Annemarie I Luik

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Erasmus MC

Purpose To guide formal healthcare resource allocation for common mental disorders (CMDs), this study updates and expands earlier findings on the associations of CMD severity with treatment contact and intensity. Methods Baseline data (2019–2022) of NEMESIS-3, a prospective study of a representative cohort of Dutch adults (18–75 years), were used....

Purpose Bright light therapy (BLT) is a potential treatment for depression during pregnancy, which may also improve sleep. We investigated whether BLT has an effect on self-reported and actigraphy-estimated sleep in pregnant women diagnosed with depressive disorder. Method Sixty-seven pregnant women with a DSM-5 diagnosis of depressive disorder du...

We conducted a genome-wide association study on income among individuals of European descent (N = 668,288) to investigate the relationship between socio-economic status and health disparities. We identified 162 genomic loci associated with a common genetic factor underlying various income measures, all with small effect sizes (the Income Factor). O...

Background Neuropsychiatric symptoms are common in the prodromal phase of dementia, and may be related to altered structure and function of subcortical grey matter involved in emotion regulation. We aimed to determine the association between subcortical grey matter volume and occurrence of neuropsychiatric symptoms in a population‐based study. Met...

Background Neuropsychiatric symptoms are common in the prodromal phase of dementia, and may be related to altered structure and function of subcortical grey matter involved in emotion regulation. We aimed to determine the association between subcortical grey matter volume and occurrence of neuropsychiatric symptoms in a population‐based study. Met...

We aimed to determine the association of family history of dementia with structural brain measures and cognitive performance in childhood and mid-life adulthood. We studied 1,259 parents (mean age: 47.3 years, range 31.9–67.4) and 866 of their children (mean age [range] at brain MRI: 9.9 years [8.8–11.9], and for cognition: 13.5 years [12.6–15.8])...

Background Mood and anxiety disorders are heterogeneous conditions with variable course. Knowledge on latent classes and transitions between these classes over time based on longitudinal disorder status information provides insight into clustering of meaningful groups with different disease prognosis. Methods Data of all four waves of the Netherla...

Objectives The enormous societal and individual burden of mental disorders and detrimental health behaviors in the general population is of paramount concern. Many argue that ‘prevention is the best cure’, pushing for the implementation of early (preventive) interventions. A key question regarding this is which population segment to target for scre...

Objectives The Mental Health Inventory (MHI‐5) is frequently used as a screener for mood and anxiety disorders. However, few population‐based studies have validated it against a diagnostic instrument assessing disorders following current diagnostic criteria. Methods Within the third Netherlands Mental Health Survey and Incidence Study (NEMESIS‐3),...

Importance Sleep disturbances are common among older adults and have been associated with the development of Alzheimer disease (AD), such as amyloid-β (Aβ) pathology. For effective AD prevention, it is essential to pinpoint the specific disturbances in sleep and the underlying 24-hour activity rhythms that confer the highest risk of Aβ deposition....

Study Objectives Harmonizing and aggregating data across studies enable pooled analyses that support external validation and enhance replicability and generalizability. However, the multidimensional nature of sleep poses challenges for data harmonization and aggregation. Here we describe and implement our process for harmonizing self-reported sleep...

Background Although behavioral mechanisms in the association among depression, anxiety, and cancer are plausible, few studies have empirically studied mediation by health behaviors. We aimed to examine the mediating role of several health behaviors in the associations among depression, anxiety, and the incidence of various cancer types (overall, br...

Background Itch, common in dermatological conditions, is often accompanied by psychological distress and reduced quality of life. However, research on the prevalence and associated factors of itch with skin conditions in general populations is limited. Objectives This cross-sectional study aimed to determine the lifetime prevalence of itch with sk...

Objectives We aimed to determine the association of family history of dementia with structural brain measures and cognitive performance in childhood and mid-life adulthood. Methods We studied 1,259 parents (mean age: 47.3 years, standard deviation: 4.7) and 866 of their children (mean age 9.9 years standard deviation: 0.5) of the population-based G...

The Rotterdam Study is a population-based cohort study, started in 1990 in the district of Ommoord in the city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, with the aim to describe the prevalence and incidence, unravel the etiology, and identify targets for prediction, prevention or intervention of multifactorial diseases in mid-life and elderly. The study curre...

Introduction Short and long self-reported sleep durations are associated with a higher risk of stroke, but the association of objective estimates of sleep and 24-hour activity rhythms is less clear. We studied the association of actigraphy-estimated sleep and 24-hour activity rhythms with the risk of stroke in a population-based cohort of middle-ag...

