40 Hz Steady-State Visually Evoked Potentials Recovered During Oscillating Transcranial Electrical Stimulation.

Background Combining Transcranial Electrical Stimulation and Visual Stimulation at the gamma frequency of 40 Hz holds scientific and clinical potential, but requires concurrent electrophysiological measurement to quantify neuronal effects. This poses substantial methodological challenges: electrical stimulation artefacts largely overshadow EEG signals; gamma signals' amplitude is particularly low; and oculo-muscular confounds overlap in frequency. With appropriate artefact removal, we aimed to record 40 Hz Steady-State Visually Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) with EEG during frequency-matched electrical stimulation and explore possible interactions.

The ILIA study: protocol for a randomized-controlled multicenter clinical trial on smartphone- and web-based relapse monitoring for patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder.

Background: Despite the proven efficacy of antipsychotics in relapse prevention in schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, every third patient experiences a relapse within less than one year. Relapses can worsen psychosocial and treatment related outcomes and lead to substantial economic costs, primarily due to frequent and prolonged hospitalizations. The aim of this project is to evaluate a smartphone- and web-based digital solution for detecting early warning signs of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder to reduce relapses and subsequent hospitalizations.

Reduced expression of fMRI subsequent memory effects with increasing severity across the Alzheimer's disease risk spectrum.

In functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, episodic memory is commonly investigated with the subsequent memory paradigm in which brain activity is recorded during encoding and analyzed as a function of subsequent remembering and forgetting. Impaired episodic memory is common in individuals with or at risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but only few studies have reported subsequent memory effects in AD or its risk states like mild cognitive impairment (MCI). One reason for this might be that subsequent memory responses may be blunted in AD or MCI and thus less likely to manifest in fMRI signal differences.

Disease stage-specific atrophy markers in Alzheimer's disease.

Introduction: Structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) often lacks diagnostic, prognostic, and monitoring value in Alzheimer's disease (AD), particularly in early disease stages. To improve its utility, we aimed to identify optimal atrophy markers for different intended uses.

Methods: We included 363 older adults; cognitively unimpaired individuals who were negative or positive for amyloid beta (Aβ) and Aβ-positive patients with subjective cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment, or dementia of the Alzheimer type.

Associations between digital speech features of automated cognitive tasks and trajectories of brain atrophy and cognitive decline in early Alzheimer's disease.

BackgroundSpeech-based features extracted from telephone-based cognitive tasks show promise for detecting cognitive decline in prodromal and manifest dementia. Little is known about the cerebral underpinnings of these speech features.ObjectiveTo examine associations between speech features, brain atrophy, and longitudinal cognitive decline in individuals at risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD).

Enhancing mental health care: a problem, resources and goals oriented multidimensional framework (PRoGO).

Background: Lawrence Weed introduced the "Problem-Oriented Medical Records" (POMR) approach to medicine. Its core principle is that treatment should be organised around patients' specific problems. This approach gained widespread adoption in the United States during the 1970s.

The economic burden of subjective cognitive decline, mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's dementia: excess costs and associated clinical and risk factors.

Background: With the availability of first disease-modifying treatments, evidence on costs across the entire Alzheimer's Continuum, especially for early disease stages, becomes increasingly important to inform healthcare planning, resource allocation, and policy decisions. This study assessed costs and cost-associated factors in patients with subjective cognitive decline (SCD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) dementia compared to healthy controls.

Methods: The German DELCODE cohort study assessed clinical data, healthcare resource use, and informal care provision.

An Unsupervised XAI Framework for Dementia Detection with Context Enrichment.

Introduction: Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods enhance the diagnostic efficiency of clinical decision support systems by making the predictions of a convolutional neural network's (CNN) on brain imaging more transparent and trustworthy. However, their clinical adoption is limited due to limited validation of the explanation quality. Our study introduces a framework that evaluates XAI methods by integrating neuroanatomical morphological features with CNN-generated relevance maps for disease classification.

Mini social cognition and emotional assessment: Diagnostic performance and neural correlates in behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia.

