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Health apps focused on inciting behavior change are becoming increasingly popular. Nevertheless, many lack underlying evidence base, scientific credibility and have limited clinical effectiveness. It is therefore important that apps are well-informed, scientifically credible, peer reviewed and evidence based. This paper presents the use of the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS) to assess the quality of the Grey Matters app, a cross platform app to deliver health education material and track behavior change across multi-domains with the aim of reducing the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. The Gray Matters app shows promising results following reviews from 5 Expert raters, achieving a mean overall MARS score of 4.45 ± 0.14. Future work will involve undertaking of a detailed content analysis of behavior change apps to identify common themes and features which may lead to the successful facilitation of sustained behavior change.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/EMBC.2016.7591697 | DOI Listing |
Brain Behav
September 2025
Department of Biology, Faculty of Science, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran.
Introduction: Anxiety and stress are prevalent mental health issues. Traditional drug treatments often come with unwanted side effects and may not produce the desired results. As an alternative, probiotics are being used as a treatment option due to their lack of specific side effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGenes Brain Behav
October 2025
Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock, Arkansas, USA.
Major depressive disorder is a prevalent and debilitating psychiatric illness that produces significant disability. Clinical data suggest that the pathophysiology of depression is due, in part, to a dysregulation of inflammation and glutamate levels in the brain. The systemic administration of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) has been shown to induce depressive-like behaviors in mice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDev Psychobiol
September 2025
Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Depressed mothers often experience parenting difficulties, which can persist after their symptoms have remitted. However, not all depressed mothers show parenting struggles, suggesting that there could be unidentified characteristics that increase risk. Specifically, neurobiological models emphasize that reward system deficits contribute to maladaptive parenting and depression, but no studies have evaluated how they could conjointly lead to parenting challenges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchizophr Bull
September 2025
Department of Psychiatry, Central Laboratory, Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University, Wuhan 430060, China.
Background And Hypothesis: Schizophrenia is linked to hippocampal dysfunction and microglial inflammatory activation. Our prior clinical findings revealed significantly reduced transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) expression in both first-episode and recurrent schizophrenia patients, with levels inversely correlating with symptom severity, implicating TRPV1 dysfunction in disease progression. Preclinical maternal separation (MS) models recapitulate schizophrenia-like behavioral and synaptic deficits, paralleled by hippocampal microglial TRPV1 downregulation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Neural Transm (Vienna)
September 2025
Sárospatak College, Sztárai Institute, University of Tokaj, Eötvöst str. 7, Sárospatak, 3944, Hungary.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is characterized by excessive worry and physical symptoms of prolonged anxiety. Patients with subclinical GAD-states (sub-GAD) do not fulfill the diagnostic criteria of GAD, but they often show a disease burden similar to GAD, and the subclinical state may turn into a full syndrome. Neuroinflammation may contribute to changes in brain structures in sub-GAD, but direct evidence remains lacking.
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