Proton irradiation induces persistent and tissue-specific DNA methylation changes in the left ventricle and hippocampus

Measures, completers, and wave of investigations. Figure S1. Controlling for IQ in the final model. Latent factors EF, ToM, ASD, and ADHD were regressed on IQ in the full final model (Figure A), nonsignificant paths were represented by dotted lines. Figure S2. Model including only measures from collected from the adolescents at the age of 14–16 years old. (DOCX 488 kb

Evaluation of pilot community art-based workshops designed for Ukrainian refugee children

ObjectivesApproximately 8 million Ukrainians have been displaced by the war in Ukraine and five million children had their education disrupted. Here, we report an evaluation of (1) the feasibility (i.e., recruitment), (2) the acceptability (i.e., attendance, participants' views) and (3) the influence of a pilot community art-based project on the well-being, health behaviour and socialisation of Ukrainian refugee children in London, UK.MethodsTwenty-two refugee children aged 4–14 years from St Mary's Ukrainian school in London took part in five weekly art workshop group sessions led by a team of volunteer independent artists based in a community art studio in West London in collaboration with Children and War UK. Analyses were conducted on measures of the children's psychological well-being, health behaviour, and socialisation; collected from participating children and their parents through the workshops.ResultsThe community art workshops received sufficient interest from parents during recruitment. Child participants and their parents expressed overwhelmingly positive views and high satisfaction towards the workshops and their activities. While the workshops were conducted without a control group, changes in psychological well-being and health behaviour and socialisation were in the expected direction. The workshops were associated with reduced impact of intrusive re-experiencing of traumatic events (p = .021), negative emotion (ps = .006–.043; rated by children and by their parents, respectively), and sleep disturbance (p = .015). Mood and motivational states increase relative to before activities within sessions (ps = .001–.023).ConclusionsThe artist-led workshops are a valuable community project associated with high satisfaction and potentially increased well-being in Ukrainian refugee children. A provision for a larger number of participants should be considered

Risk and protective factors for self-harm and suicide in children and adolescents: a systematic review and meta-analysis protocol.

INTRODUCTION Self-harm and suicide are major public health concerns among children and adolescents. Many risk and protective factors for suicide and self-harm have been identified and reported in the literature. However, the capacity of these identified risk and protective factors to guide assessment and management is limited due to their great number. This protocol describes an ongoing systematic review and meta-analysis which aims to examine longitudinal studies of risk factors for self-harm and suicide in children and adolescents, to provide a comparison of the strengths of association of the various risk factors for self-harm and suicide and to shed light on those that require further investigation. METHODS AND ANALYSIS We perform a systematic search of the literature using the databases EMBASE, PsycINFO, Medline, CINAHL and HMIC from inception up to 28 October 2020, and the search will be updated before the systematic review publication. Additionally, we will contact experts in the field, including principal investigators whose peer-reviewed publications are included in our systematic review as well as investigators from our extensive research network, and we will search the reference lists of relevant reviews to retrieve any articles that were not identified in our search. We will extract relevant data and present a narrative synthesis and combine the results in meta-analyses where there are sufficient data. We will assess the risk of bias for each study using the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale and present a summary of the quantity and the quality of the evidence for each risk or protective factor. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION Ethical approval will not be sought as this is a systematic review of the literature. Results will be published in mental health journals and presented at conferences focused on suicide prevention. PROSPERO REGISTRATION NUMBER CRD42021228212

Neural Correlates of Duration Discrimination in Young Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Their Comorbid Presentation

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often co-occur and share neurocognitive deficits. One such shared impairment is in duration discrimination. However, no studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have investigated whether these duration discrimination deficits are underpinned by the same or different underlying neurofunctional processes. In this study, we used fMRI to compare the neurofunctional correlates of duration discrimination between young adult males with ASD (n = 23), ADHD (n = 25), the comorbid condition of ASD+ADHD (n = 24), and typical development (TD, n = 26) using both region of interest (ROI) and whole brain analyses. Both the ROI and the whole-brain analyses showed that the comorbid ASD+ADHD group compared to controls, and for the ROI analysis relative to the other patient groups, had significant under-activation in right inferior frontal cortex (IFG) a key region for duration discrimination that is typically under-activated in boys with ADHD. The findings show that in young adult males with pure ASD, pure ADHD and comorbid ASD+ADHD with no intellectual disability, only the comorbid group demonstrates neurofunctional deficits in a typical duration discrimination region

Focusing on Comorbidity A Novel Meta-Analytic Approach and Protocol to Disentangle the Specific Neuroanatomy of Co-occurring Mental Disorders

Background: In mental health, comorbidities are the norm rather than the exception. However, current meta-analytic methods for summarizing the neural correlates of mental disorders do not consider comorbidities, reducing them to a source of noise and bias rather than benefitting from their valuable information. Objectives: We describe and validate a novel neuroimaging meta-analytic approach that focuses on comorbidities. In addition, we present the protocol for a meta-analysis of all major mental disorders and their comorbidities. Methods: The novel approach consists of a modification of Seed-based d Mapping with Permutation of Subject Images (SDM-PSI) in which the linear models have no intercept. As in previous SDM meta-analyses, the dependent variable is the brain anatomical difference between patients and controls in a voxel. However, there is no primary disorder, and the independent variables are the percentages of patients with each disorder and each pair of potentially comorbid disorders. We use simulations to validate and provide an example of this novel approach, which correctly disentangled the abnormalities associated with each disorder and comorbidity. We then describe a protocol for conducting the new meta-analysis of all major mental disorders and their comorbidities. Specifically, we will include all voxel-based morphometry (VBM) studies of mental disorders for which a meta-analysis has already been published, including at least 10 studies. We will use the novel approach to analyze all included studies in two separate single linear models, one for children/adolescents and one for adults. Discussion: The novel approach is a valid method to focus on comorbidities. The meta-analysis will yield a comprehensive atlas of the neuroanatomy of all major mental disorders and their comorbidities, which we hope might help develop potential diagnostic and therapeutic tools

Enhanced behavioral inhibition in restrained eaters

Impulsivity has been found to play a decisive role in both addiction and disordered eating. Behavioral and self-report measures show impulsive tendencies to even occur in non-clinical samples, e.g. restrained eaters. Within this group, these traits interact with high reactivity to food-related cues leading to overeating. The aim of the present study was to investigate if restrained eaters show this behavioral disinhibition specifically in response to food-cues. Participants performed a Go/No-Go-task with stimuli encircled by pictures of high caloric foods or neutral objects. In contrast to our hypotheses, participants with medium-to-high restrained eating made less commission errors in response to both food and neutral pictures than unrestrained eaters. Additionally, participants' inhibitory performance in the high-restrained group were enhanced in the presence of food pictures. Results are in line with expanding evidence of counteractive-control mechanisms when restrained eaters are confronted with tempting food-related cues