Depression, anxiety and other psychosocial factors are hypothesized to be involved in cancer development. We examined whether psychosocial factors interact with or modify the effects of health behaviors, such as smoking and alcohol use, in relation to cancer incidence. Two‐stage individual participant data meta‐analyses were performed based on 22 c...

Background Previous research found associations between activity rhythms, sleep, and amyloid pathology (Winer et.al, JAMA Neurology, 2021; Leng et.al, Lancet Neurology, 2019). Shorter self‐reported sleep duration and more napping were robust predictors in the amyloid prediction model we recently developed (A4 Study, n = 4,119) and validated (Rotter...

Background Twin studies show moderate heritability of sleep traits: 40% for insomnia symptoms and 46% for sleep duration. Genome‐wide association studies (GWAS) have identified genetic variants involved in insomnia and sleep duration in adults, but it is unknown whether these variants affect sleep during early development. We assessed whether polyg...

Objective An association of thyroid function with mood disorders has been widely suggested, but very few studies have examined this association longitudinally. We assessed the cross-sectional and longitudinal association between thyroid function and depression in a population-based cohort. Methods 9,471 individuals were included in cross-sectional...

Aim Investigating what is underlying late‐life depression is becoming increasingly important with the rapidly growing elderly population. Yet, the associations between plasma biomarkers of neuroaxonal damage and late‐life depression remain largely unclear. Therefore, we determined cross‐sectional and longitudinal associations of neurofilament light...

Background: Metabolic alterations are often found in patients with clinical psychosis early in the course of the disorder. Psychotic-like experiences are observed in the general population, but it is unclear whether these are associated with markers of metabolism. Methods: A population-based cohort of 1890 individuals (mean age 58.0 years; 56.3% wo...

Metabolome reflects the interplay of genome and exposome at molecular level and thus can provide deep insights into the pathogenesis of a complex disease like major depression. To identify metabolites associated with depression we performed a metabolome-wide association analysis in 13,596 participants from five European population-based cohorts cha...

Early life stress is robustly associated with poor sleep across life. Preliminary studies suggest that these associations may begin already in utero. Here, we study the longitudinal associations of prenatal psychosocial stress with sleep across childhood, and assess whether prenatal stress interacts with genetic liability for poor sleep. The study...

Exposure to specific stressors has been found to associate with higher adiposity in adulthood. However, the potential overlapping effects of stress domains have been overlooked, as well as the role of parenting-related stressors that mothers are widely exposed to in mid-adulthood. Therefore, we assessed the association of overlapping effects of str...

Background: Considerable comorbidity exists between insomnia and anxiety, and evidence shows that the benefits of CBT for insomnia extend to anxiety. Using data from two large trials of digital CBT (dCBT) for insomnia, we evaluated whether improving sleep is an effective treatment target to reduce both insomnia and anxiety symptoms in individuals...

Up-to-date information on the prevalence and trends of common mental disorders is relevant to health care policy and planning, owing to the high burden associated with these disorders. In the first wave of the third Netherlands Mental Health Survey and Incidence Study (NEMESIS-3), a nationally representative sample was interviewed face-to-face from...

Introduction Insomnia has significant overlap with anxiety, and CBT for insomnia, in addition to improving sleep, leads to concomitant reductions in anxiety. Nevertheless, few studies have evaluated the anxiolytic effects of CBT for insomnia in individuals with insomnia and clinically significant anxiety symptoms or an anxiety disorder diagnosis. L...

Background: Dysregulation of the negative feedback loop of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis may have damaging effects on the brain, potentially under influence of psychosocial health factors. We studied associations between functioning of the negative feedback loop of HPA-axis, measured with a very low-dose dexamethasone suppression t...

Background Cognitive and brain reserve refer to individual differences that allow some people to better withstand brain pathology than others. Although early life stress has been recognized as a risk factor for low reserve in late life, no research yet has studied this across midlife. Objective To examine the associations of life stress with brain...

Study objectives: Disturbed sleep and 24-hour activity rhythms are linked to adverse cardiometabolic profiles in adults and adolescents, and these associations may originate in early life. We aimed to study associations of sleep and 24-hour rhythms with cardiometabolic risk factors in school-age children. Methods: This cross-sectional population...

Background Current categorical classification systems of psychiatric diagnoses lead to heterogeneity of symptoms within disorders and common co-occurrence of disorders. We investigated the heterogeneous and overlapping nature of symptom endorsement in a population-based sample across three of the most common categories of psychiatric disorders: dep...

