Ultrasonic vocalisations (USVs) emitted by rats may reflect affective states. Specifically, 50 kHz calls emitted during juvenile playing are associated with positive affect. Given that depression is characterised by profound alterations in this domain, we proposed that USV calls may configure a suitable tool for assessing depressive-like states. Utilising the Flinders Sensitive Line (FSL), a well-established animal model of depression, we assessed USV calls emitted by rats during tickling, a procedure based on juvenile rats’ rough-and-tumble play.

Juvenile FSL rats and their control counterparts, the Flinders Resistant Line (FRL) and Sprague Dawley, were submitted to tickling sessions to imitate rats playing behaviour. The rats were tickled daily for 6 weeks starting at PND21. Tickling sessions were recorded for further acoustic analysis of 50 kHz calls.

Tickling increased 50 kHz calls in all the strains. FSL rats emitted more calls than control strains and exhibited a higher number of flat-trill combination calls.

Tickling is a robust method for inducing 50 kHz USV calls. Analysing USV calls emitted during tickling configurates a suitable method for studying affective states relevant to depression. FSL rats did not present anhedonia but rather higher reward sensitivity, which may underlie their stress vulnerability.

This study aimed to utilise graph theory to explore the functional brain networks in individuals with tic disorders and to investigate resting-state functional connectivity changes in critical brain regions associated with tic disorders.

Participants comprised individuals with tic disorders and age-matched healthy controls, ranging from 6 to 18 years old, all recruited from Korea University Guro Hospital. We ensured a medication-naïve cohort by excluding participants exposed to psychotropic medications for at least three weeks prior to the study. Data included structural and resting-state functional MRI scans, analysed with the CONN-fMRI Functional Connectivity toolbox v20b. The analysis included 22 patients (18 males, 4 females) and 26 controls (14 males, 12 females).

Significantly increased global efficiency was observed in the left inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis among tic disorder patients compared to controls. Furthermore, this region displayed enhanced resting-state functional connectivity with its right counterpart in patients versus controls.

The inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis, known for its inhibitory role, may reflect adaptive functional adjustments in response to tic symptoms. Increased hubness of the inferior frontal gyrus pars opercularis possibly represents functional adjustments in response to tic symptoms. The identified brain region with increased efficiency and connectivity presents a promising avenue for further research into tic expression and control mechanisms.

Folate and cobalamin deficiency or impaired function due to genetic variants in key enzymes have been associated with neuropsychiatric symptoms. The aim of this study was to compare folate and cobalamin status in patients admitted to an acute psychiatric unit to patients from primary health care in order to reveal factors which may be important in the follow-up of patients with mental disorders.

Anonymous blood samples tested for folate, cobalamin, the metabolic marker total homocysteine (tHcy), creatinine and glomerular filtration rate as well as age and gender in patients admitted to a psychiatric acute unit (n = 981) and patients from primary health care (controls) (n = 32,201) were reviewed retrospectively.

Median serum folate was 18% lower and median serum cobalamin was 11% higher in patients with mental disorders compared to controls. Folate deficiency was associated with 54% higher median tHcy levels among patients with mental disorders compared to controls. The prevalence of folate deficiency was 31% and of cobalamin deficiency 6% in patients admitted to a psychiatric acute unit in a Norwegian hospital in 2024.

Folate, but not cobalamin deficiency, was prevalent in Norwegian patients with mental disorders. The higher tHcy levels in folate-deficient patients with mental disorders indicate an impaired folate metabolism, which might be related to genetic factors, such as polymorphisms in the methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) gene. Ensuring a serum folate concentration above 15 nmol/L and a serum cobalamin above 250 pmol/L might improve symptoms in patients with mental disorders.

This study aims to explore the outcome with iv ketamine treatment in a real-world clinical setting, primarily measured as posttreatment days hospitalised.

The psychiatric medical records of 46 patients having received iv ketamine on a psychiatric treatment indication between 2015 and 2018 were retrospectively examined. Analysis comparing the number and duration of hospital admissions before and after ketamine treatment as well as logistic regression analysis to investigate clinical predictors of effectiveness, were performed. To assess patients’ severity of depressed symptoms records were screened for MADRS-S scores.

No significant difference between pre- and posttreatment hospital days (p = 0.170), or number of hospitalisations (p = 0.740) were found. The response rate was 31% and remission rate 21%. None of the predictors showed statistical significance in the logistic model.

