Dear colleagues,
It is my great pleasure to introduce to you the second issue of 2018 featuring original research on treatment options and biomarkers in child psychiatry.
Bonvicini and colleagues review the genetic markers involved in children and adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In children, associations were detected in dopaminergic and neurodevelopmental genes while in adults circadian rhythm and neurodevelopmental/neurite outgrowth network genes were found associative. Commonly found genes between children and adults were genes involved in oxidative stress. Further studies are needed in order to make firmer conclusions that might someday prove useful in prediction of the disorder.
Massat et al., aimed to replicate previous hypotheses of reduced motor response inhibition (RI) networks in ADHD. Contrary to previous findings, the authors found increased neural activity during successful response inhibition related network involving pathways between the basal ganglia and the cortex. Furthermore, they found reduced grey matter volume in the left caudate paralleling higher functional responses. At this point, reduced activity in RI cerebral networks cannot be considered as a systematic biomarker for ADHD.
Percinel and co-workers assessed emotion recognition and regulation skills of children with exogenous obesity. Children with obesity had lower scores on the Faces Test and Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test along with greater difficulty in emotional regulation skills. The authors conclude, that with increased understanding of emotional recognition and regulation in children with obesity may improve social adaptation and help treating their disorder.
Sato et al., propose a novel method to assess brain networks based on graph theory and machine learning to examine association between abnormal brain functional connectivity and psychopathology in children. It emerged that children with atypical brain network organization had higher levels of psychopathology. To conclude, combining graph theory methods and one-class support vector machine is promising to examine neurodevelopment and potentially useful in understanding deviations leading to mental disorders.
Buse and colleagues investigated the functional neuroanatomical modulators of attention allocation towards predictable versus unpredictable stimuli in boys with Tourette syndrome (TS). Boys with TS showed altered reactions towards predictable versus unpredictable stimuli in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Additionally, they showed stronger ACC activation during harmonic chords which was associated with greater tic severity. Their findings indicate altered allocation of attention towards those stimuli.
Geller et al. assessed neuropsychological performance in adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Adolescents with OCD underperformed on tasks assessing processing speed in comparison to healthy controls. They showed intact performance on memory and executive functions tasks. These findings suggest relative weaknesses that may be overlooked that may be important in clinical and school settings.
In a brief report, Koenig and colleagues examined longitudinal covariance of borderline personality disorder (BPD) symptoms with cardiac function in non-suicidal self-injury adolescents (NSSI). Patients had reduction of NSSI, depressive symptoms and increased level of functioning. Changes in BPD were associated with changes in cardiac function. Clinical studies are required to assess the usefulness of cardiac markers to monitor treatment outcome in adolescents with BPD.
Yours sincerely,
Siegfried Kasper, MD
Chief Editor