Psychotic patients with COMTVal158Met Met alleles were recently found to display more intense psychotic and affective responses to daily life stressors. We aimed to test the hypothesis that the Met allele is implicated in the development of affective and psychotic symptomatology in subjects genetically at risk for schizophrenia, by testing if unaffected first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia who share a Met allele have greater concordance of symptomatology than relatives not sharing a Met allele.

Unaffected relatives (n = 38) were arranged in as many genetically related pairs as possible (n = 26), and Met-sharing between Index Unaffected Subject (IUS) and Related Unaffected Subject (RUS) was assessed. Symptomatology was assessed with the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) total score.

Multilevel regression revealed an interaction between RUS BPRS score and Met-sharing in the model of IUS BPRS score (interaction χ2 = 3.78, p = 0.05). Stratified analyses revealed that IUS–RUS total BPRS scores were significantly associated in the case of Met-sharing (B = 0.57, 95% CI: 0.22–0.93, p = 0.002), but were not when there was no Met-sharing.

These findings support the hypothesis that the Met allele may be involved in the causation of psychopathology, at least in populations with a genetic predisposition to psychosis.

1. 1. Understand the process of migration from a mental health point of view.

2. 2. Learn the role of acculturative stress vis-à-vis mental illness.

SEROQUEL® (quetiapine) is an atypical antipsychotic in the dibenzothiazepine class. Clinical studies have demonstrated consistent efficacy in the treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar mania, and bipolar depression. Further clinical results suggest robust efficacy in the long-term treatment of bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder. This broad spectrum of clinical effect has not been fully predicted based on quetiapine's preclinical pharmacology. However, norquetiapine, a recently discovered major active human metabolite of quetiapine, has unexpected properties that may explain the observed clinical antidepressant and mood-stabilizing effects.

Radioligand binding and functional assays using rat and human tissue were used to characterize receptor interactions. Positron emission tomography (PET) studies performed on cynomolgus monkeys and man explored the relationship between clinically relevant plasma exposures and occupancy at serotonin 5HT2A and dopamine D2 receptors and the norepinephrine transporter (NET).

Norquetiapine had high affinity for and potently inhibited the NET, a property shared by tricyclic antidepressants and SNRIs but not other atypical antipsychotics at clinically relevant doses. In addition, norquetiapine had moderate-to-high affinity for D2, 5HT1A, 5HT2A, and 5HT2C receptors and shared some commonality with SSRIs. PET studies confirmed the properties of norquetiapine including occupancy of D2 and 5HT2A receptors as well as the NET at clinically relevant plasma exposures.

A unique combination of direct and indirect effects at noradrenergic, serotonergic, and dopaminergic receptors by quetiapine and norquetiapine provides a putative mechanism of action for the broad spectrum of clinical efficacy observed with SEROQUEL® in psychiatric disorders.

Emotional regulation, understood as the emotional ability to repair emotional states, is a skill closely linked to adaptation during aging. People who are capable to manage their emotions have greater control over moods, applying adaptive regulation strategies that allow them to maintain positive moods and modify or regulate negative ones. It has been observed that gender can be a relevant variable related to emotional regulation. In this sense, it is considered that women may be more skillful than men to emotional regulation strategies, benefiting from more successful emotional management strategies.

Verify if there are differences in the ability of emotional regulation between older men and women.

The sample consisted of 851 healthy older adults, of whom 299 were men and 554 women. The participants were recruited from elderly leisure centers in the city of Valencia (Spain). To assess emotional regulation, the regulation dimension of the Trait Meta-Mood Scale 24 (TMMS-24) was used.

Significant differences were obtained in the emotional regulation dimension based on gender (F1, 851 = 0.075, p = 0.010), finding higher levels in women than in men (3.64 vs. 3.49).

There is an apparent advantage of women in relation to emotional regulation, showing more skill than men in the management of emotional states. This is an important finding considering the impact of emotional regulation on adaptation during aging. This adaptative advantage has a greate importance in generation pleasant emotional states that contribute to healthy aging.

No significant relationships.

Social Media might represent an amazing and valuable source of information on mental health and well-being. Several researches revealed that adolescents aged 13 to 17 years old go “online” daily or stay online “almost constantly”.

The aim of this project is to identify distress in pre-clinical stages using Social media screening methods. The system can be modelled to centre on different several health-related topics.

We created a digital system able to analyse scripts written by adolescents on Twitter. InsideOut works using machine learning techniques and computational linguistic items to catch significant and sense of written messages and it improves its performances with iterations. The system is able to automatically identify semantic information relevant to different topics: in this case “distress in teenagers”.

The task of our system is considered correct when it is able to identify triples of Life Event, Sentiment and Experience of a tweet in agreement with the Gold Standard established among the annotators. The system has around 70% of accuracy in identifying triples. The analysis has been carried out both in Italian and English collecting over 4 million Italian tweets and 30 million English tweets. Comparative analysis with self-report questionnaires show that tweet analysis is able to suggest similar statistics.

