Andrew Belden

The current study applied data-driven methods to identify and explain novel cognitive phenotypes of HIV. Methods: 388 people with HIV (PWH) with an average age of 46 (15.8) and median plasma CD4+ T-cell count of 555 copies/mL (79% virally suppressed) underwent cognitive testing and 3T neuroimaging. Demographics, HIV disease variables, and health co...

HIV-1 disrupts the host epigenetic landscape with consequences for disease pathogenesis, viral persistence, and HIV-associated comorbidities. Here, we examined how soon after infection HIV-associated epigenetic changes may occur in blood and whether early initiation of antiretroviral therapy (ART) impacts epigenetic modifications. We profiled longi...

Background clinically relevant methods to identify individuals at risk for impaired daily living abilities secondary to neurocognitive impairment (ADLs) remain elusive. This is especially true for complex clinical conditions such as HIV-Associated Neurocognitive Disorders (HAND). The aim of this study was to identify novel and modifiable factors th...

Background: Long-term neurocognitive outcomes following first-line suppressive anti-retroviral therapy (ART) remain uncertain for individuals with HIV and hepatitis C (HCV) co-infection. The study examined neurocognitive performance before and after 72 weeks of ART using repeated multivariate analyses and latent trajectory models.Methods: One hundr...

Background Cognitive and behavioral impairment are common in children living with perinatally acquired HIV (pHIV) and children exposed to HIV in utero but uninfected (HEU). Methods We sought to determine the prevalence of adverse behavioral symptomatology using a Thai-translated and validated version of the SNAP-IV questionnaire and assess cogniti...

Background: Frailty is an important clinical concern for the aging population of people living with HIV (PLWH). The objective of this study was to identify the combination of risk features that distinguish frail from nonfrail individuals. Setting: Machine learning analysis of highly dimensional risk features was performed on a clinical cohort of...

Objective: To develop a predictive model of neurocognitive trajectories in children with perinatal HIV (pHIV). Design: Machine learning analysis of baseline and longitudinal predictors derived from clinical measures utilized in pediatric HIV. Methods: 285 children (ages 2-14 years at baseline; Mage = 6.4 years) with pHIV in Southeast Asia unde...

Objective: Deficits in reward processing are established in mood and substance use disorders and are known risk factors for these disorders. Volume reductions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the striatum, regions that subserve neural response to reward, have been shown to be related to anhedonia in depressive and substance use disorders. The autho...

Recent interest has emerged in understanding the neural mechanisms by which deficits in emotion regulation (ER) early in development may relate to later depression. Corticolimbic alterations reported in emotion dysregulation and depression may be one possible link. We examined the relationships between emotion dysregulation in school age, corticoli...

High shyness during early adolescence is associated with impaired peer relationships and risk for psychiatric disorders. Little is known, however, about the relation between shyness and trajectories of brain development over early adolescence. The current study longitudinally examined trajectories of resting-state functional connectivity (rs-fc) wi...

Objective: Early adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been linked to the development of both internalizing and externalizing psychopathology. In our prior work, we found that ACEs predicted reductions in the volume of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), a brain region important for impulse control and emotion regulation. Here we tested the hypo...

Importance Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been associated with poor mental and physical health outcomes. However, the mechanism of this effect, critical to enhancing public health, remains poorly understood. Objective To investigate the neurodevelopmental trajectory of the association between early ACEs and adolescent general and emotio...

Objective: The purpose of the present report was to describe the longitudinal trajectories of physical health beginning during preschool and continuing into early adolescence; explore whether these trajectories were predicted by psychosocial adversity, family income-to-needs ratio, and psychiatric disorders occurring during the preschool period; a...

Objective: Adults and adolescents with major depressive disorder (MDD) show a blunted neural response to rewards. Depression has been validated in children as young as age 3; however, it remains unclear whether blunted response to reward is also a core feature of preschool-onset depression. If so, this would provide further validation for the cont...

Background: Child and adolescent psychopathology has been linked to increased sleep problems, but there has been less investigation of this relationship in younger samples with early-onset psychopathology. This study examined three specific but commonly observed aspects of sleep behaviors in young children - (i) Sleep onset latency, (ii) Refusal t...

