Multi-omics approaches in psychoneuroimmunology and health research: Conceptual considerations and methodological recommendations

Dynamic Human Gut Microbiome and Immune Shifts During an Immersive Psychosocial Therapeutic Program

Background

Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide yet its underlying factors, particularly microbial associations, are poorly understood.

Methods

We examined the longitudinal interplay between the microbiome and immune system in the context of depression during an immersive psychosocial intervention. 142 multi-omics samples were collected from 52 well-characterized participants before, during, and three months after a nine-day inquiry-based stress reduction program.

Results

We found that depression was associated with both an increased presence of putatively pathogenic bacteria and reduced microbial beta-diversity. Following the intervention, we observed reductions in neuroinflammatory cytokines and improvements in several mental health indicators. Interestingly, participants with a Prevotella-dominant microbiome showed milder symptoms when depressed, along with a more resilient microbiome and more favorable inflammatory cytokine profile, including reduced levels of CXCL-1.

Conclusions

Our findings reveal a protective link between the Prevotella-dominant microbiome and depression, associated with a less inflammatory environment and moderated symptoms. These insights, coupled with observed improvements in neuroinflammatory markers and mental health from the intervention, highlight potential avenues for microbiome-targeted therapies in depression management.

Proteogenomics in Nephrology: A New Frontier in Nephrological Research

Proteogenomics represents a transformative intersection in nephrology, uniting genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics to unravel the molecular intricacies of kidney diseases. This review encapsulates the methodological essence of proteogenomics and its profound implications in chronic kidney disease (CKD) research. We explore the proteogenomic pipeline, highlighting the integrated analysis of genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data and its pivotal role in enhancing our understanding of kidney pathologies. Through case studies, we showcase the application of proteogenomics in clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) and Autosomal Recessive Polycystic Kidney Disease (ARPKD), emphasizing its potential in personalized treatment strategies and biomarker discovery. The review also addresses the challenges in proteogenomic analysis, including data integration complexities and bioinformatics limitations, and proposes solutions for advancing the field. Ultimately, this review underscores the prospective future of proteogenomics in nephrology, particularly in advancing personalized medicine and providing novel therapeutic insights.

Toward a dynamic immunopsychiatry

In this article, we briefly clarify several points regarding immunopsychiatry. In particular, we argue that higher density data and a greater focus on temporal dynamics are both important, and that studies incorporating these features have the potential to greatly advance the field. We also respond to recent comments made on our original article on this topic (Moriarity and Slavich, 2023), including the contention that our perspective on immunopsychiatry is reductionistic. To the contrary, we believe that strong immunopsychiatry studies are highly integrative and include data from multiple major levels of analysis to form a more complete picture of how processes that are relevant for mental health and behavior emerge and dynamically change over time in relation to one another.

Sex Differences in Stress Susceptibility as a Key Mechanism Underlying Depression Risk

PURPOSE OF REVIEW

Although females are at relatively greater risk for a variety of disorders, including depression, the biological mechanisms underlying this striking health disparity remain unclear. To address this issue, we highlight sex differences in stress susceptibility as a key mechanism potentially driving this effect and describe the interacting inflammatory, hormonal, epigenomic, and social-environmental mechanisms involved.

RECENT FINDINGS

Using the Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression as a theoretical framework, women's elevated risk for depression may stem from a tight link between life stress, inflammation, and depression in women. Further, research finds hormonal contraceptive use alters cortisol and inflammatory reactivity to acute stress in ways that may increase depression risk in females. Finally, beyond established epigenetic mechanisms, mothers may transfer risk for depression to their female offspring through stressful family environments, which influence stress generation and stress-related gene expression. Together, these findings provide initial, biologically plausible clues that may help explain the relatively greater risk for depression in females vs. males. Looking forward, much more research is needed to address the longstanding underrepresentation of females in biomedical research on the biology of stress and depression.

The Stress Phenotyping Framework: A multidisciplinary biobehavioral approach for assessing and therapeutically targeting maladaptive stress physiology

Although dysregulated stress biology is becoming increasingly recognized as a key driver of lifelong disparities in chronic disease, we presently have no validated biomarkers of toxic stress physiology; no biological, behavioral, or cognitive treatments specifically focused on normalizing toxic stress processes; and no agreed-upon guidelines for treating stress in the clinic or evaluating the efficacy of interventions that seek to reduce toxic stress and improve human functioning. We address these critical issues by (a) systematically describing key systems and mechanisms that are dysregulated by stress; (b) summarizing indicators, biomarkers, and instruments for assessing stress response systems; and (c) highlighting therapeutic approaches that can be used to normalize stress-related biopsychosocial functioning. We also present a novel multidisciplinary Stress Phenotyping Framework that can bring stress researchers and clinicians one step closer to realizing the goal of using precision medicine-based approaches to prevent and treat stress-associated health problems.