This study analyzed contents of messages posted on Social Media Twitter meta-dating them with psychological and health-related information. Using InsideOut, we can plan clinical intervention in district and regions where high levels of uneasiness are revealed.

Clinical studies demonstrate that quetiapine is efficacious in schizophrenia, bipolar mania, bipolar depression, major depressive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder. The pharmacological basis for this broad range of clinical effects is not completely understood. The current experiments evaluated pharmacological assays investigating the receptor-binding characteristics of quetiapine and norquetiapine (the major human metabolite) and compared these with other atypical antipsychotics and standard antidepressants.

In vitro receptor-binding assays utilized cloned human targets including norepinephrine transporter (NET), dopamine D2 receptor, and serotonin 5-HT1A, 5-HT2A, and 5-HT2C receptors stably expressed in CHO or HEK cell lines. In vitro functional studies included uptake-inhibition assays for NET and GTPgammaS assays for D2/D3 antagonist and 5-HT1A agonist activity.

Norquetiapine demonstrated high affinity at 5-HT2A receptors (5 nM) and moderate/high affinity at NET (29 nM) and 5-HT2C receptors (76 nM), while quetiapine had moderate affinity at 5-HT2A receptors (29 nM), weak affinity at 5-HT2C receptors (2800 nM), and lacked appreciable affinity at NET. Both quetiapine and norquetiapine showed moderate affinity at D2 receptors (56 nM and 59 nM, respectively) with moderate/low-potency antagonist activity. Both quetiapine and norquetiapine exhibited low affinity at 5-HT1A receptors (1800 nM and 570 nM, respectively) with low-potency agonist activity.

These experiments confirm that quetiapine-norquetiapine have multiple pharmacological effects at targets associated with psychotropic drug action. This combination of effects by quetiapine-norquetiapine at dopaminergic, serotonergic, and noradrenergic targets may explain the antipsychotic, antidepressant, and anxiolytic properties of quetiapine.

Supported by funding from AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP.

Suicide is major cause of death in the IDF. The Suicide Prevention Program (SPP) led to significant reduction in yearly rates of suicide. A study regarding demographic changes of those who died by suicide was done to further investigate its affect.

Nested case control retrospective study based on medical and HR data gathered between 1992 and 2016. Participants were divided into four groups: soldiers who died by suicide and non-suicidal soldiers, before and after SPP implementation.

Multivariate analysis with suicide as the binary logistic dependent variable before and after implementation of the SPP among four groups revealed that before SPP the OR was higher for males (OR, 7.885; 95% CI, 5.071–12.259;p < 0.001) compared to after (OR, 3.281; 95% CI, 1.600–6.726; p = 0.001). For support unit soldiers the values before SPP were OR, 14.962 and 95% CI, 8.427–26.563 (p < 0.001) while after SPP they were OR, 6.304 and 95% CI, 3.334–11.919 (p < 0.001). After SPP, OR was higher for psychiatric diagnosis at recruitment (OR, 5.830; 95% CI, 2.046–16.612; p = 0.001) than before SPP (OR, 2.422; 95% CI, 1.526–3.842; p < 0.001).For soldiers from Ethiopian ethnicity, after SPP values were higher (OR, 8.130 and 95% CI, 2.868–23.047 (p < 0.001) compared to before (OR, 3.522; 95% CI, 1.2891–6.650; p < 0.001). For those of Druse religion before values (OR, 4.027; 95% CI, 2.211–7.331; p < 0.001) were significant but not after.

While the SPP succeeded in reducing risk of suicide in situational factors, dispositional risk factors were not affected by the SPP. The OR decreased in critical masses and rose in unique and smaller groups.

Alcohol relapse is often occurring to regulate negative affect during withdrawal. On the neurobiological level, alcoholism is associated with gray matter (GM) abnormalities in regions that regulate emotional experience such as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). However, no study to our knowledge has investigated the neurobiological unpinning of affect in alcoholism at early withdrawal and the associations of OFC volume with long-term relapse risk.

One hundred and eighty-two participants were included, 95 recently detoxified alcohol dependent patients (ADP) and 87 healthy controls (HC). We measured affective states using the positive and negative affect schedule (PANAS). We collected T1-weighted brain structural images and performed Voxel-based morphometry (VBM).

Findings revealed GM volume decrease in alcoholics in the prefrontal cortex (including medial OFC), anterior cingulate gyrus, and insula. GM volume in the medial OFC was positively associated with NA in the ADP group. Cox regression analysis predicted that risk to heavy relapse at 6 months increases with decreased GM volume in the medial OFC.