Significance Data from a longitudinal neuroimaging study beginning in the preschool period and including three brain scans through school age and early adolescence were used to investigate the effects of maternal support on the development of the hippocampus. Consistent with animal findings showing that early support enhances hippocampal developmen...

Objective: A substantial body of literature has established the positive effect of breastfeeding on child developmental outcomes. There is increasing consensus that breastfed children have higher IQs after accounting for key variables, including maternal education, IQ, and socioeconomic status. Cross-sectional investigations of the effects of brea...

Objective: In this study, the authors tested the hypothesis that poverty experienced in early childhood, as measured by income-to-needs ratio, has an impact on functional brain connectivity at school age, which in turn mediates influences on child negative mood/depression. Method: Participants were from a prospective longitudinal study of emotio...

Background: There has been little available data to inform the predictors and outcomes of latent class trajectories of depressive symptoms beginning during preschool and continuing throughout school age. Further, the extant literature in this domain has been limited by the use of parent report checklists of nonspecific 'internalizing' psychopathol...

Importance The trajectory of cortical gray matter development in childhood has been characterized by early neurogenesis and volume increase, peaking at puberty followed by selective elimination and myelination, resulting in volume loss and thinning. This inverted U-shaped trajectory, as well as cortical thickness, has been associated with cognitiv...

Although depression and anxiety are common in youth (Costello et al. 2003), factors that put children at risk for such symptoms are not well understood. The current study examined associations between early childhood cognitive control deficits and depression and anxiety over the course of development through school age. Participants were 188 childr...

Internalizing pathology is related to alterations in amygdala resting state functional connectivity, potentially implicating altered emotional reactivity and/or emotion regulation in the etiological pathway. Importantly, there is accumulating evidence that stress exposure and genetic vulnerability impact amygdala structure/function and risk for int...

Objective: Behavioral inhibition (BI) during early childhood predicts risk for anxiety disorders and altered cognitive control in adolescence. Although BI has been linked to variation in brain function through adulthood, few studies have examined relations between early childhood BI and adult brain structure. Method: The relation between early c...

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is characterized by poor emotion regulation. Rumination, a maladaptive strategy for dealing with negative emotions, is common in MDD, and is associated with impaired inhibition and cognitive inflexibility that may contribute to impaired emotion regulation abilities. However, it is unclear whether rumination is differ...

Objective: Despite research documenting the existence of depression and other psychiatric disorders in early childhood, little is known about the nature and consequences of suicidal cognitions and behaviors (SI) in young children ages 3 to 7 years. The identification of trajectories of SI across childhood is a critical step toward preventing child...

Impairments in cognitive emotion regulation (CER) have been linked to functional neural abnormalities and the pathogenesis of major depressive disorder (MDD). Few functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated the neural underpinnings of CER in samples with depression. As CER develops in childhood, understanding dysfunctiona...

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) is a key center of affect regulation and processing, fundamental aspects of emotional competence which are disrupted in mood disorders. Structural alterations of VMPFC have consistently been observed in adult major depression and are associated with depression severity, yet it is unknown whether young chil...

Importance This is the first study to date to examine volumetric alterations in the anterior insula (AI) as a potential biomarker for the course of childhood major depressive disorder (MDD).Objectives To examine whether children with a history of preschool-onset (PO) MDD show reduced AI volume, whether a specific symptom of PO MDD (pathological g...

Structural and functional alterations in a variety of brain regions have been associated with depression and risk for depression across the life span. A majority of these regions are associated with emotion reactivity and/or regulation. However, it is generally unclear what mechanistic role these alterations play in the etiology of depression. A fi...

Objective: Preschool-onset depression, a developmentally adapted form of depression arising between ages 3 and 6, has demonstrated numerous validated features, including characteristic alterations in stress reactivity and brain function. This syndrome is characterized by subthreshold DSM criteria for major depressive disorder, raising questions ab...