Iv ketamine treatment showed effectiveness in reducing depressive symptoms even with complex patients in a real-world clinical setting. However, this did not translate to a reduction in hospitalisation. Highlighting the multifaceted challenges posed when implementing iv ketamine treatment in clinical practice.

The aim of the study was to explore the association between tuberculosis (TB) and common mental disorders (CMD), in an area with high prevalence of TB.

We performed a case–control study of TB patients and unmatched healthy controls, from a demographic surveillance site in Guinea-Bissau. Screening for CMD was performed once for controls and at inclusion and follow-up for TB patients. Kessler 10 (K-10) and a brief version of Hopkins Symptom Checklist 25 (SCL-8d) were used as screening instruments.

571 controls were interviewed and 416 interviews were performed for 215 TB cases. Estimated CMD prevalence at the time of diagnosis of TB was 33.6 % (SCL-8d) and 46.2 % (K-10), compared with 6.8 % (SCL-8d) and 6.7 % (K-10) among controls; adjusted OR 7.18 (95 % CI 4.07 to 12.67) and 14.52 (95 % CI 8.15 to 25.84), respectively. No significant difference in CMD prevalence rates was observed between TB patients, after 6 months of treatment, and controls.

Psychological distress and common mental disorders were more prevalent among TB patients at the time of diagnosis compared with the background population, but after completion of TB treatment no increased prevalence of psychological distress was found.

Phelan-McDermid syndrome is a rare genetic disorder characterised by various neurodevelopmental, medical, and psychiatric issues. Although bipolar disorder-like presentations and catatonia are particularly common, psychosis has also been reported but is less well described. As such, this systematic review sought to characterise the phenomenology of psychosis in Phelan-McDermid syndrome, clarify the association of psychotic symptoms with other neuropsychiatric features of the disorder, and describe antipsychotic treatment response.

A literature search was completed in July 2024 using PubMed and Scopus. Only English-language articles that reported the occurrence of psychotic symptoms in Phelan-McDermid syndrome were eligible for inclusion. 18 articles describing 35 individuals were included in the main analyses. Three additional articles of relevance are discussed separately, as they either provided limited clinical information or did not present data in a patient-specific manner.

The average age of psychosis onset was ∼17 years, and 65% of individuals developed symptoms at or before age 15. ∼69% of individuals also experienced catatonia, ∼81% experienced mood symptoms, and 50% experienced both. Visual hallucinations were the most commonly reported psychotic symptom. Where reported, ∼76% of individuals exhibited at least a partial and/or temporary response to antipsychotic therapy.

Psychotic presentations in Phelan-McDermid syndrome may qualitatively differ from schizophrenia. Although numerous antipsychotics may be efficacious in the treatment of Phelan-McDermid syndrome-associated psychosis, this review most importantly highlights the paucity of available high-quality evidence to guide treatment decisions in this respect, and as such indicates the need for more reports to be published.

Natural language processing (NLP) methods hold promise for improving clinical prediction by utilising information otherwise hidden in the clinical notes of electronic health records. However, clinical practice – as well as the systems and databases in which clinical notes are recorded and stored – change over time. As a consequence, the content of clinical notes may also change over time, which could degrade the performance of prediction models. Despite its importance, the stability of clinical notes over time has rarely been tested.

The lexical stability of clinical notes from the Psychiatric Services of the Central Denmark Region in the period from January 1, 2011, to November 22, 2021 (a total of 14,811,551 clinical notes describing 129,570 patients) was assessed by quantifying sentence length, readability, syntactic complexity and clinical content. Changepoint detection models were used to estimate potential changes in these metrics.

We find lexical stability of the clinical notes over time, with minor deviations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of 2988 data points, 17 possible changepoints (corresponding to 0.6%) were detected. The majority of these were related to the discontinuation of a specific note type.

We find lexical and syntactic stability of clinical notes from psychiatric services over time, which bodes well for the use of NLP for predictive modelling in clinical psychiatry.

Mechanisms of sleep disorders in fibromyalgia (FM) patients, such as insomnia, early morning awakenings and poor quality sleep, have not yet been proven and no consistent and effective treatment is yet available. The aim of this study was to investigate the pineal gland volume and the relationship between total fibre count, total fibre volume and total fibre length of the spinoreticular tract involved in regulation of sleep and wakefulness in terms of the mechanism of sleep disturbance.

This study included only female cases, 31 with fibromyalgia and 31 controls. Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index was used to assess sleep quality. Tractography of targeted pathway from brain diffusion MR images was calculated in Diffusion Studio Imaging (DSI) Studio programme and the volume of the pineal gland was calculated in ITK-SNAP programme.

