Family history of alcohol dependence modulates functional neurophysiology in mood/anxiety disorders

Time perspective and family history of alcohol dependence moderate the effect of depression on alcohol dependence: A study in Chinese psychiatric clinics

BACKGROUND

Depression and alcohol dependence (AD) are among the most prevalent psychiatric disorders that commonly co-occur. Therefore, gaining a better grasp of factors related to this comorbidity is particularly interesting for clinicians. Past research has highlighted the significant role that time perspective and family history of alcohol dependence (FH) play in the occurrence of depression and AD. However, much remains unexplored in the understanding of the association between them. This study explored how temporal profile and other sociodemographic characteristics of patients diagnosed with AD impact the severity of depression and AD in them.

METHODS

This study was multi-centered, including 381 patients. Cross-sectional information was collected from both inpatient and outpatient psychiatric clinics in China. Data were acquired using validated self-report scales, including Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test, Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale, and Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory-Chinese version. Multiple linear regression analyzes were conducted to control social demographic variables and construct prediction models to inspect the influence factors of variables. Moderation models were constructed to inspect further interplay between variables using hierarchical regression and PROCESS Macro.

RESULTS

Results showed that of all the patients in Chinese psychiatry clinics diagnosed with AD according to the International Classification of Diseases-10, 59.9% met the criteria of depression according to the questionnaire, and time perspective was correlated with the severity of depression. Furthermore, using regression analysis, we found that time perspective and depression could predict AD severity. The moderating role of a past negative time perspective and FH was confirmed between depression and AD. We found that, in our study, only in patients with FH and relatively moderate to high scores of past negative time perspective could the severity of depression predict the severity of AD. Therefore, during the treatment and care of patients with AD, their depression level, time perspective score, and FH should be considered.

Fifteen years of NESDA Neuroimaging: An overview of results related to clinical profile and bio-social risk factors of major depressive disorder and common anxiety disorders

The longitudinal Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA) Neuroimaging study was set up in 2003 to investigate whether neuroanatomical and functional abnormalities during tasks of primary emotional processing, executive planning and memory formation, and intrinsic brain connectivity are i) shared by individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD) and common anxiety disorders; and ii) characterized by symptomatology-specific abnormalities. Furthermore, questions related to individual variations in vulnerability for onset, comorbidity, and longitudinal course could be investigated. Between 2005 and 2007, 233 individuals fulfilling a diagnosis of MDD, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder and/or generalized anxiety disorder and 68 healthy controls aging between 18 and 57 were invited from the NESDA main sample (n = 2981). An emotional faces processing task, an emotional word-encoding task, and an executive planning task were administered during 3T BOLD-fMRI acquisitions. In addition, resting state BOLD-fMRI was acquired and T1-weighted structural imaging was performed. All participants were invited to participate in the two-year and nine-year follow-up MRI measurement. Fifteen years of NESDA Neuroimaging demonstrated common morphological and neurocognitive abnormalities across individuals with depression and anxiety disorders. It however provided limited support for the idea of more extensive abnormalities in patients suffering from both depression and anxiety, despite their worse prognosis. Risk factors including childhood maltreatment and specific risk genes had an emotion processing modulating effect, apparently stronger than effects of diagnostic labels. Furthermore, brain imaging data, especially during emotion processing seemed valuable for predicting the long-term course of affective disorders, outperforming prediction based on clinical information alone.

Meta-analysis and review of functional neuroimaging differences underlying adolescent vulnerability to substance use

Adolescence is increasingly viewed as a sensitive period in the development of substance use disorders (SUDs). Neurodevelopmental 'dual-risk' theories suggest adolescent vulnerability to problematic substance use is driven by an overactive reward drive mediated by the striatum, and poor cognitive control mediated by the prefrontal cortex. To this end, there has been a growing number of neuroimaging studies examining cognitive and affective neural systems during adolescence for markers of vulnerability to problematic substance use. Here, we perform a coordinate-based meta-analysis on this emerging literature. Twenty-two task-based voxelwise fMRI studies with activation differences associated with substance use vulnerability, representative of approximately 1092 subjects, were identified through a systematic literature search (PubMed, Scopus) and coordinates of activation differences (N ​= ​190) were extracted. Adolescents were defined as 'at-risk' for problematic substance use based on a family history of SUD or through prospective prediction of substance use initiation or escalation. Multilevel kernel density analysis was used to identify the most consistent brain regions associated with adolescent substance use vulnerability. Across the included studies, substance use vulnerability was most reliably associated with activation differences in the striatum, where at-risk adolescents had hyper-activation in the dorsal subdivision (putamen). Follow-up analyses suggested striatal differences were driven by tasks sharing a motivational and/or reward component (e.g., monetary incentive) and common across subgroups of substance use risk (family history and prospective prediction studies). Analyses examining the role of psychiatric comorbidity revealed striatal activation differences were significantly more common in samples whose definition of substance use risk included cooccurring externalizing psychopathology. Furthermore, substance use risk meta-analytic results were no longer significant when excluding these studies, although this may reflect limitations in statistical power. No significant activation differences were observed in prefrontal cortex in any analysis. These results suggest striatal dysfunction, rather than prefrontal, may be a more primary neural feature of adolescent vulnerability to problematic substance use, possibly through a dimension of individual variability shared with externalizing psychopathology. However, our systematic literature search confirms this is still an emerging field. More studies, increased data sharing, and further quantitative integration are necessary for a comprehensive understanding of the neuroimaging markers of adolescent substance use risk.

Preconception Alcohol Increases Offspring Vulnerability to Stress

The effect of preconception drinking by the mother on the life-long health outcomes of her children is not known, and therefore, in this study using an animal model, we determined the impact of preconception alcohol drinking of the mother on offspring stress response during adulthood. In our preconception alcohol exposure model, adult female rats were fed with 6.7% alcohol in their diet for 4 weeks, went without alcohol for 3 weeks and were bred to generate male and female offspring. Preconception alcohol-exposed offsprings' birth weight, body growth, stress response, anxiety-like behaviors, and changes in stress regulatory gene and protein hormone levels were evaluated. In addition, roles of epigenetic mechanisms in preconception alcohol effects were determined. Alcohol feeding three weeks prior to conception significantly affected pregnancy outcomes of female rats, with respect to delivery period and birth weight of offspring, without affecting maternal care behaviors. Preconception alcohol negatively affected offspring adult health, producing an increased stress hormone response to an immune challenge. In addition, preconception alcohol was associated with changes in expression and methylation profiles of stress regulatory genes in various brain areas. These changes in stress regulatory genes were normalized following treatment with a DNA methylation blocker during the postnatal period. These data highlight the novel possibility that preconception alcohol affects the inheritance of stress-related diseases possibly by epigenetic mechanisms.