A polygenic/threshold model of psychiatric disorder was first introduced more than 40 years ago by Gottesman and Shields (). They proposed, following on from the seminal work of Falconer (), that what is inherited is not so much a disorder as a liabili… . . . → Read More: Polygenic Heterogeneity: A Complex Model of Genetic Inheritance in Psychiatric Disorders
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For more than a century, clinical investigators have focused on early life as a source of adult psychopathology. Early theories about psychic conflict and toxic parenting have been replaced by more recent formulations of complex interactions of genes a… . . . → Read More: Early Life Programming and Neurodevelopmental Disorders Background: In the neurodevelopmental disorder autism, several neuroimmune abnormalities have been reported. However, it is unknown whether microglial somal volume or density are altered in the cortex and whether any alteration is associated with age o… . . . → Read More: Microglial Activation and Increased Microglial Density Observed in the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex in Autism The last decade has witnessed the emergence of new pharmacotherapy in the treatment of drug and alcohol dependence, although addiction to the psychostimulants cocaine and amphetamines is notoriously resistant to pharmacological approaches that can effe… . . . → Read More: Stress-Related Receptor Targets for Cocaine Addiction Paloyelis et al. () raise two concerns about the statistical methods used in the original article by Scheres et al. (): first, they indicate that analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) is inappropriate when groups differ on the covariate; and second, they sug… . . . → Read More: What We Can and Cannot Conclude About the Relationship Between Steep Temporal Reward Discounting and Hyperactivity-Impulsivity Symptoms in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Background: Timing abilities are critical to the successful management of everyday activities and personal safety, and timing abnormalities have been argued to be fundamental to impulsiveness, a core symptom of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder … . . . → Read More: Neural Substrates of Impaired Sensorimotor Timing in Adult Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Background: Dopamine D3 receptors are involved in the pathophysiology of several neuropsychiatric conditions. [11C]-(+)-PHNO is a radiolabeled D2 and D3 agonist, suitable for imaging the agonist binding sites (denoted D2HIGH and D3) of these receptors … . . . → Read More: Imaging Dopamine D3 Receptors in the Human Brain with Positron Emission Tomography, [11C]PHNO, and a Selective D3 Receptor Antagonist In a timely and interesting study, Scheres et al. () examined the association between attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) subtype and discounting of delayed rewards in real-time. They found that the ADHD-combined subtype group (henceforth A… . . . → Read More: Are Steeper Discounting Rates in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Specifically Associated with Hyperactivity-Impulsivity Symptoms or Is This a Statistical Artifact? Background: Psychostimulants and opiates trigger similar enduring neuroadaptations within the reward circuitry thought to underlie addiction. Transcription factors are key to mediating these enduring behavioral alterations. The facilitation of these ma… . . . → Read More: Glucocorticoid Receptors in Dopaminoceptive Neurons, Key for Cocaine, Are Dispensable for Molecular and Behavioral Morphine Responses Background: Modulation of midbrain dopamine neurons by nicotinic acetylcholine receptors (nAChRs) plays an important role in behavior, cognition, motivation, and reward. Specifically, nAChRs containing ?2 subunits (?2-nAChRs) switch dopamine cells fr… . . . → Read More: Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptors-Alpha Modulate Dopamine Cell Activity Through Nicotinic Receptors Background: Oral naltrexone effectively antagonizes heroin, but patient noncompliance limits its utility; sustained-release preparations may overcome this. Few data are available on optimal blood naltrexone levels for preventing craving and/or return to heroin use. This study assesses various risk factors, including blood naltrexone level, for heroin craving and relapse to illicit opioids.Methods: Heroin-dependent persons from a randomized controlled trial of oral versus implant naltrexone were followed up for 6 months. Thirty-four participants received 50 mg oral naltrexone daily, plus placebo implant; thirty-five participants received a single dose of 2.3 g naltrexone implant, plus daily oral placebo tablets.Results: Compared to oral naltrexone patients, implant naltrexone patients were significantly less likely to use any opioids and had one-fifth the risk of using heroin ? weekly. Risk of ? weekly heroin use increased by 2.5 times at blood naltrexone concentration < .5 ng/mL compared with ? .5 ng/mL, with 3 ng/mL associated with very low risk of use. Craving remained near “floor” levels for implant patients but rebounded to higher levels among oral patients. Lower craving scores (? 20/70) predicted lower relapse risk. Noncompliance with daily oral formula, higher baseline craving, longer history of use, and being younger predicted higher craving at follow-up.Conclusions: Implant naltrexone was better associated with reduced heroin craving and relapse than oral naltrexone. Effective treatment was achieved at blood naltrexone levels of 1 ng/mL to 3 ng/mL, with higher levels associated with greater efficacy. Craving assessment may be valuable in predicting relapse risk allowing timely intervention. . . . → Read More: Risk Factors for Craving and Relapse in Heroin Users Treated with Oral or Implant Naltrexone Background: Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) experience intense emotions and often show a deficiency of emotion regulation skills. Moreover, they display high prevalence rates of self-injurious behavior. Patients report engaging in s… . . . → Read More: Affect Regulation and Pain in Borderline Personality Disorder: A Possible Link to the Understanding of Self-Injury Background: Children raised in institutional settings are exposed to social and environmental circumstances that may deprive them of expected environmental inputs during sensitive periods of brain development that are necessary to foster healthy develo… . . . → Read More: Delayed Maturation in Brain Electrical Activity Partially Explains the Association Between Early Environmental Deprivation and Symptoms of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Background: Acute and chronic stress reinstates drug-seeking behavior. Current animal models show that these effects are contingent (temporally, contextually, or both) on the drug-conditioning environment. To date, no paradigm exists to model the commo… . . . → Read More: Persistent Increases in Cocaine-Seeking Behavior After Acute Exposure