The study objective was to explore associations of fetal and infant weight patterns and preterm birth with sleep and 24‐h activity rhythm parameters at school‐age. In our prospective population‐based study, 1327 children were followed from birth to age 10–15 years. Fetal weight was estimated using ultrasound in the second and third trimester of pre...

Objectives: Tinnitus is a common and burdensome disease, often accompanied by complaints of poor sleep. However, associations of tinnitus with objective estimates of sleep remain unclear, particularly in the general population. We assessed these associations in a population-based cohort of middle-aged and elderly persons. Design: This study incl...

Depression is one of the most poorly understood diseases due to its elusive pathogenesis. There is an urgency to identify molecular and biological mechanisms underlying depression and the gut microbiome is a novel area of interest. Here we investigate the relation of fecal microbiome diversity and composition with depressive symptoms in 1,054 parti...

Background The cognitive reserve hypothesis aims to explain individual differences in susceptibility to the functional impact of dementia-related pathology. Previous research suggested that poor subjective sleep may be associated with a lower cognitive reserve. Objective The objective was to investigate if actigraphy-estimated sleep and 24-hour ac...

Depressive symptoms differ in severity and stability over time. Trajectories depicting these changes, particularly those with high late-life depressive symptoms, have been associated with poor brain health at old age. To better understand these associations across the lifespan, we examined depressive symptoms trajectories in relation to brain healt...

In this study, we investigated history of traumatic brain injury with loss of consciousness in relation to cognitive functioning, subjective memory complaints and brain structure in mid-life. This study included 2,005 participants (mean age: 47.6 years, standard deviation: 5.0, women: 65%) from the ORACLE study between 2017-2020. History of traumat...

Background: The ageing population and its burden on health-care systems warrant early detection of patients at risk of functional decline and mortality. We aimed to assess frailty transitions and its accuracy for mortality prediction in subjects with impaired spirometry (Preserved Ratio Impaired Spirometry [PRISm] or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary...

Objectives We examined the associations of estimated allocations of time spent in physical activity, sedentary behavior and sleep with self-rated sleep quality. Methods Between 2011 and 2016, 1918 participants (mean age 71 ± 9 years, 51% women) from the population-based Rotterdam Study were included. Durations of light physical activity, moderate-...

Physical activity has been suggested as modifiable factor that might contribute to improving cognitive and brain function during aging. However, previous studies were mainly of cross-sectional design and did not consider effects of time or potential reverse causality. We aimed to investigate the bidirectional associations of physical activity with...

Background Multimorbidity poses a major challenge for care coordination. However, data on what non-communicable diseases lead to multimorbidity, and whether the lifetime risk differs between men and women are lacking. We determined sex-specific differences in multimorbidity patterns and estimated sex-specific lifetime risk of multimorbidity in the...

Background Cognitive and brain reserve aim to explain individual differences in susceptibility to dementia and may also affect the risk of late-life depressive events. We assessed whether higher cognitive and brain reserve are associated with lower risk of a late-life depressive event. Methods This study included 4509 participants from the populat...

Early life stress (ELS) is associated with lower IQ and academic achievement; however, it remains unclear whether it additionally explains their discrepancy. In 2,401 children (54% girls, 30.2% migration background) from the population‐based study Generation R Study, latent factors of prenatal and postnatal (age 0–10) ELS were estimated, and IQ‐ach...

Up to 25% of children experience sleep problems. Transactional sleep models suggest bidirectional associations between parenting and children’s sleep problems. The current study aims to clarify the temporal associations between maternal sensitivity and children’s sleep problems across early childhood. This study includes 942 mother-child dyads from...

Background Sleep is important for healthy functioning in children. Numerous genetic and environmental factors, from conception onwards, may influence this phenotype. Epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation have been proposed to underlie variation in sleep or may be an early-life marker of sleep disturbances. We examined if DNA methylation at...

Complaints of insomnia are common, yet provision of the recommended treatment, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), is limited. In this chapter we discuss how a digital medicine approach, in the form of CBT delivered by web or mobile (dCBT), could have a transformative impact on insomnia care provision by enabling universal implementation of clinic...

Purpose Psychosocial health problems, such as social isolation, loneliness, depression and anxiety, have gained attention during the COVID-19 pandemic and are commonly co-occurring. We investigated the network of psychosocial health constructs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods This study included 4553 participants (mean age: 68.6 ± 11.2 years,...