We aimed at validating the Mini Social Cognition and Emotional Assessment (Mini-SEA) in a German cohort of mildly impaired behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) patients and healthy controls. The Mini-SEA comprises the Facial Emotion Recognition Test (FERT) and the Faux Pas Test (FPT) measuring Theory of Mind (ToM) abilities in social norm-related real-life stories. We examined the diagnostic performance of the Mini-SEA alongside other neuropsychological assessments and investigated its structural neural correlates.

"The DESCRIBE-ALS-FTD study: a prospective multicenter observational study of the ALS-FTD spectrum".

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) exhibit significant clinical, genetic and neuropathological abnormalities, and are regarded as belonging to a common disease spectrum, referred to as the ALS-FTD spectrum disorders. Our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of these diseases has advanced significantly, including molecular neuropathology, genetics and molecular pathophysiology. The heterogeneity of these diseases poses significant challenges to translational research and drug development, particularly in sporadic cases.

GWAS meta-analysis of CSF Alzheimer's disease biomarkers 18,948 individuals reveal novel loci and genes regulating lipid metabolism, brain volume and autophagy.

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) amyloid beta (Aβ42), total tau (t-tau), and phosphorylated tau (p-tau181) are well accepted markers of Alzheimer's disease. We performed a GWAS meta-analysis including 18,948 individuals of European and 416 non-European ancestry. We identified 12 genome-wide significant loci across all three biomarkers, eight of them novel.

Speech-based digital cognitive assessments for detection of mild cognitive impairment: Validation against paper-based neurocognitive assessment scores.

BackgroundCognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease (AD) often includes speech impairments, where subtle changes may precede clinical dementia onset. As clinical trials focus on early identification of patients for disease-modifying treatments, digital speech-based assessments for scalable screening have become crucial.ObjectiveThis study aimed to validate a remote, speech-based digital cognitive assessment for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) detection through the comparison with gold-standard paper-based neurocognitive assessments.

Application of IVDr NMR spectroscopy to stratify Parkinson's disease with absolute quantitation of blood serum metabolites and lipoproteins.

The challenge of early detection and stratification in Parkinson's disease (PD) is urgent due to the current emergence of mechanism-based disease-modifying treatments. In here, metabolomic and lipidomic parameters obtained by a standardized and targeted in vitro diagnostic research (IVDr) platform have a significant potential to address therapy-related questions and generate improved biomarker panels. Our study aimed to use IVDr nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to quantify metabolites and lipoproteins in PD blood serum from different cohorts to stratify metabolically driven subtypes of idiopathic and genetic PD.

Towards a name change of schizophrenia: Positive and Negative Symptoms Disorder (PND).

We propose renaming schizophrenia to Positive and Negative Symptoms Disorder (PND) to reduce stigma, enhance clarity, and align with current diagnostic criteria. The term reflects core symptom domains, is translatable, ICD compatible, and avoids misleading associations. If cognitive deficits should be part of the name, it would be Positive, Negative, Cognitive Symptoms disorder.

A comparative analysis of technical data: At-home vs. in-clinic application of transcranial direct current stimulation in depression.

Objective: The application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) at home for the treatment of depression and other neuropsychiatric disorders presents both significant opportunities and inherent challenges. Ensuring safety and maintaining high-quality stimulation are paramount for the efficacy and safety of at-home tDCS. This study investigates tDCS quality based on its technical parameters as well as safety of at-home and in-clinic tDCS applications comparing the data from two randomized controlled trials in patients with major depressive disorder.

Partial volume effect correction impairs the diagnostic utility of [F]-THK-5351 PET in nonfluent-agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia.

Objectives: Partial volume effects in positron emission tomography occur frequently in neurodegenerative diseases due to increasing cortical atrophy during the disease course, and fronto-temporal dementia is often characterized by severe atrophy. The aim of this study was to challenge partial volume effect correction (PVEC) in patients with nonfluent-agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia (nfv-PPA) imaged with [F]-THK-5351 PET a marker of reactive neuroinflammatory astrogliosis as well as tau-binding.