Multi-omics in stress and health research: study designs that will drive the field forward

Despite decades of stress research, there still exist substantial gaps in our understanding of how social, environmental, and biological factors interact and combine with developmental stressor exposures, cognitive appraisals of stressors, and psychosocial coping processes to shape individuals' stress reactivity, health, and disease risk. Relatively new biological profiling approaches, called multi-omics, are helping address these issues by enabling researchers to quantify thousands of molecules from a single blood or tissue sample, thus providing a panoramic snapshot of the molecular processes occurring in an organism from a systems perspective. In this review, we summarize two types of research designs for which multi-omics approaches are best suited, and describe how these approaches can help advance our understanding of stress processes and the development, prevention, and treatment of stress-related pathologies. We first discuss incorporating multi-omics approaches into theory-rich, intensive longitudinal study designs to characterize, in high-resolution, the transition to stress-related multisystem dysfunction and disease throughout development. Next, we discuss how multi-omics approaches should be incorporated into intervention research to better understand the transition from stress-related dysfunction back to health, which can help inform novel precision medicine approaches to managing stress and fostering biopsychosocial resilience. Throughout, we provide concrete recommendations for types of studies that will help advance stress research, and translate multi-omics data into better health and health care.

The sense of loneliness and meaning in life in post-COVID convalescents-a preliminary study

Introduction

The COVID-19 epidemic has provided opportunity to study the impact of a well-defined severe illness on the development of a depressive episode and the associated sense of loneliness and lack of meaning in life.

Materials and Methods

The aim of the study was to assess the occurrence of a reactive depressive episode, the severity of depression, a sense of loneliness and meaning in life in subjects who approximately a year earlier than the date of the study had suffered from a pulmonary form of SARS-CoV-2 infection with radiologically documented interstitial lesions of the lungs, requiring and not requiring hospitalization compared to people who did not develop the disease as a result of infection with that virus. The study included 63 subjects hospitalized for pulmonary lesions, 67 not hospitalized and 60 healthy controls. The severity of depressive symptoms was measured using a Polish-language standardized version of the Beck Depression Inventory, a sense of loneliness using the De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale, and a sense of meaning in life using the Life Attitude Profile-Revised.

Results

The frequency of depression and its severity were found to be the highest in hospitalized patients compared to those treated at home and healthy people. A significant difference in the frequency of depression and its severity between outpatients and healthy people was also observed. The feeling of loneliness turned out to be greatest in the group of hospitalized people. Also, the severity of loneliness was found to be higher in the outpatient compared to the control group. The sense of meaning in life reached its lowest level among hospitalized patients, was moderately reduced in the outpatient group, and typical of the Polish population in the control group.

Discussion

Both pulmonary SARS-CoV-2 infection and hospitalization have been shown to be a risk factor for depression, increased feeling of loneliness and a reduced sense of meaning in life. The effect of trauma and the presence of depression can be the explanation for the increased sense of loneliness after the illness and the partial breakdown of the lifeline manifested by a decrease in the sense of meaning in life.

Using Ecological Momentary Assessments to Study How Daily Fluctuations in Psychological States Impact Stress, Well-Being, and Health

Despite great interest in how dynamic fluctuations in psychological states such as mood, social safety, energy, present-focused attention, and burnout impact stress, well-being, and health, most studies examining these constructs use retrospective assessments with relatively long time-lags. Here, we discuss how ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) address methodological issues associated with retrospective reports to help reveal dynamic associations between psychological states at small timescales that are often missed in stress and health research. In addition to helping researchers characterize daily and within-day fluctuations and temporal dynamics between different health-relevant processes, EMAs can elucidate mechanisms through which interventions reduce stress and enhance well-being. EMAs can also be used to identify changes that precede critical health events, which can in turn be used to deliver ecological momentary interventions, or just-in-time interventions, to help prevent such events from occurring. To enable this work, we provide examples of scales and single-item questions used in EMA studies, recommend study designs and statistical approaches that capitalize on EMA data, and discuss limitations of EMA methods. In doing so, we aim to demonstrate how, when used carefully, EMA methods are well poised to greatly advance our understanding of how intrapersonal dynamics affect stress levels, well-being, and human health.

How Can Experimental Endotoxemia Contribute to Our Understanding of Pain? A Narrative Review

The immune system and the central nervous system exchange information continuously. This communication is a prerequisite for adaptive responses to physiological and psychological stressors. While the implicate relationship between inflammation and pain is increasingly recognized in clinical cohorts, the underlying mechanisms and the possibilities for pharmacological and psychological approaches aimed at neuro-immune communication in pain are not fully understood yet. This calls for preclinical models which build a bridge from clinical research to laboratory research. Experimental models of systemic inflammation (experimental endotoxemia) in humans have been increasingly recognized as an approach to study the direct and causal effects of inflammation on pain perception. This narrative review provides an overview of what experimental endotoxemia studies on pain have been able to clarify so far. We report that experimental endotoxemia results in a reproducible increase in pain sensitivity, particularly for pressure and visceral pain (deep pain), which is reflected in responses of brain areas involved in pain processing. Increased levels of blood inflammatory cytokines are required for this effect, but cytokine levels do not always predict pain intensity. We address sex-dependent differences in immunological responses to endotoxin and discuss why these differences do not necessarily translate to differences in behavioral measures. We summarize psychological and cognitive factors that may moderate pain sensitization driven by immune activation. Together, studying the immune-driven changes in pain during endotoxemia offers a deeper mechanistic understanding of the role of inflammation in chronic pain. Experimental endotoxemia models can specifically help to tease out inflammatory mechanisms underlying individual differences, vulnerabilities, and comorbid psychological problems in pain syndromes. The model offers the opportunity to test the efficacy of interventions, increasing their translational applicability for personalized medical approaches.