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Background: Cognitive networks impairments are common in neuropsychiatric disorders like Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder (BD), and schizophrenia (SZ). While previous research has focused on specific brain regions, the role of the procedural memory as a type of long-term memory to examine cognitive networks impairments in these disorders remains unclear. This study investigates alterations in resting-state functional connectivity (rs-FC) within the procedural memory network to explore brain function associated with cognitive networks in patients with these disorders. Methods: This study analyzed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) data from 40 individuals with ADHD, 49 with BD, 50 with SZ, and 50 healthy controls (HCs). A procedural memory network was defined based on the selection of 34 regions of interest (ROIs) associated with the network in the Harvard-Oxford Cortical Structural Atlas (default atlas). Multivariate region of interest to region of interest connectivity (mRRC) was used to analyze the rs-FC between the defined network regions. Significant differences in rs-FC between patients and HCs were identified (P < 0.001). Results: ADHD patients showed increased Cereb45 l - Cereb3 r rs-FC (p = 0.000067) and decreased Cereb1 l - Cereb6 l rs-FC (p = 0.00092). BD patients exhibited increased rs-FC between multiple regions, including Claustrum r - Caudate r (p = 0.00058), subthalamic nucleus r - Pallidum l (p = 0.00060), substantia nigra l - Cereb2 l (p = 0.00082), Cereb10 r - SMA r (p = 0.00086), and Cereb9 r - SMA l (p = 0.00093) as well as decreased rs-FC in subthalamic nucleus r - Cereb6 l (p = 0.00013) and Cereb9 r - Cereb9 l (p = 0.00033). SZ patients indicated increased Caudate r– putamen l rs-FC (p = 0.00057) and decreased rs-FC in subthalamic nucleus r – Cereb6 l (p = 0.000063), and Cereb1 r – subthalamic nucleus r (p = 0.00063). Conclusions: This study found significant alterations in rs-FC within the procedural memory network in patients with ADHD, BD, and SZ compared to HCs. These findings suggest that disrupted rs-FC within this network may related to cognitive networks impairments observed in these disorders. Clinical trial number: Not applicable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Spasticity is an upper motor neuron syndrome that exacerbates motor paralysis and is rarely associated with pain. This report elucidates the management of drug-resistant pain attributed to an adolescent brain tumor using botulinum therapy. Case presentation: A 15-year-old female patient experienced dizziness, developed muscle weakness in her upper extremities, and was diagnosed with diffuse glioblastoma of the pons. The tumor responded partially to radiation therapy. Three years later, at the time of recurrence, she had high muscle tone and pain in her extremities. On stimulation, her upper and lower extremities would bend and extend, respectively, causing excruciating pain. Despite experiencing pain-induced insomnia and restlessness, she was reluctant to use drugs, citing concerns about respiratory depression. She received botulinum therapy for her extremities 3 times (200, 300, and 500 U), with pain improvement after repeated treatments (Numerical rating scale from 7.5 to 1 and Short-form McGill Pain Questionnaire-2 score from 78 to 16). The effect lasted for more than three months after the final injection. Conclusion: Thus, botulinum therapy can potentially alleviate spasticity-associated pain in advanced stages of brain tumors in adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The high comorbidity and symptom overlap of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and social anxiety disorder (SAD), has led to the study of their shared and disorder-specific neural substrates. However, the morphometric similarity network (MSN) differences among these disorders remain unknown. Methods: MSN derived from T1-weighted images in patients of GAD, PTSD, and SAD, and health controls (HC) using a Siemens 3T magnetic resonance imaging system. Covariance analysis and post hoc tests were used to investigate group differences. In addition, the relationship between MSN and clinical characteristics was analyzed. Results: Increased morphometric similarity (MS) between left bankssts (BA22, superior temporal cortex, STC) and right precentral gyrus, and decreased MS between left precentral gyrus and right cuneus_part1/part2, and between right rostral middle frontal cortex (rMFC) and right STC were common in GAD and PTSD relative to HC and SAD. Compared to the other three groups, SAD exhibited disorder-specific alterations of increased MS between right rMFC and right STC, and between left cuneus and right inferior parietal cortex. Additionally, increased regional MSN in left precentral gyrus was found in PTSD compared to HC and SAD. A mild positive correlation of the MS value between left bankssts and right precentral gyrus and the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale scores (uncorrected p = 0.041) was found in PTSD. Conclusions: Our study provides the first evidence for common and distinct brain MSN abnormalities underlying the pathophysiology of GAD, PTSD, and SAD, which may aid in differential diagnosis and determining potential disorder-specific intervention targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Unmet