When used effectively, cognitive reappraisal of distressing events is a highly adaptive cognitive emotion regulation (CER) strategy, with impairments in cognitive reappraisal associated with greater risk for psychopathology. Despite extensive literature examining the neural correlates of cognitive reappraisal in healthy and psychiatrically ill adul...

Depressed adults have shown blunted or elevated cortisol reactivity in response to various forms of psychosocial stress. However, there have been few studies of cortisol reactivity in children who had early onset depression or a history of depression during the preschool-school period. The present study utilized a laboratory stress paradigm and col...

Depression has been linked to increased cortisol reactivity and differences in limbic brain volumes, yet the mechanisms underlying these alterations are unclear. One main hypothesis is that stress causes these effects. This is supported by animal studies showing that chronic stress or glucocorticoid administration can lead to alterations in hippoca...

IMPORTANCE The study provides novel data to inform the mechanisms by which poverty negatively impacts childhood brain development. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether the income-to-needs ratio experienced in early childhood impacts brain development at school age and to explore the mediators of this effect. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This study...

The amygdala is a key region in emotion processing. In particular, fMRI studies have demonstrated that the amygdala is active during the viewing of emotional faces. Previous research has consistently found greater amygdala responses to fearful than to neutral faces in adults, convergent with a focus in the animal literature on the amygdala's role i...

The present investigation compared parenting practices in a sample of preschoolers whose mothers reported smoking during pregnancy versus those who did not. A sample of n = 216, 3.0- to 5.11-year-old children, participants in an ongoing longitudinal study, was separated into those reportedly exposed to smoking in utero and those who were not. Paren...

Although hippocampal atrophy and altered functional brain responses to emotional stimuli have been found in major depressive disorder (MDD), the relationship between the two is not yet well understood. The present study focused on children with and without a history of preschool onset MDD (PO-MDD) and directly examined the relations between hippoca...

The role of preschool-onset (PO) psychiatric disorders as correlates and/or risk factors for relational aggression during kindergarten or first grade was tested in a sample of 146 preschool-age children (age 3 to 5.11 years). Axis-I diagnoses and symptom scores were derived using the Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment. Children's roles in relatio...

Background: Recent research has demonstrated that clinical depression can emerge as early as the preschool period. Here, we examine brain function in children with a history of preschool-onset depression (PO-MDD) in comparison with healthy children. Methods: Participants were medication naïve school-aged children (ages 7-11) with PO-MDD (n = 22)...

While major depressive disorder has been shown to be a significant mental health issue for school-age children, recent research indicates that depression can be observed in children as early as the preschool period. Yet, little work has been done to explore the neurobiological factors associated with this early form of depression. Given research su...

This study investigated the occurrence of depressive symptoms prior to age 36 months as retrospectively reported by parents of preschoolers with clinical depression. The study provides some of the first empirical data on the manifestations of depressive symptoms during the toddler period, advancing existing theoretical and case-report literature. A...

Early maternal support has been shown to promote specific gene expression, neurogenesis, adaptive stress responses, and larger hippocampal volumes in developing animals. In humans, a relationship between psychosocial factors in early childhood and later amygdala volumes based on prospective data has been demonstrated, providing a key link between e...

Adult major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with reduced cortico-limbic functional connectivity thought to indicate decreased top-down control of emotion. However, it is unclear whether such connectivity alterations are also present in early-childhood-onset MDD. A total of 51 children 7 through 11 years of age who had been prospectively stu...

Although validity for DSM-IV MDD symptom criteria in preschoolers has been demonstrated, whether the 2-week duration criterion is an appropriate threshold of clinical significance at this age remains unclear. The current study aimed to begin addressing this question. Three hundred and six preschoolers were recruited from community sites and followe...

Previous research has indicated that symptom severity and amygdala reactivity during the viewing of facial expressions of emotion are related in depression. However, it remains unclear how early in development this can be detected. A sample of 11 depressed preschoolers (4.5±0.8; 6 males) participated in an fMRI experiment where they viewed facial e...

The subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) presents altered functional connections with other regions of the brain in individuals with depression. However, the developmental nature of this phenomenon remains largely unexplored. Functional connections of the sgACC were examined in 36 school age children, 17 with a history of preschool onset maj...

