NP_Publications

Brain development during adolescence and early adulthood coincides with shifts in emotion regulation and sleep. Despite this, few existing datasets simultaneously characterize affective dynamics, sleep variation, and multimodal measures of brain development. Here, we describe the study protocol and initial release (n = 10) of an open data resource of neuroimaging paired with densely sampled behavioral measures in adolescents and young adults. All participants complete multi-echo functional MRI,...

The basolateral amygdala (BLA) is important for assigning emotional weight to environmental stimuli to guide learning, discrimination, and adaptive vigilance. The contribution of neuromodulator inputs such as dopamine to this process is unclear. Here, we recorded in vivo BLA dopamine signals across emotional learning paradigms. We show that BLA dopamine scales with a stimulus's emotional intensity, but not value or associative strength, and reward-predictive cues evoke BLA dopamine signals that...

CONCLUSION: Our findings highlighted the interrelated roles of IA, impulsivity, and NSSI among adolescents with MDD. Impulsivity may be a critical factor linking IA to emotional dysregulation and self-injurious behavior. These results highlight the need for integrated screening and prevention strategies targeting impulsivity and these risk behaviors.

INTRODUCTION: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the ventral capsule/ventral striatum (VC/VS) can benefit patients with treatment-refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, time to respond post-operatively ranges from weeks to over a year. We examined neuroanatomical determinants of this variability.

Previous brain-wide association studies (BWAS) have linked specific environmental and behavioral variables to brain variability. In this work, we mapped 649 variables to children's brains and compared the resultant BWAS maps with each other and with neurobiological reference patterns. Socioeconomic status (SES) showed the strongest brain-wide associations. The SES associations were strongest in motor and sensory but not cognitive regions, a pattern shared across many BWAS maps, including...

No abstract

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) typically begins in adolescence and is associated with higher impulsivity and compromised white matter microstructure in the brain. Identifying early predictors of NSSI is a high priority. We used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study to examine whether baseline white matter, specifically generalized fractional anisotropy (GFA), and different facets of impulsivity were prospectively associated with NSSI onset two years later (Y(2)). We also...

INTRODUCTION: Since 2001, approximately 17.3% of enlisted personnel have experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI) according to the United States military. Visual deficits (e.g., convergence insufficiency or pursuit abnormalities) are reported as chronic, persistent symptoms of TBI, which can impact daily activities such as reading, computer work, and driving.

CONCLUSIONS: Within a causal inference framework, DOACs exposure was associated with less risk of GI bleeding compared to antiplatelets. However, class-level grouping may mask individual drug-specific metabolic risks.

CONCLUSIONS: In older adults with prediabetes, the STRRIDE-Prediabetes interventions produced several legacy health effects persisting more than a decade later. Legacy effects differed by sex and exercise dose, and short-term intervention response relative to baseline was associated with long-term outcomes - supporting targeted exercise strategies to preserve cardiometabolic health and functional independence with aging.

CONCLUSIONS: Although the current findings point to some subtle putamen differences during reward receipt, they suggest largely typical brain response in PwP and first-degree biological relatives of PwP, particularly regarding pMod brain activation or adaptive reward coding.

The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework was introduced to guide psychiatric research using biologically grounded, dimensional constructs of mental function. However, its hierarchical domain structure remains largely unvalidated against individual-level brain and behavioral data. Building on prior group-level work, we applied a multi-stage validation framework to Human Connectome Project (HCP) task-fMRI data to test whether individual-level, data-driven models more accurately capture the...

Tourette syndrome (TS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder of childhood onset characterised by vocal and motor tics and is associated with cortical-striatal-thalamic-cortical circuit [CSTC] dysfunction. TS often follows a developmental time course in which tics become increasingly more controlled during adolescence. However, many individuals continue to have debilitating tics into adulthood. This indicates that there may be important differences between adults with TS for whom the clinical...

Trypanosoma evansi (T. evansi) is a flagellate blood and tissue protozoa parasite that establishes long-term infection by evading host immune clearance. Although variant surface glycoprotein (VSG) switching is a well-known immune evasion mechanism, additional strategies utilized by the parasite remain to be fully elucidated. Macrophages are central to the early inflammatory response against pathogen invasion. This study investigates how T. evansi-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) regulate...

Functional MRI (fMRI) data are severely distorted by magnetic field (B0) inhomogeneities, which currently must be corrected using separately acquired field map data. However, changes in the head position of a participant across fMRI frames cause changes in the B0 field, preventing accurate correction of geometric distortions. Movement during field map acquisitions corrupts field maps, preventing distortion correction altogether. In this study, we use multi-echo (ME) fMRI data to dynamically...

The cerebellum has been implicated in schizophrenia-related structural and functional deficits, with posterior Crus I and II most consistently affected. Source-based morphometry (SBM) involves applying independent component analysis to gray matter volume to identify spatially distinct structural networks that covary across individuals. We applied SBM and voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to cerebellar structural imaging data to identify patterns of gray matter differences across individuals with...

The reinforcement learning community has made significant progress in understanding dopamine (DA) in reward learning, cognitive control, and motivation. Yet, little consensus remains about the functions of distinct DA bandwidths-fast phasic transients (milliseconds), ramps (seconds), and slow tonic shifts (minutes). Are these dynamics independent channels conveying distinct decision variables or temporal expressions of a unified DA computation? These questions lie at the heart of competing...

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is functionally closely related with the insula and the ventral lateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC). The ACC and insula are the main hubs of the salience network, a set of functionally related brain regions involved in detecting salient stimuli and coordinating inter-network communication, while communication between ACC and vlPFC is closely linked to inhibitory control. However, despite strong indirect evidence from nonhuman primate (NHP) tract tracing, the...

Avoidance behavior is a prominent and impairing feature of anxiety disorders, trauma- and stressor-related disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. A transdiagnostic approach to identifying the neural basis of avoidance is a promising avenue to shed light on the heterogeneity among individuals affected by these conditions, collectively termed anxiety-related disorders (ARDs). In this cross-sectional study, 58 adults with ARDs and 77 healthy comparisons (HC) completed self-report measures of...

Humans have the capacity to persist in behavioural policies, even in challenging environments that lack immediate reward. Persistence is the scaffold on which many higher executive functions are built. However, it remains unclear whether humans are uniquely persistent or, instead, if this capacity is widely conserved across species. To address this question, we compared humans with mice and monkeys in harmonized versions of a dynamic decision-making task. The task encouraged all species to...