Editorial: Bringing Parenting Into Focus: A Decade of Longitudinal Follow-Up Reveals Potential Parenting Targets for Early Intervention for Adolescent Self-Injury.

The mounting prevalence in adolescents of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI),1 a behavior known to predict future suicide attempts,2 highlights a critical need for research that can help us understand and prevent it. Research studying the childhood roots of this behavior has the potential to provide the groundwork needed to identify possible avenues for intervention.

Clinical Trajectories in Adolescents with and without a History of Non-Suicidal Self-Injury: The BRIDGES Longitudinal Study.

Background: Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a highly prevalent clinical concern in adolescents and is associated with impaired functioning and suicide risk. The BRIDGES (BRain Imaging Development of Girls' Emotion and Self) study was designed to collect longitudinal clinical and neurobiological data to advance our understanding of NSSI in adolescents. The purpose of this paper is to describe the clinical data collected as part of this study, including psychiatric diagnoses, depression symptoms, episodes of non-suicidal self-injury, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, childhood trauma, and personality domains. Methods: The baseline sample included 164 adolescents aged 12-16 assigned female at birth (Mean age = 14.97, SD = 1.20) with NSSI histories ranging from none to severe. Participants and their parent/guardian were invited to provide data at three time points spaced approximately one year apart. Descriptive analyses were conducted to provide estimates of rates and trajectories of clinical data. Results: Of the 164 study participants, 75.61% and 57.93% completed the second and third time points, respectively. Visual inspection of the data suggests an overall trend of decreasing severity of psychopathology over time, and adolescents with a history of NSSI appeared to have higher rates of psychopathology than those without. Conclusions: This paper describes longitudinal clinical trajectories in adolescents with a range of NSSI histories and presents readers with an overview of the rich, publicly available dataset that we hope will inspire future research to advance the understanding of the neurodevelopmental trajectories associated with NSSI, depression, and suicide risk.

Stress system concordance as a predictor of longitudinal patterns of resilience in adolescence.

Resilience promotes positive adaptation to challenges and may facilitate recovery for adolescents experiencing psychopathology. This work examined concordance across the experience, expression, and physiological response to stress as a protective factor that may predict longitudinal patterns of psychopathology and well-being that mark resilience. Adolescents aged 14-17 at recruitment (oversampled for histories of non-suicidal self-injury; NSSI) were part of a three-wave (T1, T2, T3) longitudinal study. Multi-trajectory modeling produced four distinct profiles of stress experience, expression, and physiology at T1 (High-High-High, Low-Low-Low, High-Low-Moderate, and High-High-Low, respectively). Linear mixed-effect regressions modeled whether the profiles predicted depressive symptoms, suicide ideation, NSSI engagement, positive affect, satisfaction with life, and self-worth over time. Broadly, concordant stress response profiles (Low-Low-Low, High-High-High) were associated with resilient-like patterns of psychopathology and well-being over time. Adolescents with a concordant High-High-High stress response profile showed a trend of greater reduction in depressive symptoms (B = 0.71, p = 0.052), as well as increased global self-worth (B = -0.88, p = 0.055), from T2 to T3 compared to the discordant High-High-Low profile. Concordance across multi-level stress responses may be protective and promote future resilience, whereas blunted physiological responses in the presence of high perceived and expressed stress may indicate poorer outcomes over time.

Basal and reactive cortisol: A systematic literature review of offspring of parents with depressive and bipolar disorders.

One of the most consistent biological findings in the study of affective disorders is that those with depression commonly show abnormal cortisol response, which suggests dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Children of parents with mood disorders offer the opportunity to explore the biological pathways that may confer risk for psychopathology. This review explores basal and reactive cortisol in the offspring of parents who are currently depressed or have had a history of a depressive or bipolar disorder. Using PRISMA guidelines, search terms yielded 2002 manuscripts. After screening, 87 of these manuscripts were included. Results from the literature suggest that while the degree and direction of dysregulation varies, offspring of a parent with depression tend to show elevations in both basal (particularly morning and evening) and reactive (tentatively for social stressors) cortisol levels. There were few studies focused on offspring of parents with bipolar disorder. This review also discusses implications and recommendations for future research regarding the HPA axis in the intergenerational transmission of depressive disorders.

New Somatic Treatments for Child and Adolescent Depression.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Depression is a common clinical problem in youth, with prevalence increasing significantly during the adolescent period. Although several evidence-based treatments are currently available for treating depression in adults, only a subset of these have been investigated in a pediatric sample. Unfortunately, even well-established, first-line interventions do not lead to sufficient treatment response for many children and adolescents suffering from depression. However, recent research has been conducted in the area of somatic treatments for youth with depression. This review focuses on current (past three years, including published results and ongoing studies) research on somatic treatments for adolescent depression in the following categories: psychopharmacology, nutraceuticals, interventions implicating motor and sensory systems, and neuromodulation. FINDINGS: Results from recent randomized, controlled trials testing psychopharmacological options suggest that while antidepressants that have been recently approved for adult patients are safe and tolerable in children and adolescents, none have yet outperformed performed placebo in efficacy. Nutraceuticals, motor-sensory interventions, and neuromodulation techniques, present safe and promising results, but few have been tested against controls to support effectiveness over current treatment options. SUMMARY: This review of research on pediatric depression treatment from the past 3 years highlights some disappointments (negative results following some of the well-designed clinical trials) and gaps (preliminary studies in need of follow up with robust methodology) but also some promising directions in research of the efficacyof these treatments in a pediatric sample. We offer suggestions for future research including consideration of treatment timing, sequencing, the role of symptom severity in directing treatment selection, the potential value of combined treatments, consideration of how to best account for high placebo response rates, and the incorporation of neurobiological assessments to examine mechanisms and biomarker predictors of treatment response.