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As a result of a decade of partnership between the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) and the Child Mind Institute (CMI), the Children and Adolescent Mental Health Initiative (CAMHI) has been established to help enhance child and adolescent mental health care capacity and strengthen the infrastructure for prevention, assessment, and treatment of mental health struggles faced by children and adolescents in Greece. Under the SNF’s Health Initiative and the associated public-private partnership in place between SNF and the Greek State, the Child Mental Health Initiative (CAMHI) envisions to expand access to mental health care and offer ground-up resources in ways that can reinforce the critical work done by mental health and child protection providers across the country. Aimed (a) to raise mental health literacy and awareness; b) to increase access to evidence-based mental health care; (c) to build out technological capacity, and (d) to establish a country-wide Referral Network for children and adolescent mental health care, the CAMHI builds on a solid open science-based framework aspiring to leverage scientific knowledge production about children and adolescent mental health and mental health care in Greece. To approach that, the initiative has been following three research approaches (checkout the Home wiki for more).

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-asm-10.1177_10731911231163136 for An Evaluation of Item Harmonization Strategies Between Assessment Tools of Psychopathology in Children and Adolescents by Maurício Scopel Hoffmann, Tyler Maxwell Moore, Luiza Kvitko Axelrud, Nim Tottenham, Pedro Mario Pan, Eurípedes Constantino Miguel, Luis Augusto Rohde, Michael Peter Milham, Theodore Daniel Satterthwaite and Giovanni Abrahão Salum in Assessment

This study aim to evaluate the item-wise harmonization performance of two mental health questionnaires, the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and GOASSESS, a questionnaire derived from the Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia, while using bifactor models. We tested model fit, questionnaire invariance and how authentic the harmonized models are in relation to full item sem models.

The Reproducible Brain Charts initiative aims to aggregate and harmonize phenotypic and neuroimage data to delineate novel mechanisms regarding the developmental basis of psychopathology in youth and yield reproducible growth charts of brain development. To reach this objective, the first step to phenotypic harmonization is to characterize psychopathology in a way that general and specific aspects are dissociated, so more specific relationships with the brain could be established. Bifactor models of mental health problems suits this purpose. The understanding of what the bifactor model of psychopathology represents must go through the identification of the different published models, the estimation of their global fit, model-based reliability and criterion validity, whether the models are influenced by other sample characteristics and whether the derived factors from different models inform a similar construct. This would ultimately help to elucidate whether different models represent similar or distinct constructs while reliably representing psychopathology. To answer these questions, the present study aimed to compile published bifactor models of psychopathology originating from different methodologies and compare them in their global model fit, model-based reliability, invariance and correlations among the constructs of these models. Doing so allowed us to understand the extent to which the model specifications and item selection impacted model quality, and if the models are distinguishable, to select the best model to represent the bifactor model of psychopathology.

The Reproducible Brain Charts initiative aims to aggregate and harmonize phenotypic and neuroimage data to delineate novel mechanisms regarding the developmental basis of psychopathology in youth and yield reproducible growth charts of brain development. To reach this objective, the second step of our project is to test item-wise matching strategies of phenotypic harmonization between studies using bifactor models of psychopathology. We focused on this model because general and specific aspects of mental health problems can dissociated, so more specific relationships with the brain could be established. In the current study, we benchmarked six item matching strategies for harmonizing the Child Behavioral Checklist (CBCL) and the Sstrenghts and Difficulties Qquestionnaire (SDQ) within a bifactor model framework in two samples that were assessed with both instruments. It proceded in the following steps: 1) harmonization of items according to the six strategies, 2) estimated bifactor models with harmonized items for each sample separately, 3) estimated factor score correlation between assessment tools in each sample, 4) estimated factor reliability, 5) tested the assessment’s invariance according to each strategy and 6) calculated the root expected mean square difference (REMSD) to estimate the factor score difference of using a proxy measure instead of a target measure while integrating the two samples. We expect that the results of this study can encourage the use of the best streategy to date to increase reproducibility in the field while aggregating data from different contexts and instruments in the context of the bifactor model of psychopathology.

Comparing cortical and subcortical brain structure between patients with generalized anxiety disorder and healthy comparison subjects – findings from the ENIGMA Generalized Anxiety Disorder Working Group

A recent neurodevelopmental hypothesis posits that cortical maturation progresses along the sensorimotor-association (S-A) axis, which spans from unimodal sensorimotor to transmodal association cortices (Sydnor et al., 2021). Prior work suggests that patterns of functional network development vary across this cortical hierarchy (Pines et al., 2022). In this pre-registered analysis, we will use multiple large-scale datasets to replicate and extend this prior work on functional network development. We will use resting-state and task functional MRI in youth ages 5-22 from four large datasets. The Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (N=1621) was used for discovery and feature selection (Satterthwaite et al., 2016); these findings will be replicated prospectively in other large-scale developmental datasets including the Human Connectome Project: Development (N= 652), Healthy Brain Network (N=5,290), and Nathan Kline Institute-Rockland (N=505) (Alexander et al., 2017; Nooner et al., 2012; Somerville et al., 2018). Results from this study will robustly establish how patterns of functional brain development align with a major axis of brain organization.

