pubmedvcu

• Dispositional threat sensitivity as a liability for fear-related pathologies: Evidence from a child-aged twin sample July 2, 2025
  Threat sensitivity, an individual difference construct reflecting variation in responsiveness to threats of various types, predicts physiological reactivity to aversive stimuli and shares heritable variance with anxiety disorders in adults. However, no research has been conducted yet with youth to examine the heritability of threat sensitivity or evaluate the role of genetic versus environmental influences […]
  Chelsea K Sawyers
• The Landscape of Shared and Divergent Genetic Influences across 14 Psychiatric Disorders June 26, 2025
  Psychiatric disorders display high levels of comorbidity and genetic overlap^(1,2). Genomic methods have shown that even for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, two disorders long-thought to be etiologically distinct³, the majority of genetic signal is shared⁴. Furthermore, recent cross-disorder analyses have uncovered over a hundred pleiotropic loci shared across eight disorders⁵. However, the full scope of […]
  Andrew D Grotzinger
• Evaluation of a 20-Item Version of the Trauma-Related Drinking to Cope Questionnaire June 26, 2025
  CONCLUSION: These findings highlight the TRD-20 as a useful measure for determining an individual's PTSD-specific drinking motives, which carries implications for improving understanding and treatment of PTSD-AUD comorbidity.
  Sage E Hawn
• The Mediating Role of Social and Environmental Determinants of Health in the Association Between Race and Preterm Birth Risk June 16, 2025
  Objective: To evaluate the mediating role of social and environmental determinants of health (SEDH) in the relationship between self-identified race and preterm birth risk. Methods: Data on birth outcomes and five broad domains of SEDH were obtained from the Pregnancy, Race, Environment, Genes study, a prospective cohort of pregnant women (50% Black American) in Richmond, […]
  Julia J Brittain
• Testing the causal impact of plasma amyloid on total Tau using a genetically informative sample of adult male twins June 9, 2025
  The amyloid cascade hypothesis predicts that amyloid-beta (Aβ) aggregation drives tau tangle accumulation. We tested competing causal and non-causal hypotheses regarding the direction of causation between Aβ40 and Aβ42 and total Tau (t-Tau) plasma biomarkers. Plasma Aβ40, Aβ42, t-Tau, and neurofilament light chain (NFL) were measured in 1,035 men (mean = 67.0 years) using Simoa […]
  Nathan A Gillespie
• Missing data approaches for longitudinal neuroimaging research: Examples from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study® May 25, 2025
  This paper addresses the challenges of managing missing values within expansive longitudinal neuroimaging datasets, using the specific example of data derived from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study^(®). The conventional listwise deletion method, while widely used, is not recommended due to the risk that substantial bias can potentially be introduced with this method. […]
  Lin Li
• Childhood Trauma and <em>APOEε4</em> are Associated with Adolescent Brain Function, Posttraumatic Stress, and Alcohol-related Outcomes May 19, 2025
  Childhood trauma affects neurodevelopment and lifelong risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol use disorder (AUD). Changes in brain structures and function are observed in young carriers of APOEε4, the genetic factor most associated with Alzheimer's disease. Longitudinal studies of APOEε4, childhood trauma, and neural connectivity in adolescence have not been explored. We studied […]
  Zoe E Neale
• Genetic Links Between Subcortical Brain Morphometry and Suicide Attempt Risk in Children and Adults May 14, 2025
  Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have uncovered genetic variants associated with suicide attempt (SA) risk and regional brain volumes (RBVs). However, the extent of their genetic overlap remains unclear. To address this, we investigated whether the genetic architecture of SA and various RBVs (i.e., caudate nucleus, hippocampus, brainstem, ventral diencephalon, thalamus, globus pallidus, putamen, nucleus accumbens, […]
  Zuriel Ceja
• A history of metaphorical brain talk in psychiatry May 13, 2025
  From the very beginnings of our field in the late 18th century, psychiatrists have engaged, often extensively, in "metaphorical brain talk" - rephrasing descriptions of mental processes in unconfirmed brain metaphors (e.g., "diseased working of the brain convolutions"). In the late 19th century, Kraepelin criticized the later developments of such approaches, termed "brain mythology" by […]
  Kenneth S Kendler
• The Impact of a Registry-Based Environmental Risk Score on Episodes of Alcohol Use Disorder and Drug Use Disorder in Swedish National Samples May 8, 2025
  CONCLUSIONS: Valid measures of environmental risks that predispose to AUD and DUD can be assessed from SLEs obtained from high quality national registry data. Importantly, this method avoids prior assessment problems of accurate dating and recall bias and can be performed in large samples.
