Mauricio Scopel Hoffmann

• MD, PhD
• Adjunct Professor at Federal University of Santa Maria

Major mental disorders are increasingly understood as disorders of brain development. Large and heterogeneous samples are required to define generalizable links between brain development and psychopathology. To this end, we introduce the Reproducible Brain Charts (RBC), an open data resource that integrates data from 5 large studies of brain develo...

Background The Short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire (SMFQ) is a validated tool for assessing depressive symptoms in youth, though no specific cut-point exists for the Brazilian population. Item response theory (IRT) and interval likelihood ratios (ILRs) offer refined methods to monitor symptoms but involve complex calculations that hinder clinical...

Introduction While the influence of both genetic and environmental factors on the development of psychiatric symptoms is well-recognized, the precise nature of their interaction throughout development remains a subject of ongoing debate. This study investigated the association between the expression of 78 candidate genes, previously associated with...

Objective: We aim to create a web-based calculator for assessing depressive symptoms with the Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9), utilizing IRT-based standardized scores, to improve measurement precision, standardization, and practical application in clinical practice. Methods: This study developed a web-based calculator using a graded respo...

Background: This study aims to examine the utility of adding loneliness as a symptom of major depressive disorder (MDD).Methods: We used data from the 2018-2019 wave of the Brazilian High-Risk Cohort Study, involving 1,905 participants aged 14-23. We evaluated the centrality of loneliness within the depressive symptom network. Finally, we used adju...

Background Social connection factors play a key role for young people's mental health. It is important to understand how their influence may vary across contexts. We investigated structural (e.g. household size), functional (e.g. social support) and quality (e.g. feeling close) social connection factors in relation to adolescent internalising and e...

Translation of biomarkers to clinical practice is hindered by the significant overlap in neurobiological measures between ADHD cases and controls. A risk-informed design can enhance the utility and validation of ADHD biomarkers by highlighting differences between individuals with ADHD and those without at differential risk. Participants were 2511 c...

The Child Mind Institute (CMI) Healthy Brain Network (HBN) project has recorded phenotypic, behavioral, and neuroimaging data from ~5,000 children and young adults between the ages of 5 and 21. Here, we present "analysis-ready" data from its high-density (128-channel) electroencephalographic (EEG) recording sessions formatted as Brain Imaging Data...

Depression is a debilitating and costly mental health problem. Despite this, its prevalence and associated factors among medical students remain inconclusive. Methodological variations in assessment tools and their cutoff points possibly contributed to inconsistencies in prevalence estimates among previous studies. Stressors and their correlation w...

Objective Analyse the psychometric properties of the Portuguese version of the PAFAS (Parenting and Family Adjustment Scales) parenting scale, using data from two large Brazilian birth cohorts. Methods The original PAFAS parenting scale, which consists of 18 items (parental inconsistency 5 items, coercive parenting 5 items, positive encouragement...

Background: To improve access to mental health care for children and adolescents, it is necessary to identify the barriers faced by their caregivers. The aim of this study is to identify these barriers in Greece and to investigate the reliability and validity of the modified version of the Barriers to Access to Care Evaluation scale (BACE) - the BA...

Background Pooling data from different sources will advance mental health research by providing larger sample sizes and allowing cross-study comparisons; however, the heterogeneity in how variables are measured across studies poses a challenge to this process. Methods This study explored the potential of using natural language processing (NLP) to...

Background Understanding the factors that determine distinct courses of anxiety symptoms throughout development will better guide interventions. There are scarce data‐driven longitudinal studies, using multi‐modal predictors, investigating the chronicity of anxiety symptoms from childhood to young adulthood, particularly in a middle‐income country....

Background: Health systems need tools to assess patient's experience of service, but existing tools lack reliability and validity assessment. Our aim is to investigate the factor structure, reliability, validity, item parameters and interpretability of the parent version of the Experience of Service Questionnaire (ESQ) for practical use in Greece....

Assessment tools for depression and anxiety usually inquire about the frequency of symptoms. However, evidence suggests that different question framings might trigger different responses. Our aim is to test if asking about symptom’s context, ability, duration, and botherment adds validity to Patient Health Questionnaire–9, General Anxiety Disorder–...

Background: Depression is a leading cause of disability globally, necessitating precise assessment tools. The Patient Health Questionnaire 9-item version (PHQ-9) is widely used for this purpose but relies on sum scores, limiting its accuracy and comparability with other tools. Item Response Theory (IRT) offers a more nuanced approach by weighting i...

Many countries implement a double-shift schooling system, offering morning or afternoon shifts, driven by diverse factors. Young people with ADHD may face educational problems attending morning shifts compared to afternoon shifts. To investigate this, we used data from a Brazilian school-based cohort (n = 2.240, 6–14 years old, 45.6% female; 50.2%...