oral health needs remain a significant issue among immigrant adolescents, often exacerbated by experiences of racial discrimination. This study aimed to examine the associations between perceived discrimination and oral health behaviours in adolescents with immigrant backgrounds and explore the potential moderating role of resilience on this association. Methods: Ethical approval for this cross-sectional study was obtained from the University of Alberta Research Ethics Board. Participants were 12 to 18-year-old adolescents from immigrant backgrounds. Participants were recruited through nine community organizations using a snowball sampling technique. After obtaining active parental consent and assent from the adolescent, the participants completed a questionnaire covering demographics, oral health behaviours, and perceived racial discrimination and resilience. Perceived racial discrimination and resilience were measured using validated scales. Descriptive statistics summarized variables. Logistic regression assessed associations, controlling for confounding factors. Resilience's moderating impact was analyzed via the interaction model of regression analysis. Results: In this cross-sectional study of 316 participants, average age of 15.3 (SD = 1.9) years, and a median age of 15 years (Inter Quartile Range-12-18), 76% reported discrimination experiences. Adjusted analysis showed that an increase of one unit in the total discrimination distress score was associated with 51% less likelihood of categorizing self-rated oral health as good (OR = 0.49, 95% CI: 0.29–0.81). The odds of brushing teeth more than twice a day, as opposed to once a day, decreased by 58% with one unit increase in the total discrimination distress score (OR = 0.42, 95% CI: 0.25–0.71). The odds of visiting the dentist for an urgent procedure instead of a regular check-up were 2.3 times higher with a unit increase in the total discrimination distress score (OR = 2.3: 95% CI:1.3–4.0) Resilience did not moderate the observed association. Conclusion: Perceived racial discrimination was associated with the pattern for dental attendance, tooth brushing frequency, and self-rated oral health. Resilience did not moderate the observed association. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: High Angular Resolution Diffusion Imaging (HARDI) models have emerged as a valuable tool for investigating microstructure with a higher degree of detail than standard diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (dMRI). In this study, we explored the potential of multiple advanced microstructural diffusion models for investigating preterm birth in order to identify non-invasive markers of altered white matter development. Approach: Rather than focusing on a single MRI modality, we studied on a compound of HARDI techniques in 46 preterm babies studied on a 3T scanner at term-equivalent age and in 23 control neonates born at term. Furthermore, we investigated discriminative patterns of preterm birth using multiple analysis methods, drawn from two only seemingly divergent modeling goals, namely inference and prediction. We thus resorted to (i) a traditional univariate voxel-wise inferential method, as the Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS) approach; (ii) a univariate predictive approach, as the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification; and (iii) a multivariate predictive Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA). Main results: The TBSS analysis revealed significant differences between preterm and term cohorts in several white matter areas for multiple HARDI features. SVM classification on skeletonized HARDI measures yielded satisfactory accuracy, particularly for highly informative parameters about fiber directionality. Assessment of the degree of overlap between the two methods in voting for the most discriminating features exhibited a good, though parameter-dependent, rate of agreement. Finally, CCA identified joint changes precisely for those measures exhibiting less correspondence between TBSS and SVM. Significance: Our results suggest that a data-driven intramodal imaging approach is crucial for gathering deep and complementary information. The main contribution of this methodological outline is to thoroughly investigate prematurity-related white matter changes through different inquiry focuses, with a view to addressing this issue, both aiming toward mechanistic insight and optimizing predictive accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By giving voice to 15 Ukrainian refugees, aged 10–14, who sheltered in a refugee camp in Poland in March 2022, this qualitative study reveals how and why they used smartphones, to cope with the challenges they faced in the first days of the Russia–Ukraine war. The results showed that by the second week since the inception of the war, the children and adolescents already had created new practices of smartphone use, suitable for war. They extensively used their smartphones offline and online for three overarching purposes: in order to emotionally regulate themselves; make significant contacts with other people; and maintain identity. The current study shows the important role of avoidant and collective coping strategies in the lives of children and adolescents in war and contributes to a deeper and pragmatic understanding of their digital coping in