Volume 2 Issue 1, January 2024

Clinical staging could be an actionable concept for behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD), providing clinicians with tools to navigate choices of treatment, acceptability of side effects and suitable care settings. This would pave the way for more research into tailored interventions that are much needed in high-stage BPSD.

This article explores debates in psychiatry about generalism and subspecialization, illustrating the potential benefits and issues of each in the context of service delivery and education founded on the biopsychosocial model. Recommendations are given to respond to varying global dynamics and support moves toward patient-centred care.

A deficit-oriented approach to describing living with schizophrenia obscures the challenges affected individuals face in being understood by others. Though symptoms of the illness complicate the development of a robust narrative self, patients still seek meaningful dialogue, and provider attitudes and practices can foster this narrative voice.

Intergenerational trauma, passed down through generations, is a significant concern for refugees and their descendants. Millions of people are forcibly displaced worldwide, with profound effects on mental and physical health. Refugees face many challenges, from acculturation to legal uncertainties, leading to a range of emotional struggles.

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.

In this Perspective the authors survey the state of computerized cognitive training interventions for mental health and identify some of the challenges and opportunities in the scale-up of certain interventions.

In this Review, the authors outline the current evidence on a precision medicine approach to Alzheimer’s disease risk reduction and propose how to integrate personalized strategies into routine clinical practice.

Using data from the UK Biobank, the authors studied the effect of body mass index, change in body mass index, and metabolic status in people with obesity on the prevalence of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Modeling neurodevelopmental trajectories in a pediatric cohort reveals accelerated decrease in correlation between brain structural and functional connectivity in children exposed to high levels of prenatal adversity.

Fittipaldi et al. examined how heterogeneity affects social cognition in populations over 50 years old by using advanced neuroimaging techniques and social cognition assessments in a diverse sample of over 1,000 adults across nine countries.

The study reports the application of data-driven techniques to structural neuroimaging data of people with recent-onset psychosis or recent-onset depression and matched controls for the prediction of transdiagnostic clinical symptom severity and clinical outcomes.

Analyzing data on households without broadband internet access, level of urbanization, and mental healthcare services, the authors demonstrate that those counties with reduced broadband access are more likely to be under-resourced for mental health practitioners and facilities.

Investigators present findings from a double-blind randomized controlled trial of personalized stimulation of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex using transcranial magnetic stimulation to increase hypnotizability in a sample of patients with fibromyalgia syndrome.

The study performed on a large, heterogeneous and multisite sample of youth with anxiety disorders reveals that only modest classification performances can be realistically achieved with machine learning using neuroanatomical data.