Esther Via

• MD, PhD
• Hospital Sant Joan de Déu

Background: COVID-19 pandemic stressors affected youth’s mental health. This longitudinal study aims to explore these effects while considering predictive factors such as age and sex. Methods: An initial sample of 1502 caregivers answered a longitudinal survey evaluating their youths’ (4–17 years of age) emotional/behavioral symptoms using the Pedi...

Progression to psychosis has been associated with increased cortical thinning in the frontal, temporal and parietal lobes in individuals at clinical high risk for the disorder (CHR-P). The timing and spatial extent of these changes are thought to be influenced by age. However, most evidence so far stems from adult samples. Longitudinal studies are...

Exposure to acute and chronic stress has a broad range of structural effects on the brain. The brain areas commonly targeted in the stress response models include the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex. Studies in patients suffering from the so-called stress-related disorders -embracing post-traumatic stress, major depressive and...

Binge-eating disorder (BED) is a highly prevalent disorder. Subthreshold BED conditions (sBED) are even more frequent in youth, but their significance regarding BED etiology and long-term prognosis is unclear. A better understanding of brain findings associated with BED and sBED, in the context of critical periods for neurodevelopment, is relevant...

Progression to psychosis has been associated with increased cortical thinning in the frontal, temporal and parietal lobes in individuals at clinical high-risk for the disease (CHR-P). The timing and spatial extent of these changes are thought to be influenced by age. However, most evidence so far stems from adult samples. Longitudinal studies are e...

Patients with first-episode psychosis (FEP) report deficits in social support (SS) and diminished and less satisfactory social networks than healthy controls (HC). These SS difficulties are linked with symptomatology. The study objectives were to: (a) compare perceived SS between patients with FEP and HC; (b) study sex differences regarding perceiv...

Objective: Identifying biomarkers of transition to psychosis in individuals at clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR-P) is essential to understand the mechanisms underlying the disease. Although cross-sectional abnormalities in cortical surface area (CSA) have been demonstrated in individuals at CHR-P who transition to psychosis (CHR-P-T) compared...

Background In mental health, comorbidities are the norm rather than the exception. However, current meta-analytic methods for summarizing the neural correlates of mental disorders do not consider comorbidities, reducing them to a source of noise and bias rather than benefitting from their valuable information. Objectives We describe and validate a...

Objective To study the prevalence and the type of childhood trauma (CT) in a first-episode psychosis (FEP) cohort and in a healthy control (HC) sample. To study which clinical and sociodemographic variables in the onset of the FEP are related to having suffered some traumatic experience in childhood. Method 100 FEP patients and 94 HC participated...

Background: During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown strategies have been widely used to contain SARS-CoV-2 virus spread. Children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to suffering psychological effects as result of such measures. In Spain, children were enforced to a strict home lockdown for 42 days during the first wave. Here, we studied the e...

Anorexia nervosa (AN) typically emerges in adolescence. The cortico-striatal system (CSTS) and the default mode network (DMN) are brain circuits with a crucial development during this period. These circuits underlie cognitive functions that are impaired in AN, such as cognitive flexibility and inhibition, among others. Little is known about their i...

Objective Research suggests abnormalities in reward‐based processes in anorexia nervosa (AN). However, few studies have explored if such alterations might be associated with different temporal activation patterns. This study aims to characterize alterations in time‐dependent processes in the ventral striatum (VS) during social feedback in AN using...

The high comorbidity of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Anxiety Disorders (ANX), and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has hindered the study of their structural neural correlates. The authors analyzed specific and common grey matter volume (GMV) characteristics by comparing them with healthy controls (HC). The meta-analysis of voxel-based morp...

Importance: The ENIGMA clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis initiative, the largest pooled neuroimaging sample of individuals at CHR to date, aims to discover robust neurobiological markers of psychosis risk. Objective: To investigate baseline structural neuroimaging differences between individuals at CHR and healthy controls as well as betwee...

Objective: Our cross-sectional study collects the prevalence of anxiety, depression and sleep problems reported in children with ADHD aged between seven and twelve years. Results: A disparity was obtained between data referred by caregivers and those referred by children and adolescents with ADHD, with higher record of psychopathological discomfort...

Importance: The ENIGMA clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR) initiative, the largest pooled CHR-neuroimaging sample to date, aims to discover robust neurobiological markers of psychosis risk in a sample with known heterogeneous outcomes. Objective: We investigated baseline structural neuroimaging differences between CHR subjects and healthy contro...

COVID-19 pandemic is prompting multiple stressors -including control strategies such as lockdown- which may impact child and adolescent mental health. 1,529 caregivers answered an online questionnaire about emotional and behavioral symptoms of youths (4-18 years old) using the Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC). Percentage of above-the-risk-threshol...

Objective: Emotional processing dysfunction evident in eating disorders (ED) such as anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN), is considered relevant to the development and maintenance of these disorders. The purpose of the current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was to pilot a comparison of the activity of the fronto-limb...

Background Current brain-based theoretical models of generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) suggest a dysfunction of amygdala-ventromedial prefrontal cortex emotional regulatory mechanisms. These alterations might be reflected by an altered resting state functional connectivity between both areas and could extend to vulnerable non-clinical samples suc...

Objective: The selection of a bitemporal (BT) or right unilateral (RUL) electrode placement affects the efficacy and side effects of ECT. Previous studies have not entirely described the neurobiological underpinnings of such differential effects. Recent neuroimaging research on gray matter volumes is contributing to our understanding of the mechan...

