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Childhood maltreatment (CM) plays an important role in the development of major depressive disorder (MDD). The aim of this study was to examine whether CM severity and type are associated with MDD-related brain alterations, and how they interact with sex and age.
Methods
Within the ENIGMA-MDD network, severity and subtypes of CM using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire were assessed and structural magnetic resonance imaging data from patients with MDD and healthy controls were analyzed in a mega-analysis comprising a total of 3872 participants aged between 13 and 89 years. Cortical thickness and surface area were extracted at each site using FreeSurfer.
Results
CM severity was associated with reduced cortical thickness in the banks of the superior temporal sulcus and supramarginal gyrus as well as with reduced surface area of the middle temporal lobe. Participants reporting both childhood neglect and abuse had a lower cortical thickness in the inferior parietal lobe, middle temporal lobe, and precuneus compared to participants not exposed to CM. In males only, regardless of diagnosis, CM severity was associated with higher cortical thickness of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex. Finally, a significant interaction between CM and age in predicting thickness was seen across several prefrontal, temporal, and temporo-parietal regions.
Conclusions
Severity and type of CM may impact cortical thickness and surface area. Importantly, CM may influence age-dependent brain maturation, particularly in regions related to the default mode network, perception, and theory of mind.
Let Tx be the length of time to accumulate x units of a resource. In queueing, the resource could be service. We derive a sufficient condition for the process to have stationary increments where Tx is an additive functional of a Markov process. This condition is satisfied in symmetric queues and generalized semi-Markov schemes with insensitive components. As a corollary, we show that the conditional expected response time in a symmetric queue is linear in the service requirement. A similar result holds for the conditional average residence time of an insensitive component in a GSMS.
Two types of conditions are discussed ensuring the equality between long-run time fractions and long-run event fractions of stochastic processes with embedded point processes. Modifications of this equality statement are considered.
A class of two-node queueing networks with general stationary ergodic governing sequence is considered. This means that, in particular, a non-Poissonian arrival process and dependent service times, as well as a non-Bernoulli feedback mechanism are admitted. A mixing condition ensures that the limiting distributions of the number of customers in the nodes observed in continuous time as well as at certain embedded epochs can be expressed by the Palm distributions of appropriately chosen marked point processes. This gives the possibility of connecting the classical concept of embedding with a general point-process approach. Furthermore, it leads to simple proofs of relationships between the limiting distributions. An example is given to illustrate how these relationships can be used to derive explicit formulas for various stationary queueing characteristics.
For M/GI/1/∞ queues with instantaneous Bernoulli feedback time- and customer-stationary characteristics of the number of customers in the system and of the waiting time are investigated. Customer-stationary characteristics are thereby obtained describing the behaviour of the queueing processes, for example, at arrival epochs, at feedback epochs, and at times at which an arbitrary (arriving or fed-back) customer enters the waiting room. The method used to obtain these characteristics consists of simple relationships between them and the time-stationary distribution of the number of customers in the system at an arbitrary point in time. The latter is obtained from the wellknown Pollaczek–Khinchine formula for M/GI/1/∞ queues without feedback.
For several queueing systems, sufficient conditions are given ensuring that from the coincidence of some time-stationary and customer-stationary characteristics of the number of customers in the system such as idle or loss probabilities it follows that the arrival process is Poisson.
In this paper a point-process approach is given for determining the Palm-type (number-weighted) distribution of the size factor of the grains of a stationary grain model in the plane with non-overlapping, identically shaped and identically orientated convex grains starting from a suitably chosen characteristic of the grain model observed in fixed points of the plane.