Diagnostic Biomarker Hsa_circ_0126218 and Functioning Prediction in Peripheral Blood Monocular Cells of Female Patients With Major Depressive Disorder.

INTRODUCTION: Although major depressive diroder (MDD) has brought huge burden and challenges to society globally, effective and accurate diagnoses and treatments remain inadequate. The pathogenesis that for women are more likely to suffer from depression than men needs to be excavated as well. The function of circRNAs in pathological process of depression has not been widely investigated. This study aims to explore potential diagnostic biomarker circRNA of female patients with MDD and to investigate its role in pathogenesis. METHODS: First, an expression profile of circRNAs in the peripheral blood monocular cells of MDD patients and healthy peripherals were established based on high-throughput sequencing analysis. In addition, the top 10 differentially expressed circRNAs were quantified by quantitative real-time PCR to explore diagnostic biomarkers. To further investigate the function of biomarkers in the pathogenesis of MDD, bioinformatics analysis on downstream target genes of the biomarkers was carried out. RESULTS: There is a mass of dysregulated circRNAs in PBMCs between female MDD patients and healthy controls. Among the top 10 differentially expressed circRNAs, hsa_circ_0126218 is more feasible as a diagnostic biomarker. The expression level of hsa_circ_0126218 displayed upregulation in patients with MDD and the area under the operating characteristic curve of hsa_circ_0126218 was 0.801 (95% CI 0.7226-0.8791, p < 0.0001). To explain the competing endogenous RNA role of hsa_circ_0126218 in the pathogenesis of female MDD, a hsa_circ_0126218-miRNA-mRNA network was established. Gene Ontology and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway enrichment analyses stated that some of the enriched pathways downstream of hsa_circ_0126218 are closely related to MDD. Moreover, we established a protein-protein network to further screen out the hub genes (PIK3CA, PTEN, MAPK1, CDC42, Lyn, YES1, EPHB2, SMAD2, STAT1, and ILK). The function of hsa_circ_0126218 was refined by constructing a verified circRNA-predicted miRNA-hub gene subnetwork. CONCLUSION: hsa_circ_0126218 can be considered as a new female MDD biomarker, and the pathogenesis of female MDD by the downstream regulation of hsa_circ_0126218 has been predicted. These findings may help further improve the early detection, effective diagnosis, convenient monitoring of complications, precise treatment, and timely recurrence prevention of depression.

Influence of school-level and family-level variables on Chinese college students' aggression.

With the frequent occurrence of campus violence, scholars have devoted increasing attention to college students' aggression. This study aims to estimate the prevalence of aggression in Chinese university students and identify factors that could influence their aggression. We can thus find methods to reduce the incidence of college students' aggression in the future. A multi-stage stratified sampling procedure was used to select university students (N = 4565) aged 16-25 years in Harbin. The Aggression Questionnaire, the Adolescent Self-Rating Life Events Checklist and the Social Support Revalued Scale were used to collect data. Females reported lower levels of aggression than males (p < .001). A multiple linear regression analysis was conducted to determine the influence of factors of aggression, and the model was highly significant (R2 = .233, Ad R2 = .230, p < .01). The results show that the aggression is affected by gender, family-level and school-level variables. Aggression scores are significantly correlated with not only family-level or school-level variables independently, but their combination as well. We find that the risk factors for aggression include a dissatisfying profession, higher levels of study pressure, poor parental relationships, poor interpersonal relationships, the presence of siblings, punishment, health maladjustment, less subjective support, and lower levels of utilization of social support.

Family and College Environmental Exposures Mediate the Relationship between Parental Education and Depression among College Students.

BACKGROUND: Depression is a major health concern for college students due to its substantial morbidity and mortality. Although low parental education has been identified as a factor in depression in college students, the mechanisms through which parental educational achievement affects students' depression are not well understood. We tested whether adverse family and college environments mediate the relationship between parental educational level and depression among Chinese college students. METHODS: A total of 5180 respondents were selected using a cross-sectional survey. We examined the association of parental education, adverse family and college environments with depression in college students using the Adolescent Self-Rating Life Events Checklist, Beck Depression Inventory and socio-demographic questionnaires. RESULTS: Lower parental educational level is significantly correlated with depression in college students in our sample. Additionally, low family economic status, paternal or maternal unemployment, long periods spent apart from family, family conflicts, having been scolded and beaten by parents, poor or dissatisfying test performance, conflict with friends, heavy course load and failure in selection processes are also associated with parental education. Low family economic status, paternal or maternal unemployment, long periods spent apart from family, family conflicts, poor or dissatisfying test performance, conflict with friends and heavy course load mediated the relationship between parental education and depression in college students. CONCLUSIONS: Adverse family and college environments could explain the influence of parental educational level on depression in college students.

