Bhedita Seewoo

• PhD in Neuroscience
• Research Advisor at Minderoo Foundation

Polymers are the main building blocks of plastic, with the annual global production volume of fossil carbon-based polymers reaching over 457 million metric tons in 2019 and this figure is anticipated to triple by 2060. There is potential for environmental harm and adverse human health impacts associated with plastic, its constituent polymers and th...

This article details a correction to: Landrigan PJ, Raps H, Cropper M, et al. The Minderoo-Monaco Commission on Plastics and Human Health. Annals of Global Health. 2023; 89(1): 23. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/aogh.4056.

Background The global production and use of plastic materials has increased dramatically since the 1960s and there is increasing evidence of human health impacts related to exposure to plastic-associated chemicals. There is, however, no comprehensive, regulatory, post-market monitoring for human health effects of plastic-associated chemicals or par...

Background Resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) in rodent models have the potential to bridge invasive experiments and observational human studies, increasing our understanding of functional alterations in the brains of patients with depression. A major limitation in current rodent rs-fMRI studies is that there has been no consensus on healthy ba...

Task-free functional connectivity in animal models provides an experimental framework to examine connectivity phenomena under controlled conditions and allows for comparisons with data modalities collected under invasive or terminal procedures. Currently, animal acquisitions are performed with varying protocols and analyses that hamper result compa...

Background: Plastics have conveyed great benefits to humanity and made possible some of the most significant advances of modern civilization in fields as diverse as medicine, electronics, aerospace, construction, food packaging, and sports. It is now clear, however, that plastics are also responsible for significant harms to human health, the econo...

Currently approved repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) protocols for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD) involve once-daily (weekday) stimulation sessions, with 10 Hz or intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS) frequencies, over 4–6 weeks. Recently, accelerated treatment protocols (multiple daily stimulation sessions...

Background Global plastic production has increased exponentially since the 1960s, with more than 6300 million metric tons of plastic waste generated to date. Studies have found a range of human health outcomes associated with exposure to plastic chemicals. However, only a fraction of plastic chemicals used have been studied in vivo, and then often...

Pediatric brain cancer patients treated with fractionated radiotherapy commonly develop long-term late side-effects including cognitive deficits. Many preclinical models of late effects have been developed that use a single, high dose of radiotherapy, which does not mimic the fractionated schedule children receive clinically. This study aimed to cr...

Task-free functional connectivity in animal models provides an experimental framework to examine connectivity phenomena under controlled conditions and allows comparison with invasive or terminal procedures. To date, animal acquisitions are performed with varying protocols and analyses that hamper result comparison and integration. We introduce Sta...

Background Global plastic production has increased exponentially since the 1960s, with more than 6300 million metric tons of plastic waste generated to date. Studies have found a range of human health impacts associated with exposure to plastic chemicals. However, only a fraction of plastic chemicals used have been studied in vivo , and then often...

Gut microbiome composition is associated with mood-relating behaviours, including those reflecting depression-like phenotypes. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), a non-invasive neuromodulation technique, is an effective treatment for depression, but its effects on the gut microbiome remain largely unknown. This study assessed micr...

Background: Despite its morbidity and mortality, the neurobiology of treatment resistant depression (TRD) in adolescents and the impact of treatment on this neurobiology is poorly understood. Methods: Using automatic segmentation in FreeSurfer, we examined brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) baseline volumetric differences among healthy adole...

Objective: Ongoing studies are focused on adapting transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for the treatment of major depressive disorder in adolescent humans. Most protocols in adolescent humans to date have delivered daily 10 Hz prefrontal stimulation with mixed results. Novel TMS dosing strategies such as accelerated TMS have recently been consi...

Background Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), a non-invasive neuromodulation technique, is an effective treatment for depression. However, few studies have used diffusion MRI (dMRI) to investigate the longitudinal effects of rTMS on the abnormal brain white matter (WM) described in depression. Methods In this study, we acquired d...

Resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) is a task-free method of detecting spatially distinct brain regions with correlated activity, which form organised networks known as resting-state networks (RSNs). The two most widely used methods for analysing RSN connectivity are seed-based correlation analysis (SCA) and independent component analysis (ICA)...

Objectives: Prior studies demonstrate elevated cortical glutamate (Glu) in patients with bipolar disorder (BD). Studies assessing neurochemistry in early stages of bipolar illness before the emergence of manic symptoms are lacking. This study aimed to examine neurochemical correlates measured by proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) and a...

Prior research suggests that the neurobiological underpinnings of depression include aberrant brain functional connectivity, neurometabolite levels, and hippocampal volume. Chronic restraint stress (CRS) depression model in rats has been shown to elicit behavioral, gene expression, protein, functional connectivity, and hippocampal volume changes si...

Anaesthetic protocols involving the combined use of a sedative agent, medetomidine, and an anaesthetic agent, isoflurane, are increasingly being used in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies of the rodent brain. Despite the popularity of this combination, a standardised protocol for the combined use of medetomidine and isoflurane has...

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is involved in emotion regulation and salience processing. Prior research has implicated ACC dysfunction in suicidal ideation (SI) and suicidal behavior. This study aimed to quantify ACC glutamatergic concentrations and to examine relationships with SI in a sample of healthy and depressed adolescents. Forty adole...

Prior research suggests that the neurobiological underpinnings of depression include disruptions in functional connectivity, neurometabolite levels, and hippocampal volume. This study examined the validity of a chronic restraint stress (CRS) paradigm in male Sprague Dawley rats for the study of depression using longitudinal behavioural tests and mu...

Background: Depression is a debilitating neuropsychiatric disorder with significant morbidity and mortality due to the risk of suicide. Antidepressants are typically a first line treatment for depression. However, up to one third of adults have treatment-resistant depression (TRD) that does not respond to pharmacotherapy. Repetitive transcranial ma...

Aim - To outline the current literature surrounding natal teeth, and then, in a pilot study, to evaluate natal teeth using micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) to determine their anatomical profile, and compare and contrast different analytical methods to assess natal teeth. Methods - Two extracted natal teeth (mandibular central incisors) and one...

Background: Evidence suggests that repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), a non-invasive neuromodulation technique, alters resting brain activity. Despite anecdotal evidence that rTMS effects wear off, there are no reports of longitudinal studies, even in humans, mapping the therapeutic duration of rTMS effects. Objective: Here, we...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is gaining increasing prominence as a non‐invasive neuromodulation technique for the treatment of neurological and psychiatric conditions. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has therapeutic potential for a range of psychiatric disorders (e.g. depression, schizophrenia) as well as neurological...

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a non-invasive neuromodulation technique used to treat many neuropsychiatric conditions. However, the mechanisms underlying its mode of action are still unclear. This is the first rodent study using resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) to examine low-intensity (LI) rTMS effects, in an effort...

Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a non-invasive neuromodulation technique, which has brain network-level effects in healthy individuals and is also used to treat many neurological and psychiatric conditions in which brain connectivity is believed to be abnormal. Despite the fact that rTMS is being used in a clinical setting an...