Publications by authors named "Robert Kohler"

In clinical settings targeting alcohol use disorder (AUD), it is often unclear whether a treatment option may best suit a patient's clinical needs. Clinicians providing AUD treatment are often required to predict patients' responses to guide treatment decisions. Recently, machine learning approaches have been used as tools in precision medicine to help guide these clinical decisions.

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The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of CAP plasma on glucose. Plasma treatments were performed using an argon-driven atmospheric pressure plasma device whose discharge environment was initially characterized by optical emission spectroscopy. Each sample was subjected to plasma treatments of increasing duration, up to 16 min.

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Background: There is no safe amount or time of alcohol consumption during pregnancy; however, many women drink while pregnant placing themselves and their fetuses at risk for alcohol-related health complications. Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) impact alcohol use during pregnancy. Understanding the impact of SDoH across pregnancy will elucidate important information to reduce rates of prenatal alcohol exposure.

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Impulsivity is a multifaceted construct that typically increases during adolescence and is implicated in risk for substance use disorders that develop later in life. Here, we take a multivariate approach to identify latent dimensions of impulsivity, broadly defined, among youth enrolled in the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study and explore associations with individual differences in demographics, substance-use initiation and canonical resting state networks (N=11,872, ages ~9-10). Using principal component analysis, we identified eight latent impulsivity dimensions, the top three of which together accounted for the majority of the variance across all impulsivity assessments.

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Purpose Of The Review: Women experience worse alcohol-related health consequences compared to men, including greater risk and susceptibility to the neurotoxic effects of alcohol. There is a critical need to identify underlying neurobiological mechanisms underlying sex differences in alcohol use disorder (AUD) phenotypes to better inform individualized treatment options. This report aimed to systematically review existing original literature that examined sex differences in white matter tract integrity in individuals with heavy drinking/AUD using diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) and provide recommendations for future research.

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Introduction: Dopamine is involved in reward processing and plays a critical role in the development and progression of alcohol use disorder (AUD). However, little is known about the effect of sex on the relationship between dopamine and alcohol use/AUD. There is a critical need to identify the neurobiological mechanisms that contribute to sex differences in AUD to inform treatment approaches.

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Individual differences in gray-matter morphometry in the limbic system and frontal cortex have been linked to clinical features of cocaine use disorder (CUD). Self-administration paradigms can provide more direct measurements of the relationship between the regulation of cocaine use and gray-matter morphometry when compared to self-report assessments. Our goal was to investigate associations with self-administration behavior in subcortical and cortical brain regions.

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Article Synopsis
  • Researchers are developing a new method for detecting trace gases in the air using ionization energies, which can be miniaturized and fine-tuned.
  • Traditional methods for identification rely on large equipment, like mass spectrometers, but this new approach uses electron impact ionization, generated via the photoelectric effect, for better sensitivity at a lower scale.
  • The method achieves sensitivity levels of 1 ppm, comparable to classic photoionization detection (PID), and can identify substances with an accuracy of 30 meV, supported by quantum mechanical models.
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Background: Individual differences in reward processing are central to heightened risk-taking behaviors during adolescence, but there is inconsistent evidence for the relationship between risk-taking phenotypes and the neural substrates of these behaviors.

Methods: Here, we identify latent features of reward in an attempt to provide a unifying framework linking together aspects of the brain and behavior during early adolescence using a multivariate pattern learning approach. Data (N = 8295; n male = 4190; n female = 4105) were acquired as part of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study and included neuroimaging (regional neural activity responses during reward anticipation) and behavioral (e.

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Treatment outcomes for individuals with substance use disorders (SUDs) are variable and more individualized approaches may be needed. Cross-validated, machine-learning methods are well-suited for probing neural mechanisms of treatment outcomes. Our prior work applied one such approach, connectome-based predictive modeling (CPM), to identify dissociable and substance-specific neural networks of cocaine and opioid abstinence.

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In the development of new materials, the focus nowadays is increasingly on their relevance with regard to lightweight construction or environmental compatibility. The idea of a lightweight sandwich panel was inspired by an increasing number of cosmetic accessories that use the fibers of the loofah plant, a rapidly renewable, light, fibrous raw material. The aim of the study was to develop a fiber composite panel based on the fibers of the loofah plant () as core material and wooden veneer as the skin layer to be used in areas of lead construction.

