The Dutch version of the Child Posttraumatic Cognitions Inventory:validation in a clinical sample and a school sample

With the inclusion of trauma-related cognitions in the DSM-5 criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the assessment of these cognitions has become essential. Therefore, valid tools for the assessment of these cognitions are warranted

Psychopathology in Williams syndrome: the effect of individual differences across the lifespan

The present research aimed to comprehensively explore psychopathology in Williams syndrome (WS) across the lifespan and evaluate the relationship between psychopathology and age category (child or adult), gender and cognitive ability. The parents of 50 participants with WS, aged 6-50 years, were interviewed using the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children (K-SADS-PL). The prevalence of a wide range of Axis I DSM-IV disorders was assessed. In addition to high rates of anxiety and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (38% and 20% respectively), 14% of our sample met criteria for a depressive disorder and 42% of participants were not experiencing any significant psychopathological difficulties. There was some evidence for different patterns of psychopathology between children and adults with WS and between males and females. These relationships were largely in keeping with those found in the typically developing population, thus supporting the validity of applying theory and treatment approaches for psychopathology in the typically developing population to WS

Schizophrenia in older adults

Although the number of persons over the age of 55 with schizophrenia is expected to double over the next 20 years, the research data on older people with schizophrenia is limited. This appears to be because until the middle of the 20th century, it was assumed that mental illness in older people was a part of the aging process and older people are often excluded from research investigations. There is a need for nursing research to explore how people with schizophrenia, as they age, learn to manage their problems, as well as how those who are first diagnosed with schizophrenia in later life adapt to their illness. Mental health nurses need to be cautious in assigning premature labels to older adults with mental illness that may lead to unsubstantiated assumptions about levels of disability. Instead, they should realize individual potential regarding undiscovered strengths and should attempt to create interventions that recognize and foster personal development for older adults with schizophrenia

Anthropology, Brokerage and Collaboration in the development of a Tongan Public Psychiatry: Local Lessons for Global Mental Health

The Global Mental Health (GMH) movement has revitalised questions of the translatability of psychiatric concepts and the challenges of community engagement in countries where knowledge of the biomedical basis for psychiatric diagnosis is limited or challenged by local cultural codes. In Tonga, the local psychiatrist Dr Puloka has successfully established a publicly accessible psychiatry that has raised admission rates for serious mental illness and addressed some of the stigma attached to diagnosis. On the basis of historical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork with healers, doctors and patients since 1998, this article offers an ethnographic contextualization of the development and reception of three key interventions during the 1990s inspired by traditional healing and reliant on the translation of psychiatric terms and diagnosis. Dr Puloka’s use of medical anthropological and transcultural psychiatry research informed a community engaged brokerage between the implications of psychiatric nosologies and local needs. As such it reveals deficiencies in current polarised positions on the GMH project and offers suggestions to address current challenges of the Global Mental Health movement

Co-occurrence of ASD and ADHD traits in an adult population

Objective: ADHD and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be viewed as the extreme end of traits found in the general population. Clinical and genetic studies suggest that ADHD and ASD often co-occur and share genetic susceptibility. The aim of this study was to examine co-occurrence of ADHD and ASD traits in the general population. Method: In total, 334 participants were recruited from a population-based sample. Four questionnaires assessing current and retrospective ADHD and ASD traits were administered online: the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS) Symptom Checklist, the Wender Utah Rating Scale (WURS-25), the Broad Autism Phenotype Questionnaire (BAPQ), and the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Results: A significant correlation was found between ADHD and autistic traits. In particular, higher inattention and overall ADHD scores were associated with self-reported deficits in communication and social skills. Conclusion: Our findings are similar to results from studies on clinical populations, suggesting that ADHD and ASD might share common etiology

Interrogating the Genetic Determinants of Tourette’s Syndrome and Other Tic Disorders Through Genome-Wide Association Studies

