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Background: General aggression and evolutionary models posit that more severe early exposure experiences to trauma (physical, emotional, sexual abuse and/or neglect) place one at risk for adulthood psychopathology through heightened trait anger expression-internal (Anger-In) and external (Anger-Out). However, there are a dearth of empirical studies explaining the longitudinal childhood maltreatment-adulthood psychopathology relation.Objective: Therefore, this study investigated if childhood maltreatment exposure severity predicted elevated adulthood major depressive disorder (MDD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder (PD), and alcohol use disorder (AUD). Moreover, we tested if trait anger expression - internal and external - mediated the childhood maltreatment-adulthood MDD, GAD, PD, and AUD symptom associations.Method: Participants took part in two waves of measurement spaced approximately 9 years apart. Time 1 childhood trauma severity (retrospectively-reported Childhood Trauma Questionnaire), Time 2 Anger-In and Anger-Out (State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory), and Time 3 adulthood MDD, GAD, PD (Composite International Diagnostic Interview-Short Form), and AUD (Alcohol Screening Test) diagnoses were measured.Results: Anger-Out and Anger-In partially mediated the relations between childhood trauma severity and adulthood psychopathology diagnoses after adjusting for Time 2 symptoms. Higher Time 1 childhood trauma severity was related to greater Time 2 Anger-Out and Anger-In, and increased Time 2 Anger-Out and Anger-In were thereby related to elevated Time 3 adulthood MDD, PD and AUD, but not GAD severity. Trait anger accounted for 14 to 50% of the variance of childhood trauma-adulthood MDD, PD and AUD relations.Discussion: Theoretical and clinical implications, such as the need for trauma-informed care, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Functional specialization is a feature of human brain for understanding the pathophysiology of major depressive disorder (MDD). The degree of human specialization refers to within and cross hemispheric interactions. However, most previous studies only focused on interhemispheric connectivity in MDD, and the results varied across studies. Hence, brain functional connectivity asymmetry in MDD should be further studied.Methods: Resting-state fMRI data of 753 patients with MDD and 451 healthy controls were provided by REST-meta-MDD Project. Twenty-five project contributors preprocessed their data locally with the Data Processing Assistant State fMRI software and shared final indices. The parameter of asymmetry (PAS), a novel voxel-based whole-brain quantitative measure that reflects inter- and intrahemispheric asymmetry, was reported. We also examined the effects of age, sex and clinical variables (including symptom severity, illness duration and three depressive phenotypes).Results: Compared with healthy controls, patients with MDD showed increased PAS scores (decreased hemispheric specialization) in most of the areas of default mode network, control network, attention network and some regions in the cerebellum and visual cortex. Demographic characteristics and clinical variables have significant effects on these abnormalities.Limitations: Although a large sample size could improve statistical power, future independent efforts are needed to confirm our results.Conclusions: Our results highlight the idea that many brain networks contribute to broad clinical pathophysiology of MDD, and indicate that a lateralized, efficient and economical brain information processing system is disrupted in MDD. These findings may help comprehensively clarify the pathophysiology of MDD in a new hemispheric specialization perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depressive patients with psychotic features demonstrate distinct biological abnormalities in the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA), dopaminergic activity, electroencephalogram sleep profiles and measures of serotonergic function when compared to nonpsychotic depressive patients. However, very few functional neuroimaging studies were specifically designed for studying the effects of psychotic features on neuroimaging findings in depressed patients. The objective of the present study was to compare brain Single Photon Emission Tomography (SPECT) images in a group of unmedicated depressive patients with and without psychotic features. Twenty-eight patients who fully met DSM-IV criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD, 12 had psychotic features) were included in the study. They were compared with 16 control subjects matched for age, gender and education. Both psychotic and nonpsychotic depressed patients showed significantly lower regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) values in the left and right superior frontal cortex, and left anterior cingulate cortex compared to those of controls. In comparison with depressive patients without psychotic features (DwoPF), depressive patients with psychotic features (DwPF) showed significantly lower rCBF perfusion ratios in left parietal cortex, left cerebellum but had higher rCBF perfusion ratio in the left inferior frontal cortex and caudate nucleus. The present study showed that DwPF have a different rCBF pattern compared to patients without psychotic features. Abnormalities involving inferior frontal cortex, striatum and cerebellum may play an important role in the generation of psychotic symptoms in depression. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]