Department of Psychiatry

Piven Earns Prestigious Lifetime Award from the International Society for Autism Research

samweiss — Wed, 14 May 2025 16:29:25 +0000

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Blue Cross NC, Carolina Across 100 and CHAAMP to partner on CARE4Youth mental health program

samweiss — Wed, 14 May 2025 16:27:58 +0000

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April Research Publications

samweiss — Fri, 09 May 2025 15:19:11 +0000

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Understanding Onset, Dynamic Transitions, and Associated Inequality Risk Factors for Adverse Posttraumatic Neuropsychiatric Sequelae After Trauma Exposure

samweiss — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:20:41 +0000

This new study, using data from over 2,500 participants in the AURORA, sheds light on how adverse posttraumatic neuropsychiatric sequelae (APNS) develop and change during the first two months following trauma through latent transition modeling. In this study, APNS symptoms include pain, depressive symptoms, sleep discontinuity, nightmares, somatic symptoms, concentration/thinking/fatigue, avoidance, re-experiencing, anxiety, and hyperarousal. Using these symptoms as a foundation, researchers identified three distinct symptom groups: low symptoms, moderate symptoms, and severe symptoms. The study further examined how individuals transitioned between these groups over time and how equity-relevant factors, such as gender, race, income, and childhood trauma, influenced these transitions.
Key findings include:
-Most trauma survivors with severe or moderate symptoms remained in the same group, but some improved, especially in the first month.
-Women, non-white individuals, and those with childhood trauma were less likely to transition to a less severe symptom group.
-From one to two months, lower-income participants were less likely to move from moderate to low symptom levels.
These results emphasize the need for early, targeted interventions to support trauma survivors and reduce health disparities.

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North Carolina Healthy Active Living: Describing a Wellness Coaching Program for First-Episode Psychosis Clinics

samweiss — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:19:32 +0000

The North Carolina Healthy Active Living (NC HeAL) program is an innovative clinical service offered to all Coordinated Specialty Care (CSC) clients in this state. It offers personalized health and wellness coaching to help clients achieve meaningful health improvements. This paper provides a detailed description of the program’s development, the target population and setting, the roles and skills of the NC HeAL team, program components and evidence-based program measures.

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Revealing Cortical Spreading Pathway of Neuropathological Events by Neural Optimal Mass Transport

samweiss — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:18:32 +0000

We present a physics-informed deep learning framework that models tau pathology propagation in Alzheimerâ€s disease as an optimal mass transport (OMT) problem constrained by brain geometry, enabling interpretable and accurate prediction of future PET-based pathology distribution. By learning population-level flow dynamics and forecasting subject-specific spreading trajectories, our approach offers a novel lens into the mechanistic underpinnings of prion-like neurodegenerative progression.

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Functional connectivity between the visual and salience networks and autistic social features at school-age

samweiss — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:17:39 +0000

Connectivity between the networks in the brain responsible for processing visual input and coordinating response to stimuli may play an important role in social affect symptom variability among children with ASD and those with genetic liability for ASD. These findings align with and extend earlier reports in this sample of the central role of the visual system during infancy in ASD.

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Connection Learning Healthcare System Hub of the Early Psychosis Intervention Network: Program and Participant Characteristics

samweiss — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:16:42 +0000

Connection Learning Healthcare System, one of the eight hubs of the National Institute of Mental Health funded Early Psychosis Intervention Network, supports uniform data collection, analysis, feedback and infrastructure development to promote a culture of continuous quality improvement across 25 Coordinated Specialty Care programs serving young people experiencing first episode psychosis and their families in Maryland and Pennsylvania. This first report describes the hub and its constituent programs, the approach for developing and implementing a hub-wide core assessment battery harmonised with the national battery, and preliminary program and participant characteristics.

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Longitudinal Associations Between Peritraumatic Oestradiol and Fear Responding in Women and Men

samweiss — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:15:14 +0000

Fluctuations in sex hormones may impact risk for PTSD, as estradiol has been shown to influence PTSD severity and biomarkers of PTSD. Using the AURORA data, we were able to examine how estradiol levels at the time of the trauma were associated with changes in autonomic function and fear learning following the trauma. We observed that women with higher estradiol at the time of the trauma showed greater fear responses six months later. Among men, higher estradiol at the time of the trauma was associated with blunted fear responses at the emergency department. These findings highlight the complex relationship between estradiol and biomarkers of PTSD and suggest the protective effects of estradiol on PTSD risk may depend on other factors, such as time since trauma.

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Multi-level socioeconomic modifiers of the comorbidity of post-traumatic stress and tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis use: the importance of income

samweiss — Thu, 08 May 2025 20:13:57 +0000

Post-traumatic stress (PTS) symptoms and substance use behaviors commonly co-occur after a traumatic event. However, whether individual-, household-, or neigborhood-level factors impact this relationship is understudied due to lack of data on long-term outcomes and geographic variability in samples. From the Advancing Understanding of RecOvery afteR traumA (AURORA) study, we had data from 2943 individuals who presented at the emergency department after a traumatic event. We examined how often participants used tobacco, alcohol, and cannabis across 6 timepoints (12 months) post-traumatic event. Using models that accounted for geographic clustering within a state, we estimated the association between PTS symptoms and substance use, and then stratified the sample by whether participants made greater or less than $50,000 per year in their household, and whether their neighborhood had more or fewer resources than the median 50% of neighborhoods. We found lower household income and lower neighborhood resources (e.g., higher deprivation) were associated with greater tobacco use. We also found that higher household income and more neighborhoods resources were associated with alcohol use. Between household income and neighborhood deprivation, income seemed to be the more impactful modifier. This is useful for determining to what extent differences in PTS symptoms and substance use behaviors are related to individual characteristics versus environmental factors. This suggests that interventions at the household level may be useful in mitigating risks, compared to the neighborhood. Future studies should examine this beyond 1 year after trauma, and track whether participants move or their income changes over time.

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