Negative affect during alcohol withdrawal was positively associated with OFC volume. What is more, increased GM volume in the OFC also moderated risk to heavy relapse at 6 months. Reduced GM in the OFC poses as risk to recovery from alcohol dependence and provides valuable insights into transient negative affect states during withdrawal that can trigger relapse. Implications exist for therapeutic interventions signifying the OFC as a neurobiological marker to relapse and could explain the inability of ADP to regulate internal negative affective states.

Antipsychotic drug use among children and adolescents is increasing, and there is growing concern about off-label use and adverse effects. The present study aims to investigate the incidence, psychiatric co-morbidity and pharmacological treatment of severe mental disorder in Norwegian children and adolescents.

We obtained data on mental disorders from the Norwegian Patient Registry on 0–18 year olds who during 2009–2011 were diagnosed for the first time with schizophrenia-like disorder (International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision codes F20-F29), bipolar disorder (F30-F31), or severe depressive episode with psychotic symptoms (F32.3 or F33.3). Data on filled prescriptions for psychotropic drugs were obtained from the Norwegian Prescription Database.

A total of 884 children and adolescents (25.1 per 100 000 person years) were first time diagnosed with schizophrenia-like disorder (12.6 per 100 000 person years), bipolar disorder (9.2 per 100 000 person years), or severe depressive episode with psychotic symptoms (3.3 per 100 000 person years) during 2009–2011. The most common co-morbid mental disorders were depressive (38.1%) and anxiety disorders (31.2%). Antipsychotic drugs were prescribed to 62.4% of the patients, 72.0% of the schizophrenia-like disorder patients, 51.7% of the bipolar disorder patients, and 55.4% of the patients with psychotic depression. The most commonly prescribed drugs were quetiapine (29.5%), aripiprazole (19.6%), olanzapine (17.3%), and risperidone (16.6%).

When a severe mental disorder was diagnosed in children and adolescents, the patient was usually also prescribed antipsychotic medication. Clinicians must be aware of the high prevalence of depressive and anxiety disorders among early psychosis patients.

Recent imaging studies of large datasets suggested that psychiatric disorders have common biological substrates. This study aimed to identify all the common neural substrates with connectomic abnormalities across four major psychiatric disorders by using the data-driven connectome-wide association method of multivariate distance matrix regression (MDMR).

This study analyzed a resting functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset of 100 patients with schizophrenia, 100 patients with bipolar I disorder, 100 patients with bipolar II disorder, 100 patients with major depressive disorder, and 100 healthy controls (HCs). We calculated a voxel-wise 4,330 × 4,330 matrix of whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) with 8-mm isotropic resolution for each participant and then performed MDMR to identify structures where the overall multivariate pattern of FC was significantly different between each patient group and the HC group. A conjunction analysis was performed to identify common neural regions with FC abnormalities across these four psychiatric disorders.

The conjunction of the MDMR maps revealed that the four groups of patients shared connectomic abnormalities in distributed cortical and subcortical structures, which included bilateral thalamus, cerebellum, frontal pole, supramarginal gyrus, postcentral gyrus, lingual gyrus, lateral occipital cortex, and parahippocampus. The follow-up analysis based on pair-wise FC of these regions demonstrated that these psychiatric disorders also shared similar patterns of FC abnormalities characterized by sensory/subcortical hyperconnectivity, association/subcortical hypoconnectivity, and sensory/association hyperconnectivity.

These findings suggest that major psychiatric disorders share common connectomic abnormalities in distributed cortical and subcortical regions and provide crucial support for the common network hypothesis of major psychiatric disorders.

To examine the association between childhood trauma and work functioning, and to elucidate to what extent this association can be accounted for by depression and/or anxiety.

Data of 1,649 working participants were derived from the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA, n = 2,981). Childhood trauma (emotional neglect, psychological, physical, and sexual abuse before age 16) was assessed with a structured interview and work functioning, in terms of absenteeism and presenteeism, with the Health and Labor Questionnaire Short Form (SF-HLQ) and the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule II (WHODAS-II), respectively. Depressive and/or anxiety disorders were assessed with the Composite Interview Diagnostic Instrument (CIDI). Mediation analyses were conducted.

At baseline, 44.8% reported to have experienced childhood trauma. Workers with the highest childhood trauma level showed significantly (p < 0.001) more absenteeism as well as more presenteeism. Mediation analyses revealed that indirect effects between the childhood trauma index and both work indices were significantly mediated by current depressive disorder (p = 0.023 and p < 0.001, respectively) and current comorbid depression-anxiety (p = 0.020 and p < 0.001, respectively), with the latter accounting for the largest effects (PM = 0.23 and PM = 0.29, respectively). No significant mediating role in this relationship was found for current anxiety disorder and remitted depressive and/or anxiety disorder.

Persons with childhood trauma have significantly reduced work functioning in terms of absenteeism and presenteeism. This seems to be largely accounted for by current depressive disorders and current comorbid depression-anxiety.