Tag: News Approved

Posted on

Investigation of psychiatric symptoms, dissociative experiences, and childhood trauma in allergic rhinitis, and evaluation of the clinical relationship between these factors

BackgroundIn this study, we aimed to evaluate levels of depression and anxiety symptoms, childhood trauma, and dissociative experiences in patients with allergic rhinitis (AR) and compare them with healthy controls. Additionally, investigate the association between childhood trauma, depressive symptoms, and dissociative experiences in AR patients.MethodsThe study sample consisted of 152 adults (76 AR patients and 76 healthy controls) who presented to the otorhinolaryngology outpatient clinic. Data were collected using a personal information form and standardized self-report scales for childhood trauma (Childhood Trauma Questionnaire – CTQ-28), anxiety and depression (Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale – HADS), and dissociative experiences (Dissociative Experiences Scale – DES).ResultsSignificant differences were found between the patient and control groups in terms of all parameters (p<0.05). The patient group showed significantly higher levels of childhood trauma, anxiety and depressive symptoms, and dissociative experiences. Correlation analyses revealed a significant correlation between childhood trauma and both depressive symptoms and dissociative experiences in AR patients. Furthermore, regression analysis showed that childhood trauma significantly contributed to the severity of depression in AR patients, while the presence of dissociative symptoms further increased the risk of depression.ConclusionsThis study presents evidence of a positive association between childhood trauma, depression, and dissociative experiences in allergic rhinitis, highlighting their potential roles as risk factors for the condition. Therefore, psychiatric evaluation is crucial and necessary for treatment success in AR patients.
Posted on

Leveraging Scalable Non-Mammalian Systems for Large-Scale Studies of Autism Risk Gene Function

There are over 100 large-effect genes strongly associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), yet advancing from risk genes to the discovery of common biological pathways and pharmacological targets remains a central challenge. Scalable non-mammalian systems, including Caenorhabditis elegans (roundworm), Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly), Danio rerio (zebrafish), and Xenopus tropicalis (frog), provide critical advantages for the functional analysis of ASD genes due to their amenability to high-throughput screens, relatively low cost, and ease of genetic manipulation.

Posted on

A Smartphone-Based Acoustic Machine Learning Pipeline for Detecting Suicidal Ideation: Case-Control Model Development and Validation Study

Background: Suicidal ideation (SI) among university students is a growing public health concern. Self-report screening can be limited by concealment and delayed disclosure. We evaluated a leakage-resistant, proof-of-concept pipeline to detect SI from standardized smartphone-recorded speech. Objective: This study aimed to extract acoustic markers from brief smartphone-based reading tasks and develop machine learning models for suicide risk prediction in university students, enabling low-cost, scalable early screening to support campus mental health services. Methods: Questionnaire data and speech recordings were collected via a WeChat mini program. After screening and clinical confirmation, 96 participants (n=48, 50% with SI; n=48, 50% controls) were included. Age and sex were evaluated as potential confounders. Each participant read 16 standardized sentences. Acoustic features were extracted using openSMILE (version 3.0.2), yielding a 570D feature vector per utterance. To prevent leakage from multiple recordings per speaker, we used participant-level 5-fold cross-validation, assigning all recordings from each participant to a single fold. Seven machine learning algorithms were evaluated using area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, and -score. Results: Acoustic-based models discriminated participants with SI from control participants. The SI group was significantly older than the control group (=.001). Random forest achieved an AUC of 0.813 (accuracy=0.748), and naive Bayes achieved an AUC of 0.806 (accuracy=0.757). Feature families related to pitch, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, and harmonicity contributed to model performance. Conclusions: Standardized read speech captured via smartphones shows preliminary feasibility for SI discrimination under a leakage-aware evaluation design. External validation and testing with more naturalistic speech are warranted. Trial Registration: Chinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR2500106625; https://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.html?proj=276927
<img src="https://jmir-production.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/thumbs/05f2f6629e638ab44c30ea684f6d9937" />

Posted on

SNF Global Center to Convene Second Global Summit on Youth Mental Health 

Former Miss South Africa Shudufhadzo Musida joins global experts and partners across UNICEF, McKinsey Health Institute, and UGMH to address critical topics, gaps, and new solutions identified by youth

New York, NY – The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute will host the second Global Summit on Youth Mental Health from September 21-24, 2026, under the theme “Redefining Mental Health Care: Youth Perspectives in a Changing World.” The summit coincides with the 81st UN General Assembly (UNGA) High-level Week and is co-led by the SNF Global Center’s Global Youth Advisory Council (GYAC), with members from Brazil, South Africa, and Greece.