Gender differences in pre-attentive change detection for visual but not auditory stimuli.

OBJECTIVE: Despite ongoing debate about gender differences in pre-attention processes, little is known about gender effects on change detection for auditory and visual stimuli. We explored gender differences in change detection while processing duration information in auditory and visual modalities. METHOD: We investigated pre-attentive processing of duration information using a deviant-standard reverse oddball paradigm (50 ms/150 ms) for auditory and visual mismatch negativity (aMMN and vMMN) in males and females (n=21/group). RESULT: In the auditory modality, decrement and increment aMMN were observed at 150-250 ms after the stimulus onset, and there was no significant gender effect on MMN amplitudes in temporal or fronto-central areas. In contrast, in the visual modality, only increment vMMN was observed at 180-260 ms after the onset of stimulus, and it was higher in males than in females. CONCLUSION: No gender effect was found in change detection for auditory stimuli, but change detection was facilitated for visual stimuli in males. SIGNIFICANCE: Gender effects should be considered in clinical studies of pre-attention for visual stimuli.

The Role of Family Environment in Depressive Symptoms among University Students: A Large Sample Survey in China.

OBJECTIVE: To explore the relationship between family environment and depressive symptoms and to evaluate the influence of hard and soft family environmental factors on depression levels in a large sample of university students in China. METHODS: A multi-stage stratified sampling procedure was used to select 6,000 participants. The response rate was 88.8%, with 5,329 students completing the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and the Family Environment Scale Chinese Version (FES-CV), which was adapted for the Chinese population. Differences between the groups were tested for significance by the Student's t-test; ANOVA was used to test continuous variables. The relationship between soft family environmental factors and BDI were tested by Pearson correlation analysis. Hierarchical linear regression analysis was conducted to model the effects of hard environmental factors and soft environmental factors on depression in university students. RESULTS: A total of 11.8% of students scored above the threshold of moderate depression (BDI≧14). Hard family environmental factors such as parent relationship, family economic status, level of parental literacy and non-intact family structure were associated with depressive symptoms. The soft family environmental factors--conflict and control--were positively associated with depression, while cohesion was negatively related to depressive symptom after controlling for other important associates of depression. Hierarchical regression analysis indicated that the soft family environment correlates more strongly with depression than the hard family environment. CONCLUSIONS: Soft family environmental factors--especially cohesion, conflict and control--appeared to play an important role in the occurrence of depressive symptoms. These findings underline the significance of the family environment as a source of risk factors for depression among university students in China and suggest that family-based interventions and improvement are very important to reduce depression among university students.

Configural processing advantage for Mongoloid than Caucasian faces during the structure coding stage.

Configural processing is considered to be the hallmark of face expertise, which has been widely investigated by face global inversion (inversion effect) and local inversion (Thatcher effect). Using a passive detection task in which face stimuli are task-irrelevant, both the face inversion effect and the Thatcher effect on race perception of faces were investigated. We found that although the N170 inversion effect (enhanced and delayed N 170 for inverted than upright condition) was similar across races of faces, Chinese participants showed a larger N 170 Thatcher effect (enhanced N 170 to Thatcherized faces than normal faces) for Mongoloid faces. The present data indicates the perceptual advantage of configural changes for in-group than out-group faces.

Impaired pre-attentive change detection in major depressive disorder patients revealed by auditory mismatch negativity.

Patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) show deficits in cognitive functions. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the pre-attentive information processing in MDD patients are poorly understood. The present study investigated whether MDD patients have impairments in pre-attentive information processing indexed by auditory mismatch negativity (MMN). The deviant-standard reverse oddball paradigm was used to obtain the memory-comparison-based duration auditory MMN in 24 MDD patients and 24 healthy control subjects. Over the frontal-central area, MDD patients exhibited decreased MMN amplitudes only for the increment condition (150-ms MMN), whereas the temporal MMN did not differ between MDD patients and healthy subjects, regardless of the increment or decrement (50-ms MMN) condition. The MMN amplitudes were not correlated with depression symptoms. In addition, the peak latency of MMN amplitudes was longer in the MDD patients than the control subjects. These data indicate that pre-attentive information processing is impaired in MDD patients. This dysfunction may represent a trait of MDD patients rather than a state-dependent phenomenon.