Background Major depressive disorder (MDD) is accompanied by atypical brain structure affecting grey and white matter from the early stages. Neuroimaging studies of first-episode depression (FED) have provided evidence on this regard, but most of the studies are cross-sectional. The aim of this longitudinal study was to test potential changes in gr...

Objective and subjective cognitive measures are altered in major depressive disorder (MDD), but there is a poor correlation between them. This study aims to explore such discrepancy and the characteristics explaining this phenomenon. 229 patients with MDD subdivided into remitted (n = 57), partially remitted (n = 90) and acute (n = 82) underwent a...

Background Pathological worry is a hallmark feature of generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), associated with dysfunctional emotional processing. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is involved in the regulation of such processes, but the link between vmPFC emotional responses and pathological v . adaptive worry has not yet been examined. Aims...

Schizophrenia and mood disorders -including unipolar depression and bipolar disorder-, are severe mental diseases with a highly heterogeneous symptomatology, among which cognitive dysfunction has progressively emerged as a key cornerstone. Patients suffering from these illnesses show significant deficits in different neurocognitive and social cogni...

Recent research suggests that neuroplastic and neuroinflammatory changes may account for the mode of action of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), although extant data do not allow for a clear disambiguation between these two hypotheses. Multimodal neuroimaging approaches (for example, combining structural and metabolic information) may help in clarif...

Human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies suggest that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) contributes to the learned discrimination of threat and safety signals, although its precise contribution to these processes remains unclear. One hypothesis is that the vmPFC supports the positive affective processing of safety signals...

Objectives: Body image distortion is a core symptom of anorexia nervosa (AN), which involves alterations in self- (and other's) evaluative processes arising during body perception. At a neural level, self-related information is thought to rely on areas of the so-called default mode network (DMN), which, additionally, shows prominent synchronised a...

Finding robust brain substrates of mood disorders is an important target for research. The degree to which major depression and bipolar disorder are associated with common and/or distinct patterns of volumetric changes is nevertheless unclear. Furthermore the extant literature is heterogeneous with respect to the nature of these changes. We report...

OBJECTIVES: There is growing evidence supporting a role for stressful life events (SLEs) at OCD onset, but neurobiological correlates of such effect are not known. We evaluated regional gray matter (GM) changes associated with the presence/absence of SLEs at OCD onset.METHODS: One hundred and twenty-four OCD patients and 112 healthy controls were r...

Background: Although current models of depression suggest that a sequential modulation of limbic and prefrontal connectivity is needed for illness recovery, neuroimaging studies of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) have focused on assessing functional connectivity (FC) before and after an ECT course, without characterizing functional changes occurri...

Poster

Patients with anorexia nervosa (AN) display impaired social interactions, implicated in the development and prognosis of the disorder. Importantly, social behavior is modulated by reward-based processes, and dysfunctional at-brain-level reward responses have been involved in AN neurobiological models. However, no prior evidence exists of whether th...

Advances in the neuroscientific understanding of bodily autonomic awareness, or interoception, have led to the hypothesis that human trait anxiety sensitivity (AS)-the fear of bodily autonomic arousal-is primarily mediated by the anterior insular cortex. Despite broad appeal, few experimental studies have comprehensively addressed this hypothesis....

Familiality, stressful life events (SLE) and gender significantly affect the onset of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, their combined impact on the probability of OCD chronicity is largely unknown. With the objective of clarifying their predictive value, we tested a model of interaction effects between these influences. A sample of 449...

Background Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is the most effective and fast acting therapy for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Animal research has consistently pointed to neuroplasticity as a central mechanism of ECT action (1), however evidence in humans remains scarce (2; 3). Method We assessed two independent samples of TRD patients referre...

Background: PlayMancer is a video game designed to increase emotional regulation and reduce general impulsive behaviors, by training to decrease arousal and improve decision-making and planning. We have previously demonstrated the usefulness of PlayMancer in reducing impulsivity and improving emotional regulation in bulimia nervosa (BN) patients....

Background: The etiology of anorexia nervosa is still unknown. Multiple and distributed brain regions have been implicated in its pathophysiology, implying a dysfunction of connected neural circuits. Despite these findings, the role of white matter in anorexia nervosa has been rarely assessed. In this study, we used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)...

Despite knowledge of amygdala involvement in fear and anxiety, its contribution to the pathophysiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) remains controversial. In the context of neuroimaging studies, it seems likely that the heterogeneity of the disorder might have contributed to a lack of consistent findings. To assess the influence of OCD sy...

Background / Purpose: In a previous paper of our group (1), melancholic patients (MD) showed a cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) volume increase in the left Sylvian fissure (LSF). The objectives of this study were: 1) to assess the progression across time of this CSF change and to study its correlation pattern;2) to study the whole-brain pattern of corre...

Melancholic depression is a biologically homogeneous clinical entity in which structural brain alterations have been described. Interestingly, reports of structural alterations in melancholia include volume increases in Cerebro-Spinal Fluid (CSF) spaces. However, there are no previous reports of CSF volume alterations using automated whole-brain vo...

Studies investigating abnormalities of regional gray matter volume in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have yielded contradictory results. It is unclear whether the current subtyping of ASD into autistic disorder and Asperger disorder is neurobiologically valid. To conduct a quantitative meta-analysis of voxel-based morphometry studies exploring gray...

We conducted a meta-analysis of voxel-based morphometry (VBM) studies in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to clarify the changes in regional white-matter volume underpinning this condition, and generated an online database to facilitate replication and further analyses by other researchers. PubMed, ScienceDirect, Web of Knowledge and Scopus databases...