Reviews & Analysis

Combining accelerometry, electronic diaries and neuroimaging, we found that physical activity is reproducibly linked to better wellbeing in people lacking social contact in everyday life, especially in people at neural and psychological risk of affective disorders.

Inconsistent results have been obtained regarding the role of obesity and its related metabolic syndrome in neurological and psychiatric diseases. This systematic research using the UK Biobank demonstrates effects of body weight on the risk of several neurological and psychiatric disorders, and suggests that the higher risks may be partially explained by brain structure, food intake and inflammation.

Nicotine withdrawal and anxiety symptoms are overlapping barriers to smoking cessation. We examined the effects of a smoking cessation treatment — noninvasive neuromodulation — on nicotine withdrawal and anxiety symptoms, which revealed information on how neuromodulation can treat substance use disorders.

Short-lived online social network experiments show that making the in-game wealth of immediate neighbors invisible improves the subjective wellbeing (SWB) of poorer participants. This status invisibility reduced the strength of the positive association between in-game wealth and SWB in social networks. However, in real-world settings, status is often visible.

A large-scale prospective cohort study with 287,282 participants revealed that the integration of multiple healthy lifestyle factors (a favorable lifestyle) was associated with a lower risk of depression. Categorizing participants on the basis of their polygenic risk scores for depression demonstrated that the effect of this favorable lifestyle persisted even among participants with high genetic susceptibility.

The role of personality in brain health remains unclear. A systematic search demonstrated that lower levels of warmth, diligence, sociability and curiosity, and a higher level of nervousness, were predictive of increased risk of brain disorders. Brain structure, inflammation and lipid metabolism partially explain the associations between personality and brain disorders.

Using resting-state functional MRI, we revealed a dysfunction pattern in the white matter of people with four major psychiatric disorders. This pattern is distinct from structural changes and has specific molecular and genetic bases.

By integrating neuroimaging and multi-omics data, we established links between individual genetic variations and macro- to microscale brain circuit dysfunctions, specifically in corticocortical and corticostriatal circuits, that contribute to the diverse clinical manifestations of schizophrenia. These findings advance our understanding of the disease’s heterogeneity and offer potential treatment insights.

We searched for changes in the levels of plasma proteins that could potentially help to identify adolescents at risk of developing mental health issues. Our candidate biomarkers were associated with key enriched biological pathways, including immune responses, blood coagulation, neurogenesis and neuronal degeneration.

A large-scale study of more than 500,000 Norwegian adolescents showed that socio-economically disadvantaged adolescents experienced more adverse changes in well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic across a variety of domains, and that these negative changes persisted even after all pandemic restrictions were lifted in Norway.

This study used the DSM-5-recommended diagnostic standard to conduct a nationwide multi-center survey of the non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) behavior of patients with psychiatric conditions. We investigated the prevalence of NSSI in 3,407 patients of various ages and with various psychiatric diagnoses from 15 hospitals in China.