Methods: Patients with nfv-PPA (n = 20) were imaged with [F]-THK-5351 PET accompanied by structural magnetic resonance tomography imaging (MRI).

Total cerebral blood volume changes drive macroscopic cerebrospinal fluid flux in humans.

In the mammalian brain, the directed motion of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF-flux) is instrumental in the distribution and removal of solutes. Changes in total cerebral blood volume (CBV) have been hypothesized to drive CSF-flux. We tested this hypothesis in two multimodal brain imaging experiments in healthy humans, in which we drove large changes in total CBV by neuronal burst-suppression under anesthesia or by transient global vasodilation in a hypercapnic challenge.

COSMIN systematic review and meta-analysis of the measurement properties of the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS).

Background: The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) is the most widely used tool for assessing the symptoms of schizophrenia. Despite its widespread use, the psychometric properties of the PANSS have not been systematically reviewed. This study fills that gap in the scientific literature.

A computational ontology framework for the synthesis of multi-level pathology reports from brain MRI scans.

BackgroundConvolutional neural network (CNN) based volumetry of MRI data can help differentiate Alzheimer's disease (AD) and the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) as causes of cognitive decline and dementia. However, existing CNN-based MRI volumetry tools lack a structured hierarchical representation of brain anatomy, which would allow for aggregating regional pathological information and automated computational inference.ObjectiveDevelop a computational ontology pipeline for quantifying hierarchical pathological abnormalities and visualize summary charts for brain atrophy findings, aiding differential diagnosis.

Blood biomarkers confirm subjective cognitive decline (SCD) as a distinct molecular and clinical stage within the NIA-AA framework of Alzheimer´s disease.

Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) is proposed as an indicator of transitional disease stage 2 in the Alzheimer's disease (AD) continuum. However, molecular and particularly longitudinal fluid biomarker data for this stage are still limited. This study aimed to determine whether blood-based biomarkers in amyloid-positive individuals with SCD (A + SCD) support the notion of stage 2 as a distinct stage between stages 1 and 3 of AD and to identify those at high risk for clinical progression.

Monocyte-secreted Wnt reduces the efficiency of central nervous system remyelination.

The regeneration of myelin in the central nervous system (CNS) reinstates nerve health and function, yet its decreased efficiency with aging and progression of neurodegenerative disease contributes to axonal loss and/or degeneration. Although CNS myeloid cells have been implicated in regulating the efficiency of remyelination, the distinct contribution of blood monocytes versus that of resident microglia is unclear. Here, we reveal that monocytes have non-redundant functions compared to microglia in regulating remyelination.

COSMIN review of the PANSS Marder factor solution and other factor models in people with schizophrenia.

The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) is widely used to assess schizophrenia symptoms. Initially designed with three subscales, Marder et al.´s 5-factor-Model (M5M) first proposed in 1997 has been frequently used in treatment trials, but it has never been systematically reviewed for its measurement properties.

Disease stage-specific atrophy markers in Alzheimer's disease.

Introduction: Structural MRI often lacks diagnostic, prognostic, and monitoring value in Alzheimer's disease (AD), particularly in early disease stages. To improve its utility, we aimed to identify optimal MRI readouts for different use cases.

Methods: We included 363 older adults; healthy controls (HC) who were negative or positive for amyloidbeta (Aβ) and Aβ-positive patients with subjective cognitive decline (SCD), mild cognitive impairment, or dementia of the Alzheimer type.

The trajectory of sedative adverse events caused by antipsychotics: a meta-analysis of individual participant data from randomised, placebo-controlled, clinical trials in acute phase schizophrenia.

Background: Sedative adverse events are common in patients with schizophrenia undergoing antipsychotic treatment, which affects treatment adherence and the patients' quality of life. Although tolerance to sedation is believed to develop, robust evidence documenting the timing of sedation onset and resolution remains elusive. To address this gap, we aimed to assess the dynamics of onset and resolution of sedation across various antipsychotics in patients with schizophrenia.