to Cold Swim Stress Cannabis, like other drugs of abuse, produces its reinforcing effects by activating the brain “reward” pathways comprising dopamine (DA) neurons in the ventral tegmental area that project to the nucleus accumbens and by increasing DA levels in the … . . . → Read More: Baclofen in Cannabis Dependence Syndrome Background: Long-lasting increases in dendritic spine density and gene expression in the nucleus accumbens and in the ambulatory response to cocaine occur following chronic cocaine treatment. Despite numerous reports of these findings, the molecular me… . . . → Read More: Behavioral and Morphological Responses to Cocaine Require Kalirin7 Background: Optimal decision-making requires that organisms correctly evaluate both the costs and benefits of potential choices. Dopamine transmission within the nucleus accumbens (NAc) has been heavily implicated in reward-learning and decision-making… . . . → Read More: Phasic Nucleus Accumbens Dopamine Release Encodes Effort- and Delay-Related Costs Background: Recent behavioral and psychophysiological studies have provided converging evidence for emotional dysfunction in conduct disorder (CD). Most of these studies focused on male subjects and little is known about emotional processing in female … . . . → Read More: Facial Expression Recognition, Fear Conditioning, and Startle Modulation in Female Subjects with Conduct Disorder We thank the authors for their interest in our article (). They raise a question about gender effects and highlight “it would be informative to look at the results stratified by gender.” We agree that examination of gender effects, where feasible, … . . . → Read More: Response to: Testing the Association Between Smoking in Pregnancy and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in a Novel Design Background: Rats with extended daily cocaine access show escalating cocaine self-administration and behavioral signs of dependence. Regulation of glutamatergic transmission by metabotropic glutamate receptors has emerged as a mechanism in the addictive… . . . → Read More: Behavioral and Functional Evidence of Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor 2/3 and Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor 5 Dysregulation in Cocaine-Escalated Rats: Factor in the Transition to Dependence Background: Parental alcoholism substantially raises risk for offspring alcoholism, an effect thought to be mediated by a dysregulation in impulse control. Adult alcoholics have alterations in the frontostriatal system involved in regulating impulsive … . . . → Read More: Striatal Dysfunction Marks Preexisting Risk and Medial Prefrontal Dysfunction Is Related to Problem Drinking in Children of Alcoholics In a recent report in Biological Psychiatry, Thapar et al. () presented an interesting design to evaluate the association between smoking in pregnancy and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the offspring. . . . → Read More: Testing the Association Between Smoking in Pregnancy and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in a Novel Design Deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the nucleus accumbens has been reported to decrease ratings of depression and anxiety in treatment-resistant depression (). Does DBS in the nucleus accumbens also hold a preventive potential against the development of a … . . . → Read More: Nucleus Accumbens Deep Brain Stimulation Did Not Prevent Suicide Attempt in Tourette Syndrome Background: Orphanin FQ/nociceptin (OFQ/N), the endogenous ligand of the opioid receptor–like (ORL1) receptor, blocks cocaine sensitization in rats. In this study, we tested whether OFQ/N would block sensitization to the motor stimulatory and conditi… . . . → Read More: Orphanin FQ/Nociceptin Not Only Blocks but Also Reverses Behavioral Adaptive Changes Induced by Repeated Cocaine in Mice Background: When making decisions, children with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) are thought to focus on reward and ignore penalty. This is suggested to be associated with a state of low psychophysiological arousal.Methods: This study investigates … . . . → Read More: Impaired Decision Making in Oppositional Defiant Disorder Related to Altered Psychophysiological Responses to Reinforcement Background: The nonapeptide oxytocin (OT) has been repeatedly implicated in processes of parent-infant bonding in animal models; yet, its role in the development of human parenting has received less attention and no research has addressed the involveme… . . . → Read More: Oxytocin and the Development of Parenting in Humans Background: Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are characterized by social, communication, and behavioral deficits and complex genetic etiology. A recent study of 517 ASD families implicated DOCK4 by single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) association and a… . . . → Read More: Characterization of a Family with Rare Deletions in CNTNAP5 and DOCK4 Suggests Novel Risk Loci for Autism and Dyslexia Background: Language delay is a hallmark feature of autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The identification of word boundaries in continuous speech is a critical first step in language acquisition that can be accomplished via statistical learning and relia… . . . → Read More: No Neural Evidence of Statistical Learning During Exposure to Artificial Languages in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders Background: Biochemical diagnostics of ethanol intake would improve alcohol abuse treatment and have applications in clinical trial and public safety settings. Self-reporting of alcohol use has clinical utility but lacks the desired reliability. Previo… . . . → Read More: Classification of Alcohol Abuse by Plasma Protein Biomarkers Background: Nicotine is the principal component of tobacco smoke, resulting in addiction, and recent evidence suggests that damage to the insular cortex (insula) disrupts tobacco addiction in human smokers. However, the effect of an inactivation of thi… . . . → Read More: Granular Insular Cortex Inactivation as a Novel Therapeutic Strategy for Nicotine Addiction Background: Recent neurobiological models on attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as well as findings from imaging studies suggest a crucial involvement of dopaminergic midbrain nuclei, especially the substantia nigra (SN), in the pathogenes… . . . → Read More: Increased Echogenicity of the Substantia Nigra in Children and Adolescents with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Background: A dual representation model of intrusive memory proposes that personally experienced events give rise to two types of representation: an image-based, egocentric representation based on sensory-perceptual features; and a more abstract, alloc… . . . → Read More: Acute Effects of Alcohol on Intrusive Memory Development and Viewpoint Dependence in Spatial Memory Support a Dual Representation Model |
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