Smoking-induced changes in leptin serum levels and c/EBPalpha-related methylation status of the leptin core promotor during smoking cessation
Cigarette smoking is a severe public health hazard responsible for approximately 3-6 million premature deaths annually worldwide (Peto et al., 1996). It is the leading preventable cause of significant health costs, related chronic diseases and deaths worldwide (Jha, 2009; Neubauer et al., 2006). Although efforts have been made to develop effective smoking cessation strategies, long-term success rates remain disappointing (Fiore, 2000). Important factors contributing towards a reluctance to quit as well as for relapsing after cessation are weight gain (Spring et al., 1992) and, most critically, craving (Alsene et al., 2003;...
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 22, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Alexander Glahn, Mathias Rhein, Helge Frieling, Franziska Dette, Stefan Bleich, Thomas Hillemacher, Marc Muschler Source Type: research
Endocrine and psychological stress response in simulated doctor-patient interactions in medical education
Simulated patient-doctor interviews are an important didactic tool in the education of medical students (Cleland et al., 2009). They allow training of elementary skills for establishing a good patient-physician relationship and for dealing with demanding doctor-patient interactions like breaking bad news. Thereby, medical curricula throughout the world include such simulation trainings (Anderson et al., 1994;Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), 1998; Fr öhmel et al., 2007; Härtl et al., 2011; Kruppa et al., 2009) and they are often considered to be indispensable for adequate medical training. (Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology)
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 21, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Renate Deinzer, Stephanie Kiupel, Ulrike Weik Source Type: research
Childhood maltreatment moderates the influence of genetic load for obesity on reward related brain structure and function in major depression
Obesity is a highly prevalent comorbidity of affective disorders that has been shown to predict unfavorable outcomes in major depressive disorder (MDD) patients (de Wit et al., 2010; Kloiber et al., 2007; Luppino et al., 2010; Opel et al., 2015b; World Health Organization, 2014). In turn, findings indicating that both maternal depression and family history of obesity might increase the risk of non-response to weight-regulating interventions further corroborate the notion of a reciprocal link between obesity and depression and point to the relevance of shared genetic factors in the etiology of both conditions (Epstein et al...
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 21, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Nils Opel, Ronny Redlich, Jonathan Repple, Claas Kaehler, Dominik Grotegerd, Katharina Dohm, Dario Zaremba, Janik Goltermann, Lavinia-Alexandra M. Steinmann, Rahel Krugh öfer, Elisabeth J. Leehr, Joscha Böhnlein, Katharina Förster, Christian Bürger, S Source Type: research
Non-medical prescription opioid users exhibit dysfunctional physiological stress responses to social rejection
In recent decades, the misuse of prescription opioids (e.g., morphine, fentanyl, oxycodone, or codeine) has increased dramatically. Especially in the U.S., non-medical prescription opioid use (NMPOU) has reached epidemic dimensions, with a past-year prevalence of 37.8%, of which 12.5% fulfilled opioid misuse criteria (Han et al., 2017). Accordingly, NMPOU-related deaths dramatically increased by 265% from 2012 to 2015 (UNODC, 2017). Importantly, a relapse rate of up to 91% after detoxification for opioids is higher than for any other drug of abuse (Smyth et al., 2010), thereby signifying a lack of effective long-term treat...
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 19, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Sara L. Kroll, DeWayne P. Williams, Martina Thoma, Matthias Staib, Tina M. Binz, Markus R. Baumgartner, Clemens Kirschbaum, Julian F. Thayer, Boris B. Quednow Source Type: research
Acute Stress and Altruism in Younger and Older Adults
Altruism is the motivation to help others (Andreoni, 1989). A growing literature suggests that altruism is associated with age (for a review, see Bekkers& Wiepking, 2011). In cross-sectional studies, adult age shows positive linear relationships to subjective, behavioral, and neural measures of altruism and prosocial behavior (Freund& Blanchard-Fields, 2014; Hubbard et al., 2016; Sparrow& Spaniol, 2018). Why older adults are more altruistic than younger adults is still poorly understood. Life-span theories of motivation postulate age-related changes in value orientations, such that generativity (Erikson, 1982) and ego-tran...