war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I review recent research on climate migration, including estimates of the numbers of future migrants owing to climate change. I introduce a typology of climate migration including strategic, disaster, managed relocation and trapped populations. I draw on migration theory and findings on the integration of immigrants and refugees to suggest that a good way to manage and prepare for climate migration is for rich countries to allocate extra visas to poorer countries that are suffering the effects of climate migration, partly as reparations for climate injustice. These visas will allow strategic migrants to seed further migration by tying the countries together through social networks, and eventually will provide a co-ethnic community for disaster migrants and relocated communities. I also review research on refugees to suggest questions for researchers to answer on how best to integrate disaster migrants going forward. Finally, I review the growing intersection of climate denialism and anti-immigrant sentiment among right-wing movements. I suggest that planning for the successful integration of large numbers of migrants fleeing climate change should be a top priority not least because this success will help to preserve the social trust that is necessary for successful climate mitigation efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Character strengths and development is one of the most important and influential areas of positive psychology. Yet most of this research involves – as per the field generally – research in high income countries, with relatively little awareness of its dynamics in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, there is a burgeoning research base in such countries, but this has hitherto been neither consolidated nor widely disseminated. To remedy this lacuna, this paper reports on a systematic review of the peer-reviewed journal articles on character development in LMICs, analysing 164 articles selected from 1,507 initial abstracts. Our analysis shows that research into character in LMICs is developing rapidly, noting various significant trends with respect to countries, populations, outcomes, and interventions. We also point where further efforts are needed, showing how research on this important topic can continue to prosper in regions that have been relatively neglected in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, an imaging-preprocessing step removes the skull and other non-brain tissue from the images. But methods for such a skull-stripping process often struggle with large data heterogeneity across medical sites and with dynamic changes in tissue contrast across lifespans. Here we report a skull-stripping model for magnetic resonance images that generalizes across lifespans by leveraging personalized priors from brain atlases. The model consists of a brain extraction module that provides an initial estimation of the brain tissue on an image, and a registration module that derives a personalized prior from an age-specific atlas. The model is substantially more accurate than state-of-the-art skull-stripping methods, as we show with a large and diverse dataset of 21,334 lifespans acquired from 18 sites with various imaging protocols and scanners, and it generates naturally consistent and seamless lifespan changes in brain volume, faithfully charting the underlying biological processes of brain development and ageing., Competing Interests: Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2025. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)

Recent research has proven that peripheral (PS) and central sensitization (CS), mental health, and myofascial dysfunction all play a role, alongside nociception, in the genesis and in the perpetuation of endometriosis' symptoms. However, such components of pain are still largely ignored in clinical practice, although not considering such contributors may entail serious consequences on women's health, including the choice of unnecessary surgery and leaving the real causes of pain untreated. At the present time, we are facing a paradox by which 25-40% of women who undergo laparoscopic surgery for pelvic pain do not have an obvious diagnosis, while the percentage of women with endometriosis who have signs of CS, of depressive or anxiety disorders, or who have an increased pelvic muscle tone ammounts to 41-55%, 15-88% and 28-73%, respectively. Moving from the widely-accepted stepwise approach suggested for endometriosis management, which consists in the initial prescription of low-dose combined oral contraceptives (COCs) or of a progestin monotherapy, followed by GnRH analogues and, ultimately, by surgery, when COCs and progestins have proven ineffective or are not tolerated or contraindicated, we propose an integration of such model which takes into account the identification and the simultaneous treatment of all pain contributors. Our objective is to encourage physicians' awareness of the need of a multidisciplinary, multimodal approach to endometriosis-related pain, and ultimately to promote a reduction in the number of unnecessary surgeries., Competing Interests: Declarations. Ethical Approval: Not applicable. Informed Consent: Not applicable. Conflict of Interest: None., (© 2025. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Society for Reproductive Investigation.)

