Evaluating the development and well-being assessment (DAWBA) in pediatric anxiety and depression.

Enhancing screening practices and developing scalable diagnostic tools are imperative in response to the increasing prevalence of youth mental health challenges. Structured lay psychiatric interviews have emerged as one such promising tool. However, there remains limited research evaluating structured psychiatric interviews, specifically their characterization of internalizing disorders in treatment-seeking youth. This study evaluates the relationship between the Development and Well-Being Assessment (DAWBA), a structured psychiatric interview, and established measures of pediatric anxiety and depression, including the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Disorders (SCARED), the Pediatric Anxiety Rating Scale (PARS), and the Mood and Feelings Questionnaire (MFQ). The study comprised two independent clinical samples of treatment-seeking youth: sample one included 55 youth with anxiety and 29 healthy volunteers (HV), while sample two included 127 youth with Major Depressive Disorder and 73 HVs. We examined the association between the DAWBA band scores, indicating predicted risk for diagnosis, the SCARED and PARS (sample one), and the MFQ (sample two). An exploratory analysis was conducted in a subset of participants to test whether DAWBA band scores predicted the change in anxiety symptoms (SCARED, PARS) across a 12-week course of cognitive behavioral therapy. The results revealed that the DAWBA significantly predicted the SCARED, PARS and MFQ measures at baseline; however, it did not predict changes in anxiety symptoms across treatment. These findings suggest that the DAWBA may be a helpful screening tool for indexing anxiety and depression in treatment-seeking youth but is not especially predictive of longitudinal trajectories in symptomatology across psychotherapy.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of resting-state fMRI in anxiety disorders: Need for data sharing to move the field forward.

Anxiety disorders are among the most prevalent psychiatric disorders. Neuroimaging findings remain uncertain, and resting state functional magnetic resonance (rs-fMRI) connectivity is of particular interest since it is a scalable functional imaging modality. Given heterogeneous past findings for rs-fMRI in anxious individuals, we characterize patterns across anxiety disorders by conducting a systematic review and meta-analysis. Studies were included if they contained at the time of scanning both a healthy group and a patient group. Due to insufficient study numbers, the quantitative meta-analysis only included seed-based studies. We performed an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) analysis that compared patients and healthy volunteers. All analyses were corrected for family-wise error with a cluster-level threshold of p < .05. Patients exhibited hypo-connectivity between the amygdala and the medial frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate cortex, and cingulate gyrus. This finding, however, was not robust to potential file-drawer effects. Though limited by strict inclusion criteria, our results highlight the heterogeneous nature of reported findings. This underscores the need for data sharing when attempting to detect reliable patterns of disruption in brain activity across anxiety disorders.

Association of poorer dietary quality and higher dietary inflammation with greater symptom severity in depressed individuals with appetite loss.

BACKGROUND: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the leading cause of years lived with disability; however, little is known about its etiology to inform treatment. For a subset of MDD patients, appetite change and/or bodily inflammation may play a role in exacerbating symptoms. The goal of this study is to examine whether, relative to healthy comparisons (HC), MDD individuals with increased versus decreased appetite symptoms show a differential relationship between diet quality and inflammation. METHODS: Unmedicated current MDD (n = 61) varying in appetite change (decrease (MDD-DE): n = 39; increase (MDD-IN): n = 22) and HC (n = 42) completed 24-hour dietary recall and state depression/anxiety measures. Healthy eating and dietary inflammatory indices were calculated from dietary reports. Blood samples measured five inflammation-related biomarkers. Analyses investigated between- and within-group differences in the Healthy Eating Index (HEI), the Dietary Inflammatory Index (DII), inflammation-related blood biomarkers, and symptom severity. RESULTS: While both MDD-DE and MDD-IN exhibited lower HEI scores than HC, only MDD-IN showed higher plasma interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (IL-1RA) and interleukin-6 (IL-6) levels than HC. In contrast, MDD-DE exhibited higher DII scores than MDD-IN and HC. Within MDD-DE, greater symptom severity was associated with lower HEI and higher DII. LIMITATIONS: Modest sample sizes and the cross-sectional study design limited power to detect within-MDD effects. CONCLUSIONS: Although MDD, regardless of appetite change, is linked to poorer dietary quality, depression severity was related to dietary characteristics only in subjects who reported appetite loss. Thus, increasing the quality of dietary intake could be a treatment target for some individuals with depression.

Always on my mind: Cross-brain associations of mental health symptoms during simultaneous parent-child scanning.

How parents manifest symptoms of anxiety or depression may affect how children learn to modulate their own distress, thereby influencing the children's risk for developing an anxiety or mood disorder. Conversely, children's mental health symptoms may impact parents' experiences of negative emotions. Therefore, mental health symptoms can have bidirectional effects in parent-child relationships, particularly during moments of distress or frustration (e.g., when a parent or child makes a costly mistake). The present study used simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of parent-adolescent dyads to examine how brain activity when responding to each other's costly errors (i.e., dyadic error processing) may be associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression. While undergoing simultaneous fMRI scans, healthy dyads completed a task involving feigned errors that indicated their family member made a costly mistake. Inter-brain, random-effects multivariate modeling revealed that parents who exhibited decreased medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex activation when viewing their child's costly error response had children with more symptoms of depression and anxiety. Adolescents with increased anterior insula activation when viewing a costly error made by their parent had more anxious parents. These results reveal cross-brain associations between mental health symptomatology and brain activity during parent-child dyadic error processing.