The mean volume of the pineal gland was higher in control group (218.84 ± 64.45 mm3) than in fibromyalgia group (174.77 ± 48.65 mm3), which was statistically significant (p = 0.004). However, there was no statistically significant difference between two groups in total spinoreticular tract (TSRT), total volume (TSRTV), TSRT fractional anisotropy, TSRT mean diffusion, TSRT axial diffusion and TSRT radial diffusion of spinoreticular tract, which is involved in the regulation of sleep and wakefulness (p > 0.05).

In conclusion, it is thought that the endocrine system may be more related to sleep disturbance in individuals with FM than central nervous system. Therefore, we believe that it may be more appropriate to work on the endocrine system rather than neural system in the treatment of sleep disturbance in patients with FM.

We previously reported that dual injections of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) in mice constitute a valuable tool for investigating the contribution of inflammation to psychotic disorders. The present study investigated how immune activation affects the kynurenine pathway and rat behaviour of relevance for psychotic disorders.

Male Sprague Dawley rats were treated with either dual injections of LPS (0.5 mg/kg + 0.5 mg/kg, i.p.) or dual injections of saline. Twenty-four hours after the second injection, behavioural tests were carried out, including locomotor activity test, fear conditioning test, spontaneous alternation Y-maze test, and novel object recognition test. In a separate batch of animals, in vivo striatal microdialysis was performed, and tryptophan, kynurenine, quinolinic acid, and kynurenic acid (KYNA) in the dialysate were measured using ultra-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS).

Dual-LPS treatment decreased spontaneous locomotion, exaggerated d-amphetamine-induced locomotor activity, and impaired recognition memory in male Sprague-Dawley rats. In vivo microdialysis showed that dual-LPS treatment elicited metabolic disturbances in the kynurenine pathway with increased extracellular levels of kynurenine and KYNA in the striatum.

The present study further supports the feasibility of using the dual-LPS model to investigate inflammation-related psychotic disorders and cognitive impairments.

Chronic stress responses can lead to physical and behavioural health problems, often experienced and observed in the care of people with intellectual disabilities or people with dementia. Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a bio-signal for stress, which can be measured by wearables and thereby support stress management. However, the how, when and to what extent patients and healthcare providers can benefit is unclear. This study aims to create an overview of available wearables enabling the detection of perceived stress by using EDA.

Following the PRISMA-SCR protocol for scoping reviews, four databases were included in the search of peer-reviewed studies published between 2012 and 2022, reporting detection of EDA in relation to self-reported stress or stress-related behaviours. Type of wearable, bodily location, research population, context, stressor type and the reported relationship between EDA and perceived stress were extracted.

Of the 74 included studies, the majority included healthy subjects in laboratory situations. Field studies and studies using machine learning (ML) to predict stress have increased in the last years. EDA is most often measured on the wrist, with offline data processing. Studies predicting perceived stress or stress-related behaviour using EDA features, reported accuracies between 42% and 100% with an average of 82.6%. Of these studies, the majority used ML.

Wearable EDA sensors are promising in detecting perceived stress. Field studies with relevant populations in a health or care context are lacking. Future studies should focus on the application of EDA-measuring wearables in real-life situations to support stress management.

Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC) is a genetic neurodegenerative lysosomal storage disorder commonly associated with psychiatric symptoms and delays to accurate diagnosis and treatment. This study investigated biomarker levels and diagnostic utility of plasma neurofilament light chain (NfL) and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) in NPC compared to healthy controls.

Patients with NPC were recruited from a specialist assessment and management service. Data was available from an age and sex-matched healthy control group. NfL and GFAP were measured on Quanterix Simoa HD-X analysers and groups compared using generalised linear models. NfL levels were compared to, and percentiles derived from, recently developed NfL reference ranges.

Plasma NfL was significantly elevated in 11 patients with NPC compared to 25 controls (mean 17.1 vs. 7.4 pg/ml, p < 0.001), and reference ranges (all >98th percentile). NfL distinguished NPC from controls with high accuracy. GFAP levels were not elevated in NPC (66.6 vs. 75.1 pg/ml).

The study adds important evidence on the potential diagnostic utility of plasma NfL in NPC, extends the literature of NfL as a diagnostic tool to differentiate neurodegenerative from primary psychiatric disorders, and adds support to the pathology in NPC primarily involving neuronal, particularly axonal, degeneration.