Childhood depression is a serious and relapsing psychiatric disorder. However, to date studies have focused mostly on children aged 6 years and older. Validation for depression in preschool children has been provided by 2 independent study samples. While several studies have demonstrated stability and poor outcomes of internalizing symptoms in pres...

Context: Childhood depression is a serious and relapsing psychiatric disorder. However, to date studies have focused mostly on children aged 6 years and older. Validation for depression in preschool children has been provided by 2 independent study samples. While several studies have demonstrated stability and poor outcomes of internalizing symptom...

Although some empirical work has now been added to the larger body of case material, preschool bipolar disorder (BPD) remains a highly ambiguous diagnostic area. This is notable in the context of the significant progress that has been made in many other areas of psychopathology in the preschool period. While there is a need for well controlled empi...

The present study compared the performance of preschoolers who met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4(th) edition (DSM-IV) criteria for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to those who did not meet these criteria on a test of visual attention. The aim was to investigate whether attentional impairments in preschoole...

Background: Empirical findings from two divergent bodies of literature illustrate that depression can arise in the preschool period and that the complex self-conscious emotions of guilt and shame may develop normatively as early as age 3. Despite these related findings, few studies have examined whether the emotions of shame and guilt are salient...

Despite retrospective reports of the onset of childhood bipolar disorder during the preschool period, few studies have investigated whether mania symptoms can be identified in preschoolers. A group of children with a cluster of mania symptoms that showed discriminant validity from other disruptive disorders was identified in a large preschool sampl...

Objective: While much is now known about depression during school age and adolescence, whether clinical depression can onset even earlier in development during the preschool period remains under explored. The earliest possible identification of depression may be important for the design of prevention and early developmental intervention programs....

To investigate whether differences in the tantrum behaviors of healthy versus mood and disruptive disordered preschoolers can be detected. Caregivers of 279 preschool children (3 to 6 years old) completed the Preschool-Age Psychiatric Assessment (Egger HL, Ascher B, Angold A. Preschool Age Psychiatric Assessment (PAPA): version1.1. Durham, NC: Cent...

The assessment of psychopathology in preschool aged children has traditionally relied exclusively on adult informants as children under 6 years-of-age have been widely regarded as developmentally unable to serve as valid reporters of their own mental state. Based on the finding of a valid preschool depressive syndrome, methods to obtain self-report...

This study examined diagnostic group differences in children's internal representations of their mothers and mothers' parenting strategies 1 year later. Mother - preschool child dyads (N = 279) were examined. The sample included 151 healthy, 75 depressed, and 53 disruptive disordered preschoolers. The MacArthur Story Stem Battery (MSSB) was adminis...

Epidemiological data has shown that psychotropic medications are being prescribed to preschoolers at increasing rates. The diagnostic context and functional impairment of these preschoolers remains unknown. This investigation aimed to address these questions in a sample of preschoolers who were either without symptoms (healthy) or with mood and dis...

Family history of mood disorders and stressful life events are both established risk factors for childhood depression. However, the role of mediators in risk trajectories, which are potential targets for intervention, remains understudied. To date, there have been no investigations of mediating relationships between risk factors and very early onse...

The clinical characteristics and adaptive functioning of preschoolers who met DSM-IV criteria for bipolar disorder versus psychiatric and healthy comparison groups were investigated. A community-based sample of 303 preschoolers (3-6 years of age) and their caregivers was ascertained. Diagnostic classification based on parent report of mania symptom...

Early intervention in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) appears promising and may represent a window of opportunity for more effective treatment. Whereas the safety and efficacy of risperidone have been established for children aged 5 and older, they has not been adequately tested in preschool children. A randomized placebo-controlled study of rispe...

Reviews the book, Developmental Psychopathology (2nd ed., Vols. 1-3) edited by Dante Cicchetti and Donald J. Cohen (see records 2006-03613-000 [Vol 1], 2006-03610-000 [Vol 2], and 2006-03609-000 [Vol 3]). The purpose of this handbook, as conveyed in the preface, is twofold: (a) to compile and highlight the most up-to-date information in development...

To investigate whether higher levels of negative and