Background The DSM Level 1 Cross-Cutting Symptom Measure (DSM-XC) allows for assessing multiple psychopathological domains. However, its capability to screen for mental disorders in a population-based sample and the impact of adverbial framings (intensity and frequency) on its performance are unknown. Methods The study was based on cross-sectional...

Objective: The aims of this study are to investigate the trajectory of positive attributes from childhood to early adulthood and to explore how those trajectories can be modified by two domains of childhood adversity – threat and deprivation. Methods: A large prospective school-based community cohort of youths (n=2,511, 6-14 years of age, 45% femal...

High rates of co-occurrence of mental disorders have been hypothesized to represent a result of common susceptibility to overall psychopathology. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that commonalities among psychiatric disorders might be partially driven by sharable perinatal and neonatal environmental factors for mental disorders....

Background: Social connection plays a key role in young people’s mental health. It is important to know which components are involved but also how their influence might vary across contexts. We investigated the prospective association of multiple social connection factors with subsequent adolescent internalising and externalising symptoms comparing...

Data aggregation in mental health is complicated by using different questionnaires, and little is known about the impact of item harmonization strategies on measurement precision. Therefore, we aimed to assess the impact of various item harmonization strategies for a target and proxy questionnaire using correlated and bifactor models. Data were obt...

This study aimed to investigate alternative approaches to a cumulative risk score in the relationship between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and crime. Using data from the 1993 Pelotas (Brazil) Birth Cohort (n = 3236), we measured 12 ACEs up to 15 years, and past-year violent and non-violent crime at 22 years. We used four analytical approach...

Background Semi-structured diagnostic interviews and symptom checklists present similar internal reliability. We aim to investigate whether they differ in predicting poor life outcomes in the transition from childhood to young adulthood. Methods For this longitudinal study, we used data from the Brazilian High Risk Cohort Study for Childhood Menta...

Pooling data from different sources may help further mental health research by providing larger sample sizes and allowing cross-study comparisons; however, the heterogeneity in how variables are measured across studies poses a significant challenge to this process. This study explores the potential of natural language processing (NLP) to harmonize...

MotivationRetrospective questionnaire harmonisation allows researchers to pool and analyse information from multiple data sources, thereby increasing reproducibility in science. Currently, harmonisation of questionnaires relies on a multi-step process where items are manually matched based on expert opinion. Harmony, a new natural-language processi...

Purpose This study examines the association between mental health problems in adolescence and general practice (GP) costs during adulthood up to age 50 in the UK. Methods We conducted secondary analyses of three British birth cohorts (individuals born in single weeks in 1946, 1958 and 1970). Data for the three cohorts were analysed separately. All...

Objective: Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is commonly indicated for refractory psychiatric disorders. However, response comparison across diagnoses is scantly investigated. Here, we aimed to evaluate the relative impact of diagnosis and clinical staging as response predictors in a cross-diagnostic sample. Methods: We investigate, in a retrospec...

MotivationRetrospective questionnaire harmonisation allows researchers to pool and analyse information from multiple data sources, thereby increasing reproducibility in science. Currently, harmonisation of questionnaires relies on a multi-step process where items are manually matched based on expert opinion. Harmony, a new natural-language processi...

MotivationRetrospective questionnaire harmonisation allows researchers to pool and analyse information from multiple data sources, thereby increasing reproducibility in science. Currently, harmonisation of questionnaires relies on a multi-step process where items are manually matched based on expert opinion. Harmony, a new natural-language processi...

Objectives Little is known about the relationship between depression in mothers and problematic gaming in their children. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the potential role of mothers’ depression in childhood as a risk factor for problematic gaming in their offspring in late adolescence/young adulthood. Methods We assessed data from 1557 partic...

Objective: To provide practical norms for measuring depressive symptoms using the Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9) in Brazil using a state-of-art psychometrics analysis. Methods: We used a large and representative Brazilian dataset from the 'Pesquisa Nacional de Saúde - 2019'(PNS-2019), which includes 90,846 Brazilian citizens. First, to a...

Objectives Little is known about the relationship between depression in mothers and problematic gaming in their children. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the potential role of mothers’ depression in childhood as a risk factor for problematic gaming in their offspring in late adolescence/young adulthood. Methods We assessed data from 1557 partic...

High rates of co-occurrence of mental disorders have been hypothesized to represent a result of common susceptibility to overall psychopathology. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that commonalities among psychiatric disorders might be partially driven by shared perinatal and neonatal environmental factors for mental disorders. Pa...

Objectives Model configuration is important for mental health data harmonization. We provide a method to investigate the performance of different bifactor model configurations to harmonize different instruments. Methods We used data from six samples from the Reproducible Brain Charts initiative (N = 8,606, ages 5–22 years, 41.0% females). We harmo...

Background Implementation of interventions to treat child and adolescent mental health problems in schools could help fill the mental health care gap in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Most of the evidence available come from systematic reviews on mental health prevention and promotion, and there is less evidence on treatment strategies t...