Background Cerebrovascular disease is regarded as a potential cause of late-life depression. Yet, evidence for associations of neuroimaging markers of vascular brain disease with depressive symptoms is inconclusive. We examined the associations of neuroimaging markers and depressive symptoms in a large population-based study of middle-aged and elde...

Objectives Poor sleep is common in the general population, with hyperarousal and stress often suggested as causal factors. Conversely, sleep might also affect the stress response, in which the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis plays a key role. We assessed the longitudinal association of sleep and 24-hour activity rhythms with functioning o...

The identification of optimal sleep duration recommendations for the general population has long been an important goal on the public health agenda, as both short and long sleep duration have been linked to unfavourable health outcomes. Yet, sleep is more than duration alone and can be described across multiple domains, such as timing, regularity,...

Background Chronic cough is a debilitating medical condition that is often complicated by psychomorbidities such as depressive symptoms. Nevertheless, little is known about the impact of chronic cough on the risk of developing depression. Therefore, we investigated the association between chronic cough and prevalent, incident, as well as recurrent...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the related governmental restrictions have greatly impacted the lives of people worldwide and have been suggested to negatively impact mental health. We describe the trajectories of depressive and anxiety symptoms during the pandemic and their determinants in a large population-based sample of middle-aged and older adults....

Objective: To investigate whether child mental health problems prospectively associate with IQ-achievement discrepancy (i.e. academic under- and overachievement) in emerging adolescence. Secondary aims were to test whether these associations are specific to certain mental health problems, to assess potential sex differences, and to examine whether...

Background Sleep and stress are highly interrelated. To improve our understanding of the role of sleep in functioning of the negative feedback loop of the stress system, we assessed the association between sleep and functioning of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in a population-based sample. Methods This study included 403 participan...

Background Sleep problems, altered sleep patterns and mental health difficulties often co-occur in the pediatric population. Different assessment methods for sleep exist, however, many studies only use one measure of sleep or focus on one specific mental health problem. In this population-based study, we assessed different aspects of sleep and moth...

Background: Physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep are potential risk factors of mental health disorders, but previous studies have not considered the dependency between these activity domains. Therefore, we examined the associations of reallocations of time among older adults' physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep with depres...

Objectives The coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and accompanying lockdown restrictions impacted social life significantly. We studied associations of sociodemographic factors, mental and social health markers, and brain structure with social health trajectories during the COVID-19 pandemic. Design Prospective longitudinal population-ba...

Background Cognitive reserve aims to explain individual differences in the susceptibility to the functional impact of dementia in the presence of equal amount of neuropathological damage. It is thought to be shaped by a combination of innate individual differences and lifetime exposures. Which determinants are associated with cognitive reserve rema...

Long and short sleep duration are associated with elevated blood pressure (BP), possibly through effects on molecular pathways that influence neuroendocrine and vascular systems. To gain new insights into the genetic basis of sleep-related BP variation, we performed genome-wide gene by short or long sleep duration interaction analyses on four BP tr...

Physical inactivity is a major public health problem, and there are concerns this might have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. We aimed to identify distinct trajectories of physical activity over a 6-week period after the first restrictive measures and to explore determinants of these trajectories in a population-based cohort of middle-aged a...

Sleep has been hypothesised to facilitate waste clearance from the brain. We aimed to determine whether sleep is associated with perivascular spaces on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a potential marker of impaired brain waste clearance, in a population-based cohort of middle-aged and elderly people. In 559 participants (mean [SD] age 62 [6...

Abstract Objectives Psychosocial factors have been hypothesized to increase the risk of cancer. This study aims (1) to test whether psychosocial factors (depression, anxiety, recent loss events, subjective social support, relationship status, general distress, and neuroticism) are associated with the incidence of any cancer (any, breast, lung, pro...

Background In older populations disturbed 24-h activity rhythms, poor sleep, and depressive symptoms are often lingering and co-morbid, making treatment difficult. To improve insights into these commonly co-occurring problems, we assessed the bidirectional association of sleep and 24-h activity rhythms with depressive symptoms in middle-aged and el...

Background: Insomnia is a highly common sleep disorder in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). Yet, no screening questionnaires following the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-5 (DSM-5) criteria have been validated in PD patients. Objectives: We assessed the validity and reliability of the French version of the sleep condition indicator (SCI)...

Importance Tinnitus is a common disorder, but its impact on daily life varies widely in population-based samples. It is unclear whether this interference in daily life is associated with mental health problems that are commonly detected in clinical populations. Objective To investigate the association of tinnitus and its interference in daily life...