Objective: Tourette’s syndrome is polygenic and highly heritable. Genome-wide association study (GWAS) approaches are useful for interrogating the genetic architecture and determinants of Tourette’s syndrome and other tic disorders. The authors conducted a GWAS meta-analysis and probed aggregated Tourette’s syndrome polygenic risk to test whether Tourette’s and related tic disorders have an underlying shared genetic etiology and whether Tourette’s polygenic risk scores correlate with worst-ever tic severity and may represent a potential predictor of disease severity. Methods: GWAS meta-analysis, gene-based association, and genetic enrichment analyses were conducted in 4,819 Tourette’s syndrome case subjects and 9,488 control subjects. Replication of top loci was conducted in an independent population-based sample (706 case subjects, 6,068 control subjects). Relationships between Tourette’s polygenic risk scores (PRSs), other tic disorders, ascertainment, and tic severity were examined. Results: GWAS and gene-based analyses identified one genome-wide significant locus within FLT3 on chromosome 13, rs2504235, although this association was not replicated in the population-based sample. Genetic variants spanning evolutionarily conserved regions significantly explained 92.4% of Tourette’s syndrome heritability. Tourette’s-associated genes were significantly preferentially expressed in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Tourette’s PRS significantly predicted both Tourette’s syndrome and tic spectrum disorders status in the population-based sample. Tourette’s PRS also significantly correlated with worst-ever tic severity and was higher in case subjects with a family history of tics than in simplex case subjects. Conclusions: Modulation of gene expression through noncoding variants, particularly within cortico-striatal circuits, is implicated as a fundamental mechanism in Tourette’s syndrome pathogenesis. At a genetic level, tic disorders represent a continuous spectrum of disease, supporting the unification of Tourette’s syndrome and other tic disorders in future diagnostic schemata. Tourette’s PRSs derived from sufficiently large samples may be useful in the future for predicting conversion of transient tics to chronic tic disorders, as well as tic persistence and lifetime tic severity

Ontologies, Mental Disorders and Prototypes

As it emerged from philosophical analyses and cognitive research, most concepts exhibit typicality effects, and resist to the efforts of defining them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. This holds also in the case of many medical concepts. This is a problem for the design of computer science ontologies, since knowledge representation formalisms commonly adopted in this field do not allow for the representation of concepts in terms of typical traits. However, the need of representing concepts in terms of typical traits concerns almost every domain of real world knowledge, including medical domains. In particular, in this article we take into account the domain of mental disorders, starting from the DSM-5 descriptions of some specific mental disorders. On this respect, we favor a hybrid approach to the representation of psychiatric concepts, in which ontology oriented formalisms are combined to a geometric representation of knowledge based on conceptual spaces

Propiedades psicométricas del Cuestionario de Adicción a Internet y a los Videojuegos para Adolescentes

El propósito del presente estudio fue desarrollar un instrumento que evalúe en adolescentes la adicción a internet y a los videojuegos. La muestra estuvo compuesta por 354 adolescentes (M = 13.75, DE = 1.89). El análisis factorial confirmatorio mostró índices de ajuste aceptables (CFI = 0.918, IFI = 0.922, NFI = 0.883, RMSEA = 0.059), el alfa Cronbach fue de 0.73. De acuerdo a los resultados, el instrumento es fiable y válido para evaluar la adicción a internet y adicción a los videojuegos en adolescentes.El propósito del presente estudio fue desarrollar un instrumento que evalúe en adolescentes la adicción a internet y a los videojuegos. La muestra estuvo compuesta por 354 adolescentes (M = 13.75, DE = 1.89). El análisis factorial confirmatorio mostró índices de ajuste aceptables (CFI = 0.918, IFI = 0.922, NFI = 0.883, RMSEA = 0.059), el alfa Cronbach fue de 0.73. De acuerdo a los resultados, el instrumento es fiable y válido para evaluar la adicción a internet y adicción a los videojuegos en adolescentes

Are language production problems apparent in adults who no longer meet diagnostic criteria for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder?

In this study, we examined sentence production in a sample of adults (N = 21) who had had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as children, but as adults no longer met DSM-IV diagnostic criteria (APA, 2000). This “remitted” group was assessed on a sentence production task. On each trial, participants saw two objects and a verb. Their task was to construct a sentence using the objects as arguments of the verb. Results showed more ungrammatical and disfluent utterances with one particular type of verb (i.e., participle). In a second set of analyses, we compared the remitted group to both control participants and a “persistent” group, who had ADHD as children and as adults. Results showed that remitters were more likely to produce ungrammatical utterances and to make repair disfluencies compared to controls, and they patterned more similarly to ADHD participants. Conclusions focus on language output in remitted ADHD, and the role of executive functions in language production