Crime is a major public problem in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and its preventive measures could have great social impact. The extent to which multiple modifiable risk factors among children and families influence juvenile criminal conviction in an LMIC remains unexplored; however, it is necessary to identify prevention targets. This study examined the association between 22 modifiable individual and family exposures assessed in childhood (5–14 years, n = 2511) and criminal conviction at a 7-year follow-up (13–21 years, n = 1905, 76% retention rate) in a cohort of young people in Brazil. Population attributable risk fraction (PARF) was computed for significant risk factors. Criminal convictions were reported for 81 (4.3%) youths. Although most children living in poverty did not present criminal conviction (89%), poverty at baseline was the only modifiable risk factor significantly associated with crime (OR 4.14, 99.8% CI 1.38–12.46) with a PARF of 22.5% (95% CI 5.9–36.1%). It suggests that preventing children’s exposure to poverty would reduce nearly a quarter of subsequent criminal convictions. These findings highlight the importance of poverty in criminal conviction, as it includes several deprivations and suggest that poverty eradication interventions during childhood may be crucial for reducing crime among Brazilian youth.

Additional file 1. Contains tables of complementary analyses.

DESAFIOS ATUAIS EM PSIQUIATRIA INFANTIL Diagnóstico e Tratamento da Ansiedade na Infância e Adolescência

Additional file 1: Table S1. Description of CBCL total, internalizing and externalizing scores. Figure S1. Multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) plots colored by BeadChip number, BeadChip position and waves. Figure S2. PC1 x PC2 plot from principal components analysis generated from SNParray data. Figure S3. Line plot of chronological age between Wave 0 and Wave 1 for the 24 HRC individuals, grouped by gender. Figure S4. Scatter plot of the variation of cg08517799 DNA methylation values and the variation of RB1CC1 mRNA levels (rp = − 0.580; p = 0.005). Figure S5. Scatter plot of the variation of total score of CBCL and the variation of KMT2E mRNA levels (rp = 0.436; p = 0.042). Figure S6. Scatter plot of the variation of total score of CBCL and the variation of FAM217B mRNA levels (rp = 0.475; p = 0.025). Figure S7. Overview of the most significant differentially methylated region (DMR) and of its genomic context. Figure S8. Scatter plot of the variation of total score of CBCL and the variation of RPS6KB1 mRNA levels (rp = 0.442; p = 0.040). Figure S9. Plot of bisulfite conversion median value for each sample from High-Risk Cohort (HRC). Figure S10. Plot of bisulfite conversion median value for each sample from Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC). Figure S11. Error bar plot comparing blood cell type estimations (CD19+ B cells, CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells, granulocytes, CD14+ monocytes and CD56+ natural killer cells) between Wave 0 and Wave 1. Figure S12. Principal components analysis plot of the 24 HRC participants and of the population from 1000 genomes.

Introduction: Studies suggest that anxiety is an independent predictor of adverse cardiovascular events. However, few studies have investigated the association between cardiovascular risk factors (RF) and severity of anxiety disorders (AD) in childhood and adolescents. Objectives: To assess the prevalence of cardiovascular RF in children and adolescents with anxiety disorders and their association with disease severity. Method: Cross-sectional study assessing nutritional and anthropometric RF, as well as % body fat (BF), blood pressure (BP), physical activity level, anxiety symptoms and severity of the anxiety disorder of children and adolescents. Results: A total of 65 children and adolescents (8.6) 1.7 years) took part in the study. Excess saturated fatty acid intake (52.3%), high body mass index (50.8%), high BP (50.8%) and physical inactivity (50.0%) were the most prevalent cardiovascular RF. There was a significant association between the severity of the anxiety and the presence of > 6 RF per patient (p=0.026), excess abdominal body fat as assessed by waist circumference (p=0.019) and conicity index (p=0,053), and excess % BF (p=0.035). Generalized anxiety disorder was significantly associated with high BP (p=0.044). Conclusion: A high prevalence of cardiovascular RF was found in the present sample, and individuals with more severe anxiety had greater cardiovascular risk. The characterization of the cardiovascular risk in young populations, especially in individuals with AD who are therefore more susceptible to CVD, is crucial for the development of lifestyle interventions in these patients.

The results leading to this publication have received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 777394 for the project AIMS-2-TRIALS. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA and AUTISM SPEAKS, Autistica, SFARI. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to publish the results. Any views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the funders.