Neuroimaging and genetics studies have advanced our understanding of the neurobiology of sleep and its disorders. However, individual studies usually have limitations to identifying consistent and reproducible effects, including modest sample sizes, heterogeneous clinical characteristics and varied methodologies. These issues call for a large‐scale...

Background Sleep traits are associated with cardiometabolic disease risk, with evidence from Mendelian randomization (MR) suggesting that insomnia symptoms and shorter sleep duration increase coronary artery disease risk. We combined adjusted multivariable regression (AMV) and MR analyses of phenotypes of unfavourable sleep on 113 metabolomic trait...

Background A higher cognitive reserve and brain reserve could decrease mortality risk, but the interaction of these factors with general age-related loss of physical fitness (eg, frailty) remains unclear with regards to mortality. We investigated the associations of cognitive and brain reserve with mortality and the interaction of cognitive and bra...

Most people experience grief after a loss, about 10% develop complicated grief, often accompanied by sleep complaints. Yet, the role of objectively estimated poor sleep remains unclear. Therefore, we assessed the cross-sectional and longitudinal association of actigraphy-estimated sleep with grief. We included 1,776 participants (mean age: 61.8±8.9...

We aimed to obtain reliable reference charts for sleep duration, estimate the prevalence of sleep complaints across the lifespan and identify risk indicators of poor sleep. Studies were identified through systematic literature search in Embase, Medline and Web of Science (9 August 2019) and through personal contacts. Eligible studies had to be publ...

Brain development and deterioration across the lifespan are integral to the etiology of late-life neurodegenerative disease. Factors that influence the health of the adult brain remain to be elucidated and include risk factors, protective factors, and factors related to cognitive and brain reserve. To address this knowledge gap we designed a life-c...

Clinical guidelines recommend cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) as the first line of treatment for insomnia. Accessing CBT can be challenging due to limited providers, geographical constraints, and cost. Digital medicine, including telehealth CBT and digital CBT (dCBT), address these barriers by providing CBT through teleconference/telephone and d...

Sleep and 24-h activity rhythm disturbances are associated with development of neurodegenerative diseases and related pathophysiological processes in the brain. We determined the cross-sectional relation of sleep and 24-h activity rhythm disturbances with plasma-based biomarkers that might signal neurodegenerative disease, in 4712 middle-aged and e...

Background Since chronic cough has common neurobiological mechanisms and pathophysiology with chronic pain, both clinical disorders might be interrelated. Hence, we examined the association between chronic cough and chronic pain in adult subjects in the Rotterdam Study, a large prospective population-based cohort study. Methods Using a standardise...

Psychological and social factors are known to influence blood pressure (BP) and risk of hypertension and associated cardiovascular diseases. To identify novel BP loci, we carried out genome-wide association meta-analyses of systolic, diastolic, pulse, and mean arterial BP taking into account the interaction effects of genetic variants with three ps...

Inleiding: Slaapproblemen komen vaak voor bij kinderen. Melatonine, zonder recept verkrijgbaar in Nederland, lijkt geregeld ingezet te worden om deze slaapproblemen te behandelen. Desondanks zijn er geen richtlijnen voor het gebruik van melatonine door gezonde kinderen en is er weinig kennis beschikbaar met betrekking tot neven- en langetermijneffe...

Clinical studies have shown that up to 90% of patients with idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (RBD) will eventually be diagnosed with a clinical α-synucleinopathy. Because of this high conversion rate, screening for RBD is often performed to identify eligible participants for studies aimed at elucidating the prodromal phase of α...

Background: To what extent Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) co-occurs in subjects with different types of lung function impairment is unclear. Objective: To examine the co-occurrence and severity of OSA in subjects with asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) or Preserved Ratio Impaired Spirometry (PRISm). Methods: We compared OSA (apne...

Background: Sleep traits are associated with cardiometabolic disease risk, with evidence from Mendelian randomization (MR) suggesting that insomnia symptoms and shorter sleep duration increase coronary artery disease risk. We combined adjusted multivariable regression (AMV) and MR analyses of phenotypes of unfavourable sleep on 113 metabolomic trai...

Insomnia predicts the onset of depression, commonly co-presents with depression and often persists following depression remission. However, these conditions can be challenging to treat concurrently using depression-specific therapies. Cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia may be an appropriate treatment to improve both insomnia and depressive...

Background To establish trajectories of cognitive and motor function, and to determine the sequence of change across individual tests in community-dwelling individuals aged 45-90 years. Methods Between 1997-2016, we repeatedly assessed cognitive function with five tests in 9,514 participants aged 45-90 years from the population-based Rotterdam Stu...