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Neurodevelopmental research has traditionally focused on development of individual structures, yet multiple lines of evidence indicate parallel development of large-scale systems, including canonical neural networks (i.e., default mode, frontoparietal).

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When exposing food and feedstuff to cold atmospheric pressure plasmas (CAPP), e.g., for decontamination purposes, possible unwanted effects on the contained nutrients might occur.

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In this study, the surface parameters wettability, roughness, and adhesive penetration, which are important for wood bonding, were investigated and evaluated utilizing non-destructive methods after different mechanical processing. For this purpose, beech and birch finger joints were prepared with different cutting combinations (three cutters with different sharpness levels and two feed rates) in an industrial process. Effects and interactions on the surface parameters resulting from the different cutting combinations were evaluated using three Full Factorial Designs.

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Adolescence is the peak period for the emergence of substance use, which can lead to long-term psychosocial, occupational and interpersonal complications. Ongoing large-scale, longitudinal, consortium initiatives, such as the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, offer unprecedented opportunities to elucidate key risk factors for problematic substance use in a well-powered sample and to examine how changes in risk factors relate to symptoms across time. Delay discounting has been proposed as a putative risk marker for early substance-use initiation and other forms of psychopathology.

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Importance: The experienced consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have diverged across individuals, families, and communities, resulting in inequity within a host of factors. There is a gap of quantitative evidence about the transgenerational impacts of these experiences and factors.

Objective: To identify baseline predictors of COVID-19 experiences, as defined by child and parent report, using a multivariate pattern-learning framework from the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) cohort.

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Background: Animal-assisted interventions (AAI) show promising results, but they suffer from a lack of studies and contradictory results.

Objective: Our study deals with dog intervention and agitation in older patients with dementia.

Methods: An epidemiological quasi-experimental study was carried out in patients living in a special care unit (SCU) in an Ehpad in the French Haut-Rhin region.

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Background: Animal-assisted interventions (AAI) show promising results but they suffer from a lack studies and contradictory results.

Objective: Our study deals with dog intervention and agitation in older patients with dementia.

Methods: An epidemiological quasi-experimental study was carried out in patients living in a Special Care Unit (SCU) of an Ehpad in the French Region of Haut-Rhin.

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In recent years, awareness regarding sustainability and the responsible usage of natural resources has become more important in our modern society. As a result, wood as a building material experiences a renaissance. However, depending on the use case, protective measures may be necessary to increase wood's durability and prolong its service life.

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The chemical composition of ground and polished fused silica glass surfaces plays a decisive role in different applications of optics. In particular, a high level of carbon impurities is often undesirable for further processing and especially for gluing or cementing where adhesion failure may be attributed to carbonic surface-adherent contaminants. In this study, the surface carbon content at different stages of classical optics manufacturing was thus investigated.

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Background: Regardless of the precise mechanism, all neurodevelopmental models of risk assume that, at the population level, there exist subgroups of individuals that share similar patterns of neural function and development-and that these subgroups somehow relate to psychiatric risk. However, the existence of multiple neurodevelopmental subgroups at the population level has not been assessed previously.

Methods: In the current study, cross-validated latent profile analysis was used to test for the presence of empirically derived, brain-based developmental subgroups using functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 6758 individuals (49.

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Wood-plastic composite (WPC) based on a polylactic acid (PLA) matrix is a promising material since it is biobased, degradable, sustainable, and 3D printable. However, due to its coloring, visible layers after 3D-printing, and small build volumes of these printers, a coating or gluing of parts might be required. This study investigates the influence of a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) plasma treatment of PLA-based WPC to activate the surface and improve, e.

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In this study, a polypropylene (PP)-based wood-plastic composite with maleic anhydride-grafted polypropylene (MAPP) as a coupling agent and a wood content of 60% was extruded and specimens were injection molded. The samples were plasma treated utilizing a dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) setup with three different working gases: Ar/O (90%/10%), Ar/N (90%/10%), and synthetic air. This process aims to improve the coating and gluing properties of the otherwise challenging apolar surface of PP based wood-plastic composites (WPC).

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