Mental Health

Exploratory study results demonstrated that a machine-learning-assisted software system that runs on Google Glass, paired with a smartphone app, helped children with autism understand the emotions conveyed in other’s facial expressions.

Teenagers with elevated levels of psychotic-like experiences while engaging in a reward processing task showed differential activation in frontostriatal brain areas compared with control adolescents, data published in JAMA Psychiatry revealed.

Using substance abuse and anxiety assessments at the enrollment of collaborative care treatment for depression can help identify teenagers with depression at risk for treatment failure, findings published in Journal of Clinical Psychiatry suggest.

Maternal prenatal stress was linked with socio-emotional development in the child, with a more robust effect size seen in prenatal depression than anxiety, study findings published in Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reported.

An electroencephalogram, or EEG — a low-cost, easy-to-use tool to measure brain electrical activity — may be able to predict future development of autism spectrum disorder in children as early as 3 months of age, according to a study published in Scientific Reports.

Preliminary study results indicated an inpatient intervention — As Safe as Possible — which includes a smartphone app, may help reduce the incidence of post-discharge suicide attempts among teenagers hospitalized for suicidality.

The most commonly occurring emergency in the pediatric ambulatory care setting is respiratory distress, but most events are resolved with basic interventions such as albuterol or oxygen, according to research published in Pediatrics.

Researchers found that the relationship between toddlers’ ability to self-regulate and their risk for obesity in later childhood differed between boys and girls. The findings, published in JAMA Pediatrics, suggest that prevention efforts aimed at obesity will have different effects based on gender.

Findings published in JAMA Psychiatry showed that heightened performance monitoring evident in early childhood was associated with the onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder during adolescence and smaller right dorsal anterior cingulate cortex volume.

Researchers from King’s College London found that offspring born to mothers with major depressive disorder in pregnancy showed altered behavior and biological stress response compared with those born to healthy mothers.