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 19, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Erika P. Sparrow, Bonnie A. Armstrong, Alexandra J. Fiocco, Julia Spaniol Source Type: research
Treatment of male rats with finasteride, an inhibitor of 5alpha-reductase enzyme, induces long-lasting effects on depressive-like behavior, hippocampal neurogenesis, neuroinflammation and gut microbiota composition
Neuroactive steroids are those steroids that modulate the function of the nervous system. They are important physiological neuromodulators and include steroids synthesized in the peripheral glands as well as those directly produced by the nervous tissue. Neuroactive steroids are involved in the neuroendocrine control of reproduction and regulate synaptic plasticity, neuronal and glial morphology, adult neurogenesis, myelination and cognition (Galea, 2008; Melcangi et al., 2016). Accordingly, psychiatric disorders, such as depression and anxiety, are associated with altered levels of neuroactive steroids, and particularly o...
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 18, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Silvia Diviccaro, Silvia Giatti, Francesca Borgo, Matteo Barcella, Elisa Borghi, Jos é Luis Trejo, Luis Miguel Garcia-Segura, Roberto Cosimo Melcangi Source Type: research
Effects of leptin and ghrelin on neural cue-reactivity in alcohol addiction: two streams merge to one river?
Increasing evidence supports the role of appetite-regulating hormones in the pathophysiology of alcohol addiction. Amongst those, leptin and acylated ghrelin seem to play key roles in mediating craving and relapse (Hirth et al., 2016). (Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology)
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 18, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Patrick Bach, Jan Malte Bumb, Rilana Schuster, Sabine Vollst ädt-Klein, Iris Reinhard, Marcella Rietschel, Stephanie H. Witt, Klaus Wiedemann, Falk Kiefer, Anne Koopmann Source Type: research
Hair cortisol in newly diagnosed bipolar disorder and unaffected first-degree relatives
Stressful life events often precede the first major mood episode of bipolar disorder (BD) (Horesh et al., 2011) as well as subsequent mood episodes (Lex et al., 2017) and the tolerance for stressful life events seems to decrease with advanced illness burden (Kessing& Andersen, 2017). Further, BD seems associated with dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis (Belvederi Murri et al., 2016) including elevated concentrations of basal plasma and salivary cortisol concentrations although with large heterogeneity in findings (Belvederi Murri et al., 2016; Stalder& Kirschbaum, 2012). (Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology)
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 17, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Klara Coello, Klaus Munkholm, Flemming Nielsen, Maj Vinberg, Lars Vedel Kessing Source Type: research
Mineralocorticoid receptor function and cognition in health and disease
Stress, such as early life adversity or traumatic life events, is a risk factor for many psychiatric disorders including major depressive disorder (MDD) (Otte et al., 2016), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or borderline personality disorder (BPD) (Wingenfeld and Wolf, 2015). All of these disorders are characterized by alterations in cognitive and emotional function and by dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis leading to altered secretion of the stress hormone cortisol (Wingenfeld and Wolf, 2015). (Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology)
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 15, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Katja Wingenfeld, Christian Otte Source Type: research
Circulating epinephrine is not required for chronic stress to enhance metastasis
Beta-adrenergic receptor ( βAR) signaling has been identified as a target to modulate cancer progression. Preclinical studies in many types of cancer found that βAR signaling drives cancer progression, and identified molecular and cellular mechanisms (Thaker et al., 2006, Nissen et al., 2018, Le et al., 2016, Kim-Fuchs et a l., 2014, Lamkin et al., 2012, Sloan et al., 2010, Kim et al., 2016). These studies discovered that βAR signaling in tumor cells drives tumor cell invasion by enhancing formation of invadopodia, resulting in increased metastasis in vivo (Chang et al., 2016, Pon et al., 2016, Kim et al., 2016, Creed e...
