Modeling attention impairments in major depression

Personalized Functional Brain Network Topography Predicts Individual Differences in Youth Cognition

“…Critically, it is known that cognitive impairments in adulthood are common across diverse psychiatric illnesses including mood 63,64 and anxiety 65–67 disorders and our current first-line pharmacological treatments fail to target these cognitive symptoms. 68,69 Longitudinal studies of neurocognitive developmental trajectories may therefore also provide a critical link between functional brain organization in childhood and psychiatric illness in adulthood, with the potential to identify individuals at risk for cognitive impairments prior to the onset of psychiatric illness and in advance of treatment attempts that are likely to fail. Moreover, this study investigated PFNs in 9-10 year old children prior to the transition to adolescence; these children will be followed longitudinally into adulthood as part of the ABCD Study®.…”

Attention enhances category representations across the brain with strengthened residual correlations to ventral temporal cortex

“…Two key challenges in addressing selective attention impairments in depression and other mental illnesses are: (1) the observation that selective attention impairments in depression are often not alleviated with current first-line antidepressant pharmacotherapy ( Keller et al, 2019c ), and (2) the lack of precise neural targets for novel treatment development targeting specific symptom dimensions ( Williams, 2016 ). First, to reduce the burden on patients to undergo multiple rounds of treatment attempts (often with debilitating side effects) before finding an effective treatment, future studies may utilize our behavioral paradigm to develop a clinic-ready measure of attention impairment for guiding more personalized treatment selection among currently-available options.…”