  Kenneth S Kendler
• The relationship between parenting behavior, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempt across two population-based samples of adolescents May 7, 2025
  We examined the relationship between parenting, suicidal ideation (SI), and the transition from SI to suicide attempt (SA), and whether parenting behaviors moderate the associations of genetic liability for SA and/or painful and provocative events (PPEs) with SA risk. Participants included 6153 adolescents (48.3 % female, M(age) at baseline = 9.47 years, followed over 3 […]
  Mallory Stephenson
• Familial coaggregation and shared familiality of functional and internalizing disorders in the Lifelines cohort May 2, 2025
  CONCLUSIONS: There is a clear familial component to FDs, which is partially shared with IDs. This suggests that IDs and FDs share both genetic and family-environmental risk factors. Of the FDs, ME/CFS is most closely related to IDs.
  Martje Bos
• A multivariate Swedish national twin-sibling study in women of major depression, anxiety disorder, fibromyalgia, and irritable bowel syndrome April 28, 2025
  CONCLUSIONS: In women, FSDs and IPDs shared a moderate proportion of their genetic risk factors, greater for IBS than for FM. However, the genetic sharing between IBS and FM was less than between MD and AD, suggesting that FSDs do not form a highly genetically coherent group of disorders. The shared environment made a modest […]
  Kenneth S Kendler
• The roles of adverse childhood experiences and genetic liability in risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors: A factor analytic approach April 28, 2025
  Adverse childhood experiences are consistently implicated in risk for suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STB). However, the nature of those experiences and their specific associations with STB remain unclear. The diathesis-stress model also suggests that the influence of adverse experiences depends on one's genetic liability, though results using measures of aggregate genetic risk need additional empirical […]
  Séverine Lannoy
• Financial Stressors and Risk of Suicidal Behavior in a Swedish National Cohort April 22, 2025
  Although financial stressors are implicated as risk factors for suicidal behavior, these associations might be confounded by other factors. Furthermore, a move toward high-risk subgroup definition is necessary. The authors used Swedish national registry data to examine the associations between receipt of social welfare, unemployment benefits, or early retirement (N = 627,745-2,260,753) with suicidal behavior […]
  Alexis C Edwards
• Exploring the implications of case selection methods for psychiatric molecular genetic studies April 20, 2025
  Researchers selecting probands for molecular genetic studies confront a range of sampling issues with modest empirical guidance. In this paper, using cases of major depression (MD), anxiety disorders (AD) alcohol use disorder (AUD), drug use disorder (DUD), bipolar disorder (BD) and schizophrenia (SZ) from a large population cohort of all native Swedes born 1940-2003, we […]
  Kenneth S Kendler
• The moderation of genetic risk for ten major psychiatric and substance use disorders by the genetic aptitude for educational attainment April 17, 2025
  We seek to clarify the impact of the Genetic Aptitude for Educational Attainment (GAEA) on risk for 10 psychiatric disorders divided into 4 groups: Internalizing, Externalizing, Eating/Compulsive and Psychotic. Educational attainment and psychiatric and substance use disorder information were obtained from national Swedish registries. GAEA and disorder-specific family genetic risk score (FGRS) were calculated from […]
  Kenneth S Kendler
• Genetic and Environmental Influences on Fear Learning and Generalization April 2, 2025
  Understanding how excessive fear responses develop and persist is critical. Research using laboratory models of fear learning offers valuable insights on etiology. In this study, the influence of genetic and environmental etiology of baseline startle response and fear learning was examined, focusing on fear acquisition and generalization processes using the fear conditioning paradigm measuring fear-potentiated […]
  Christina M Sheerin
• What is the role of paternal genetic transmission on risk for PTSD and internalizing and externalizing disorders? March 10, 2025
  CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first to show cross-generation genetic transmission for PTSD using the MHSFDF design. The pattern of cross-disorder genetic risk broadly supported an internalizing versus externalizing disorder split.
  Ananda B Amstadter
• Trans-ancestry Genome-Wide Analyses in UK Biobank Yield Novel Risk Loci for Major Depression March 10, 2025
  Most genome-wide association studies (GWASs) of depression focus on broad, heterogeneous outcomes, limiting the discovery of genomic risk loci specific to major depressive disorder (MDD). Previous UK Biobank (UKB) studies had limited ability to pinpoint MDD-associated loci due to a smaller sample with strictly defined MDD outcomes and further exclusion of many participants based on […]
  Madhurbain Singh