approaching or avoiding trials offering monetary rewards and electric shocks...

Clinical trials of psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and DMT have forced a reconsideration of how non-drug factors, like participant expectations, are measured and controlled in mental health research. As doses of these profoundly psychoactive substances increase, so does the difficulty in concealing the treatment condition in the classic double-blind, placebo-controlled trial design. As widespread public enthusiasm for the promise of psychedelic therapy grows, so do questions regarding whether, and how much, trial results are biased by positive expectancy...

BACKGROUND: Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by inattention and/or impulsivity/hyperactivity. ADHD, especially when persisting into adulthood, often includes emotional dysregulation, such as affect lability; however, the neural correlates of emotionality in adults with heterogenous ADHD symptom persistence remain unclear. METHODS: The present study sought to determine shared and distinct functional neuroanatomical profiles of neural circuitry during emotional interference resistance using an Emotional Faces N-Back task while adult participants with persisting (n = 47), desisting (n = 93) or no childhood ADHD symptoms (n = 42) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans...

BACKGROUND: There has been renewed interest in the use of 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine (MDMA) and serotonergic psychedelics in the treatment of multiple psychiatric disorders. Many of these compounds are known to produce prosocial effects, but how these effects relate to therapeutic efficacy and the extent to which prosocial effects are unique to a particular drug class is unknown. METHODS: In this article, we present a narrative overview and compare evidence for the prosocial effects of MDMA and serotonergic psychedelics to elucidate shared mechanisms that may underlie the therapeutic process...

BACKGROUND: Deficits in face emotion recognition are well-documented in depression, but the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Psychophysical observer models provide a way to precisely characterize such mechanisms. Using model-based analyses, we test two hypotheses about how depression might reduce sensitivity to detect face emotion: via a change in selectivity for visual information diagnostic of emotion, versus a change in signal-to-noise ratio in the system performing emotion detection...

BACKGROUND: We sought to identify paths from APOE e4 to neurobehaviors itemized on a neuropsychiatric inventory that involved neuropathologies associated with e4 (amyloid, tau, cerebral amyloid angiopathy, and Lewy bodies) or cognition mediators (memory or global cognitive status), as well as direct paths from e4 to neurobehaviors. METHODS: A total of 1199 cases with available neurobehavioral, cognition and neuropathological data were included. We conducted a series of causal mediation analyses in R in which e4 always served as the independent variable and Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) neurobehavioral items, when included in the mediation, the outcome...

BACKGROUND: Sensory prediction allows the brain to anticipate and parse incoming self-generated sensory information from externally-generated signals. Sensory prediction breakdowns may contribute to perceptual and agency abnormalities in psychosis (hallucinations, delusions). Pons, a central node in a cortico-ponto-cerebellar-thalamo-cortical circuit, is thought to support sensory prediction. Examination of pons connectivity in schizophrenia and its role in sensory prediction abnormalities is lacking...