Melatonin in Mental Disorders: Treatment and Prevention

2011 ◽  
pp. 329-344
2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-37 ◽  

Current diagnostic systems for mental disorders were established before the tools of neuroscience were available, and although they have improved the reliability of psychiatric classification, progress toward the discovery of disease etiologies and novel approaches to treatment and prevention may benefit from alternative conceptualizations of mental disorders. The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative is the centerpiece of NIMH's effort to achieve its strategic goal of developing new methods to classify mental disorders for research purposes. The RDoC matrix provides a research framework that encourages investigators to reorient their research perspective by taking a dimensional approach to the study of the genetic, neural, and behavioral features of mental disorders, RDoCs integrative approach includes cognition along with social processes, arousal/regulatory systems, and negative and positive valence systems as the major domains, because these neurobehavioral systems have all evolved to serve the motivational and adaptive needs of the organism. With its focus on neural circuits informed by the growing evidence of the neurodevelopmental nature of many disorders and its capacity to capture the patterns of co-occurrence of behaviors and symptoms, the RDoC approach holds promise to advance our understanding of the nature of mental disorders.


2021 ◽  
pp. 211-228
Author(s):  
Malcolm Forbes ◽  
Thomas Rego ◽  
Helen Lavretsky ◽  
Charles Reynolds III

The burden of geriatric mental disorders is significant and expected to rise in the 21st century. Existing therapies for geriatric mental disorders have modest efficacy and improved prevention, diagnosis, and treatment options are urgently needed. The field of precision psychiatry focuses on an individual’s unique attributes to help improve risk assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of psychiatric disorders. Within this state-of-the-art review, the authors provide a review of the field of precision psychiatry for geriatric mental disorders. They consider topics such as wearables, pharmacogenetics, smartphone apps, and chatbots to alleviate depression in late life and virtual reality, robotics, and brain stimulation for cognitive enhancement among elderly with dementia.


The Lancet ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 370 (9591) ◽  
pp. 991-1005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vikram Patel ◽  
Ricardo Araya ◽  
Sudipto Chatterjee ◽  
Dan Chisholm ◽  
Alex Cohen ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
S. E. Khalchitsky ◽  
M. V. Ivanov ◽  
M. V. Sogoyan ◽  
M. G. Yanushko ◽  
M. A. Tumova ◽  
...  

Summary. Mental disorders are clinically heterogeneous chronic diseases resulting from complex interactions between genotype variants and environmental factors. Epigenetic processes, such as DNA methylation and post-translational histone modification, determine the interpretation by the body at the cellular and tissue levels of various environmental factors. Given that epigenetic modifications are environmentally sensitive, stable and reversible, epigenetic research in psychiatry may be a promising approach to better understanding and treating mental illness. This review discusses the clinical opportunities and challenges posed by epigenetic research in psychiatry. Using individual examples, the main conclusions are drawn that confirm the role of adverse life events, alone or in combination with genetic risk, in the epigenetic programming of neuropsychiatric systems. Further epigenetic studies show encouraging results in the use of methylation changes as diagnostic markers of disease manifestations and provide predictive tools for assessing progression and response to treatment. The potential for the use of targeted epigenetic pharmacotherapy, combined with psychosocial methods, in the context of the personalized medicine of the future in psychiatry is discussed next. It concludes with a discussion of methodological limitations that can make it difficult to interpret epigenetic data in psychiatry. They mainly arise due to the heterogeneity of individuals, both at the level of the whole organism and at the level of tissues, and require new strategies to better assess the biological significance of epigenetic data and their translational use in psychiatry. Overall, we believe that epigenetics can provide new insights and a more comprehensive understanding of the etiology and pathogenesis of mental illness, and should ultimately improve the nosology, treatment and prevention of mental disorders.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Bereznowski ◽  
Paweł Andrzej Atroszko ◽  
Roman Konarski

The network approach to psychopathology (formalized as the network theory of mental disorders) conceptualizes mental disorders as dynamic systems consisting of symptoms which are in direct causal relationships with each other. The core rationale for the utility of the network approach is a belief that treatment and prevention programs would be more effective if targets of intervention were certain symptoms or direct causal relationships between pairs of symptoms rather than mental disorders as syndromes. As such, the network approach creates a new promising framework for studying mental disorders. In this study, we aimed to estimate and compare networks of work addiction among Norwegian and Polish working individuals. We used four samples in which work addiction was measured with the Bergen Work Addiction Scale. Two samples comprised responses from working Norwegians (n1 = 16,426; n2 = 776) and two samples comprised responses from working Poles (n3 = 719; n4 = 715). We jointly estimated four networks using the fused graphic lasso method. Additionally, we estimated symptoms centrality, symptoms predictability, the stability of each network, and quantitatively compared all networks. The results showed highly similar networks across the four samples. There were several strong direct relationships between symptoms. The most and the least central symptoms were Relapse and Mood modification, respectively. Mean symptom predictability varied between 23.3% and 28.8% across samples. The network approach is a promising framework for studying work addiction, and this study showed that the dynamic system of the symptoms of work addiction is almost identical for both the Norwegian and Polish samples. Issues of proper symptom measurement and understanding of strict interconnectedness of addiction symptoms in networks are discussed.


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