Following the success of the inaugural summit, this year’s event will further bridge science, storytelling, and lived experience through breakout sessions, new research and evidence, interactive activations, networking, and notable guest appearances. The summit will bring together multidisciplinary experts, partners, and young leaders from many organizations, including UNICEF, McKinsey Health Institute, JED Foundation, and Grand Challenges. New this year, a series of workshops hosted in collaboration with United for Global Mental Health (UGMH) and the SNF Global Center Communicator Fellows will focus on advocacy, power-mapping, and communications, equipping participants with practical tools to strengthen mental health advocacy and drive change in their communities.

The summit will open with remarks by Child Mind Institute leaders Harold S. Koplewicz, MD, founding president and medical director, and Giovanni Abrahão Salum, MD, PhD, senior vice president of Global Programs, alongside Andreas Dracopoulos, co-president of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF). Former Miss South Africa Shudufhadzo “Shudu” Musida will also make a special guest appearance. An Author, Advocate, Podcast Host, and UNFPA Global Champion for Women and Girls, Musida will lead a fireside chat with members of the GYAC, discussing her advocacy journey and their hopes for the future of youth mental health.

“What began as a platform for bringing people and organizations with shared visions together in conversation has grown into a forum for advancing ideas, strengthening partnerships, and translating priorities into joint action,” said Dr. Salum. “This year’s summit aims to deepen those connections while creating new opportunities for youth perspectives to inform research, policy, and solutions.”

Panel discussions moderated by young leaders from the GYAC will examine timely topics related to:

  • The role of schools in supporting youth mental health
  • The effects of stigma and misinformation
  • Links between digital environments, such as social media and other communication channels, and youth mental health
  • How youth-led innovation is helping reshape solutions that resonate with diverse young people worldwide

A highlight at this year’s event will feature a presentation by João Marcos Almeida dos Santos, winner of the Single Session Intervention (SSI) competition, a nationwide contest in Brazil launched at last year’s Summit in partnership with the Felipe Neto Institute. The competition challenged young people aged 16-20 to develop solutions for healthier technology habits. Additionally, a dedicated youth networking session will offer an opportunity for participants to connect, build skills, and exchange ideas.

As part of the SNF Global Center’s commitment to advancing partnerships for lasting change, McKinsey Health Institute will present their latest report with World YMCA on the “Community Well-Being Case for Change” that examines topics such as strategic opportunities in well-being literacy as well as early awareness and preventative support. McKinsey Health Institute is an organization dedicated to advancing human health globally by catalyzing the actions and investment needed across continents and sectors.

To learn more about the Global Summit on Youth Mental Health, watch the highlights from the inaugural event in 2025.

About the SNF Global Center at the Child Mind Institute

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Global Center for Child and Adolescent Mental Health at the Child Mind Institute brings together the Child Mind Institute’s expertise as a leading independent nonprofit in children’s mental health and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation’s deep commitment to supporting collaborative projects to improve access to quality health care worldwide. The center is building partnerships to drive advances in under-researched areas of children and adolescents’ mental health, and expand access to culturally appropriate training, resources, and treatment in low- and middle-income countries. This work is conducted by the Child Mind Institute with support from SNF through its Global Health Initiative (GHI).

About the Child Mind Institute

The Child Mind Institute is the leading nonprofit dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families experiencing mental health and learning disorders. Since its founding in 2009, the Child Mind Institute has become a global institution reaching millions of families each year through excellence in evidence-based clinical care, renowned educational resources and training, and science to advance the next generation of treatment. 

Visit the Child Mind Institute on social media: Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn 

For press questions, contact us at childmindinstitute@ssmandl.com or mediaoffice@childmind.org.

The post SNF Global Center to Convene Second Global Summit on Youth Mental Health  appeared first on Child Mind Institute.

