Amelia Pellegrini

University of Missouri | Mizzou · Department of Psychological Sciences

Background: Implementing ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methodology to evaluate the substance use disorder (SUD) treatment pipeline has clear advantages, including learning about participants’ day-to-day experiences to aid in the improvement of services and accessibility for those seeking treatment. Given that the SUD treatment pipeline span...

Introduction: Social anhedonia (SocAnh) predicts increased risk of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, with evidence that these disorders are associated with increased creativity. However, it is still largely unknown whether SocAnh is associated with one central aspect of creative thinking, convergent thinking. Methods: In two studies, college studen...

Background Passive measures collected using smartphones have been suggested to represent efficient proxies for depression severity, but the performance of such measures across diagnoses has not been studied. Methods We enrolled a cohort of 45 individuals (11 with major depressive disorder, 11 with bipolar disorder, 11 with schizophrenia or schizoa...

Background Agitation is a common feature of many neuropsychiatric disorders. Objective Understanding the prevalence, implications, and characteristics of agitation among hospitalized populations can facilitate more precise recognition of disability arising from neuropsychiatric diseases. Methods We developed two agitation phenotypes using an expa...

With brief psychiatric hospitalizations, the extent to which symptoms change is rarely characterized. We sought to understand symptomatic changes across Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) dimensions, and the extent to which such improvement might be associated with risk for readmission. We identified 3,634 individuals with 4,713 hospital admissions to...

Background Recent initiatives in psychiatry emphasize the utility of characterizing psychiatric symptoms in a multidimensional manner. However, strategies for applying standard self-report scales for multiaxial assessment have not been well-studied, particularly where the aim is to support both categorical and dimensional phenotypes. Methods We pr...

Introduction: Preventing dementia, or modifying disease course, requires identification of presymptomatic or minimally symptomatic high-risk individuals. Methods: We used longitudinal electronic health records from two large academic medical centers and applied a validated natural language processing tool to estimate cognitive symptomatology. We...

Background Investigation of personality traits and pathology in large, generalizable clinical cohorts has been hindered by inconsistent assessment and failure to consider a range of personality disorders (PDs) simultaneously. Methods We applied natural language processing (NLP) of electronic health record notes to characterize a psychiatric inpati...

Importance Quantifying patient-physician cost conversations is challenging but important as out-of-pocket spending by US patients increases and patients are increasingly interested in discussing costs with their physicians. Objective To characterize the prevalence of financial considerations documented in narrative clinical records of primary care...

Background Identification of individuals at increased risk for suicide is an important public health priority, but the extent to which considering clinical phenomenology improves prediction of longer term outcomes remains understudied. Hospital discharge provides an opportunity to stratify risk using readily available clinical records and details....

Objective: To determine the degree to which dimensional psychopathology predicts length of stay in an emergency department (ED) and need for hospital admission among children with psychiatric complaints. Method: Electronic health records of children age 4-17 years who presented to the ED of a large academic medical center were analyzed using a n...

While nearly all common genomic variants associated with schizophrenia have no known function, one corresponds to a missense variant associated with change in efficiency of a metal ion transporter, ZIP8, coded by SLC39A8. This variant has been linked to a range of phenotypes and is believed to be under recent selection pressure, but its impact on h...

Background: Patients with schizophrenia (SCZ) experience chronic cognitive deficits. Histone deacetylases (HDACs) are enzymes that regulate cognitive circuitry; however, the role of HDACs in cognitive disorders, including SCZ, remains unknown in humans. We previously determined that HDAC2 mRNA levels were lower in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (D...

Importance The extent to which financial considerations alter intensive care unit (ICU) decision making is poorly understood. Objectives To characterize the prevalence and nature of financial considerations documented in narrative clinical records and their association with patient-level demographic and clinical features. Design, Setting, and Par...

Importance Forecasting the volume of hospital discharges has important implications for resource allocation and represents an opportunity to improve patient safety at periods of elevated risk. Objective To determine the performance of a new time-series machine learning method for forecasting hospital discharge volume compared with simpler methods....

Nonunion is a clinically significant complication of fracture associated with worse outcomes, including increased pain, disability, and higher healthcare costs. The risk for nonunion is likely to be complex and multifactorial, and as such, the biology underlying such risk remains poorly understood. Genetic studies represent one approach to identify...

We aimed to identify common genetic variations associated with delirium through genome-wide association testing in a hospital biobank. We applied a published electronic health record based definition of delirium to identify cases of delirium, and control individuals with no history of delirium, from a biobank spanning two Boston academic medical ce...

Background: Genetic studies of neuropsychiatric disease strongly suggest an overlap in liability. There are growing efforts to characterize these diseases dimensionally rather than categorically, but the extent to which such dimensional models correspond to biology is unknown. Methods: We applied a newly developed natural language processing met...