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 15, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Adam K. Walker, Davide Martelli, Alexandra I. Ziegler, Gavin W. Lambert, Sarah E. Phillips, Stephen J. Hill, Robin M. McAllen, Erica K. Sloan Source Type: research
Cortisol Relates to Regional Limbic System Structure in Older but not Younger Adults
The hippocampus, amygdala, and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), regions within the limbic system, are targets of glucocorticoid (GC) actions due to their rich expression of glucocorticoid receptors (GRs) (Morimoto et al., 1996; Wang et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2014). Although short-term GC elevations can result in adaptive neural plasticity, such as long-term potentiation (LTP), chronic elevations of circulating GCs can promote maladaptive change, such as disruption of LTP (Sapolsky, 2003). Animal studies indicate that chronic exposure to elevated GCs or chronic stress can engender dendritic atrophy within the hippocampus (...
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 14, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Gilda E. Ennis, Eve-Marie Quintin, Ursula Saelzler, Kristen M. Kennedy, Christopher Hertzog, Scott D. Moffat Source Type: research
Children ’s cortisol response to the transition from preschool to formal schooling: A review
The first year of formal schooling is an important developmental transition experience, for both children and their families: The school environment is structured around explicit goals of instruction, typically, literacy, numeracy, and socialization, and is increasingly focused on children ’s academic progress, in contrast to most childcare or home environments (Hughes, 2015; Rimm-Kaufman and Pianta, 2000). Several researchers consider school entry to be a “universal social stressor” or a “normative stressor”, because children enter a novel peer-group setting and face these new social and cognitive demands (Groen...
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 14, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Sophie Parent, Sonia Lupien, Catherine M. Herba, V éronique Dupéré, Megan R. Gunnar, Jean R. Séguin Source Type: research
Prothrombotic response to norepinephrine infusion, mimicking norepinephrine stress-reactivity effects, is partly mediated by α-adrenergic mechanisms
Between 10% and 50% of patients with an acute coronary syndrome (ACS) report an emotional trigger like mental stress or intense feelings within 2 h before symptom onset (Tofler et al., 1990; Willich et al., 1991; Tofler et al., 2017) with, for instance, outbursts of anger quadrupling the risk (Mostofsky et al., 2014). With the undeniable role of thrombosis in ACS (Abbate et al., 2012), the literature provides good evidence that stress-indu ced coagulation activation is a crucial process in emotionally-triggered ACS (Thrall et al., 2007; von Känel, 2015). (Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology)
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 14, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Roland von K änel, Nadja Heimgartner, Monika Stutz, Claudia Zuccarella-Hackl, A. Hänsel, U. Ehlert, P.H. Wirtz Source Type: research
Post-exposure cortisol administration does not augment the success of exposure therapy: a randomized placebo-controlled study
Although exposure constitutes a very powerful treatment for anxiety and stressor-related disorders (Hofmann and Smits, 2008; Norton and Price, 2007; Otte, 2011; Ruhmland and Margraf, 2001a, b, c), treatment success varies widely among patients and relapse constitutes a frequent problem (Craske et al., 2006; Durham et al., 2012). Consequently, the identification of novel strategies that can enhance exposure therapy seems to represent a useful avenue of research to yield more enduring and stable treatment benefits. (Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology)
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 13, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Friederike Raeder, Christian J Merz, Martin Tegenthoff, Oliver T Wolf, J ürgen Margraf, Armin Zlomuzica Source Type: research
Dual-Hormone Regulation of Psychopathy: Evidence from Mass Spectrometry
People high in trait psychopathy tend to have low empathy, low anxiety, fearlessness, aggression, impulsivity and antisocial behaviors (Lykken, 1995; Hunt et al., 2005; Visser et al., 2012). At a glance, these characteristics have much in common with the behavioral and psychological correlates of the hormones testosterone and cortisol. Testosterone, a steroid hormone released by the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis, has been associated with elevated aggression and impulsivity, but low empathy and anti-social behavior (Mazur& Booth, 1998; Archer et al., 2005; Hermans et al., 2006; Zilioli et al., 2015). (Source: Ps...
Source: Psychoneuroendocrinology - September 13, 2018 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Ashlin R.K. Roy, Terence Cook, Justin M. Carr é, Keith M. Welker Source Type: research