Posted on

Neural encoding of auditory processing in schizophrenia

IntroductionAuditory processing abnormalities are a core feature of schizophrenia and are linked to deficits in speech perception, cognitive function, and everyday communication. It remains unclear which stages of auditory processing are most disrupted and how these disruptions relate to symptoms at the level of population-wide neural representations.MethodsWe used fMRI recordings acquired while individuals with schizophrenia and matched healthy controls completed a controlled block-design speech-perception task. Voxel-wise encoding models mapped self-supervised speech-model representations, together with complementary acoustic and linguistic features, to neural responses.ResultsAcross cross-validated evaluations, individuals with schizophrenia showed numerically higher encoding alignment than matched controls across all evaluated regions of interest, although no effect survived false discovery rate correction in this small sample. The largest numerical group differences occurred in frontal language regions, including the middle frontal gyrus and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and in early auditory cortex. Subgroup analyses suggested that patients without auditory verbal hallucinations drove much of this numerical separation.DiscussionThese descriptive, hypothesis-generating findings suggest that model-based encoding can reveal a frontal-auditory signature in schizophrenia, but they do not establish a clinically actionable biomarker or preserved or enhanced speech encoding. Larger, adequately powered studies with richer feature spaces are needed for confirmatory inference and to test whether encoding-based measures can serve as clinically meaningful biomarkers.
Posted on

Marital satisfaction and phubbing: the roles of depressive symptoms and subjective social status

BackgroundPrevious studies have mainly examined the associations between partner phubbing and relationship outcomes among phubbees, whereas less is known about how marital relationship quality is associated with phubbing among phubbers themselves. This study aims to examine the relationship between marital satisfaction and phubbing among Chinese married adults, and examine the mediating role of depressive symptoms, as well as the moderating role of subjective social status (SSS) in this association.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted with 565 married adults in China (31.85 ± 4.85 years; 67.3% female). Participants completed self-report measures of marital satisfaction, depressive symptoms, phubbing, and SSS. Moderated mediation analyses were conducted to examine the indirect role of depressive symptoms and the conditional indirect associations across levels of SSS.ResultsDepressive symptoms significantly mediated the association between marital satisfaction and phubbing. SSS moderated both the direct path from marital satisfaction to phubbing and the second stage of the mediation model from depressive symptoms to phubbing. Simple slope analyses revealed that marital satisfaction was negatively associated with phubbing only among individuals with a high SSS (βsimple = -0.42, t = -4.16, p < 0.001). Furthermore, depressive symptoms were positively associated with phubbing among adults with low SSS (βsimple = 0.62, t = 6.99, p < 0.001), while this association was not significant among those with high SSS (M + 1SD) (βsimple = 0.11, t = 1.13, p = 0.26).ConclusionDepressive symptoms accounted for part of the indirect association between lower marital satisfaction and greater phubbing among Chinese married adults, and this process varies as a function of SSS. Prevention and intervention efforts targeting phubbing in marital contexts may benefit from considering both depressive symptoms and individuals’ perceived social status.
Posted on

Association between perceived school climate and employment anxiety among medical undergraduates: the mediating role of intentional self-regulation and the moderating role of perceived employability

BackgroundEmployment anxiety is an important psychological concern for medical undergraduates during the transition from university to work. This study examined the association between perceived school climate and employment anxiety and evaluated the roles of intentional self-regulation and perceived employability in this association.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted among 3,857 undergraduate students from four medical universities in Heilongjiang Province, China, between September and December 2025. Participants completed measures of perceived school climate, intentional self-regulation, perceived employability, employment anxiety, and demographic and academic characteristics. Hierarchical regression, indirect-association analysis, and moderated mediation analysis with 5,000 bootstrap resamples were performed. Multivariable models included university fixed effects and were adjusted for demographic and academic covariates.ResultsA more positive perceived school climate was associated with lower employment anxiety and stronger intentional self-regulation. Intentional self-regulation statistically accounted for part of the association between perceived school climate and employment anxiety. Perceived employability moderated the association between intentional self-regulation and employment anxiety: the negative association, and consequently the conditional indirect association, was stronger among students with lower perceived employability and weaker among those with higher perceived employability. However, the incremental magnitude of the moderation effect was modest.ConclusionsSupportive perceived school climate was associated with lower employment anxiety partly through intentional self-regulation, with a modest moderating role of perceived employability. Integrating school-climate improvement, self-regulation training, and targeted career support may strengthen psychological adaptation during the school-to-work transition.