Sulci are a fundamental part of brain morphology, closely linked to brain function, cognition, and behavior. Tertiary sulci, characterized as the shallowest and smallest subtype, pose a challenging task for detection. The diagonal sulcus (ds), located in a crucial area in language processing, has a prevalence between 50% and 60%. Automatic detection of the ds is an unexplored field: while some sulci segmenters include the ds, their accuracy is usually low. In this work, we present a deep learning based model for ds detection using a fine-tuning approach with limited training labeled data. A convolutional autoencoder was employed to learn specific features related to brain morphology with unlabeled data through self-supervised learning. Subsequently, the pre-trained network was fine-tuned to detect the ds using a less extensive labeled dataset. We achieved a mean F1-score of 0.7176 (SD=0.0736) for the test set and a F1-score of 0.72 for a second held-out set, surpassing the results of a standard software and other alternative deep learning models. We conducted an interpretability analysis of the results using occlusion maps and observed that the models focused on adjacent sulci to the ds for prediction, consistent with the approach taken by experts in manual annotation. We also analyzed the challenges of manual labeling by conducting a thorough examination of interrater agreement on a small dataset and its relationship with our model's performance. Finally, we applied our method on a population analysis and reported the prevalence of ds in a case study., Competing Interests: Declarations. Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest in this work. Consent: Written informed consent was obtained from all patients/parti-cipants prior to their involvement in the study. Ethics Approval: The ethical committees of Hospital El Cruce and Hospital Angel Roffo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, reviewed and approved the studies involving human participants. Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.)

Background and Objectives: Analgesia trials often demands multiple comparisons to assess various treatment arms, outcomes, or repeated assessments. These multiple comparisons risk inflating the false positive rate. Multiplicity correction in recent analgesic randomized controlled trials (RCTs) remains unclear despite statistical method advancements and regulatory guidelines. Our study aimed to identify reporting inadequacies in multiple analysis adjustments and explanations to understand these deficiencies., Databases and Data Treatment: This review analysed RCTs from the European Journal of Pain, the Journal of Pain, and PAIN, published between January 2018 and December 2022. We included randomized, double-blind trials focusing on pain outcomes. Data extraction, managed by three researchers using predefined criteria, included trial characteristics, multiplicity presence, and correction methods. Descriptive statistical analyses included Fisher's exact, and Holm method for multiple comparisons., Results: Out of 112 articles, 48 pre-specified a primary analysis plan. Multiple analyses were observed in 65 articles, with 60% adjusting for all comparisons, primarily using the Bonferroni method. Compared with previous studies, no significant changes in multiplicity correction practices were noted when stratified by trial type, size, and sponsor., Conclusions: The study reveals a persistent reliance on multiple comparisons in analgesic clinical trials without a corresponding increase in multiplicity corrections emphasizing a need for enhanced reporting and implementation of statistical adjustments. We acknowledge limitations in categorizing studies, the use of a surrogate for the trial stage, and sourcing data from journal webpages rather than a database., Significance Statement: This study flags inadequate reporting on multiplicity correction in analgesic trials, stressing the risk of false positives and the urgent need for enhanced reporting to boost reproducibility., (© 2024 European Pain Federation ‐ EFIC ®.)