Background Treatments for mental health problems in childhood and adolescence have advanced in the last 15 years. Despite advances in research, most of the evidence on effective interventions comes from high-income countries, while evidence is scarce in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), where 90% of world's children and adolescents live. Th...

Background. Understanding deviations from typical brain development is a promising approach to comprehend pathophysiology in childhood and adolescence. We investigated if cerebellar volumes different than expected for age and sex could predict psychopathology, executive functions and academic achievement. Methods. Children and adolescents aged 6–...

Background Specific pathways of intergenerational transmission of behavioral traits remain unclear. Here, we aim to investigate how parental genetics influence offspring cognition, educational attainment, and psychopathology in youth. Methods Participants for the discovery sample were 2,189 offspring (aged 6–14 years), 1898 mothers and 1,017 fathe...

Background Adolescent mental health problems have lasting impacts on health and social functioning later in life. Evidence to date mostly comes from studies of specific diagnostic categories/dimensions, but hierarchical models can elucidate associations with general as well as specific dimensions of psychopathology. We provide evidence on long‐term...

Background The high level of care needs for adolescents with mental health conditions represents a challenge to the public sector, especially in low and middle-income countries. We estimated the costs to the public purse of health, education, criminal justice and social care service use associated with psychiatric conditions among adolescents in Br...

Introduction Several barriers for mental health help-seeking were identified among medical students, including minimizing mental illness. Studies examining aspects particular to those who perceive psychological impairment but do not access treatment are necessary for planning interventions. Aims To identify help-seeking barriers based on the stude...

Crime is a major public problem in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and its preventive measures could have great social impact. The extent to which multiple modifiable risk factors among children and families influence juvenile criminal conviction in an LMIC remains unexplored; however, it is necessary to identify prevention targets. This s...

Individual differences in cognitive abilities emerge early during development, and children with poorer cognition are at increased risk for adverse outcomes as they enter adolescence. Caregiving plays an important role in supporting cognitive development, yet it remains unclear how specific types of caregiving behaviors may shape cognition, highlig...

Objective: There are no validated instruments to measure education-related stress in Brazilian university students. Thus, we aimed to translate and test internal reliability, convergent/discriminant validity, and measurement equivalence of the Higher Education Stress Inventory (HESI). Methods: The translation protocol was carried out by two inde...

Bifactor models are a promising strategy to parse general from specific aspects of psychopathology in youth. Currently, there are multiple configurations of bifactor models originating from different theoretical and empirical perspectives. We aimed to test the reliability, validity, measurement invariance, and the correlation of different bifactor...

Background The rise in mental health problems in the population directly or indirectly because of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a major concern. The aim of this study was to investigate and compare independent predictors of symptoms of stress, anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Brazilians one mont...

Background: Exposure to childhood adversity has been consistently associated with poor developmental outcomes, but it is unclear whether these associations vary across different forms of adversity. We examined cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between threat and deprivation with cognition, emotional processing, and psychopathology in a...

Background: Schools have adapted to the online environment during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the factors influencing access to online resources and the impact of these changes on youth mental health are largely unknown. The current study has two aims (1) to investigate if mental health problems previous to COVID-19 pandemic are associated with acce...

Background We examined the association between childhood poverty and mental health disorders (MHD) in childhood and early adulthood. We also investigated whether the association between poverty in childhood and MHD is mediated by exposure to stressful life events (SLE). Methods We used data from a prospective community cohort of young people asses...

Aims Mental health problems early in life can negatively impact educational attainment, which in turn have negative long-term effects on health, social and economic opportunities. Our aims were to: (i) estimate the impacts of different types of psychiatric conditions on educational outcomes and (ii) to estimate the proportion of adverse educational...

Psychopathology is associated with impaired learning and early termination of schooling, whereas positive attributes are associated with better educational outcomes. However, it is important to understand if and how psychopathology and positive attributes longitudinally impact each other so we could shed light on where to intervene to promote educa...

Background The rise of mental health problems in the population directly or indirectly by the COVID-19 pandemic is a major concern. The aim of this study was to investigate and compare independent predictors of symptoms of stress, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Brazilians, one month after the implementation of mea...

Background Although social distancing is necessary to decrease COVID-19 dissemination, it might also be associated with suicidal ideation. Therefore, we analyzed the impact of social distancing and loneliness in suicidal ideation. Methods We performed two waves of a snowball sample, web-based survey in Brazil (W1: from May 6th to June 6th, 2020; W...

Bifactor models are a promising strategy to parse general from specific aspects of psychopathology in youth. Currently, there are multiple configurations of bifactor models originating from different theoretical and empirical perspectives. Our aim is to identify and test the reliability, validity, measurement invariance, and the correlation of diff...

The aim of this study is to examine the differences in children’s academic achievement considering their mental health profiles. Previous studies have started to seek those differences. However, it is not clear what are the academic achievement differences considering distinct children’s mental health profile. We used a cross-sectional study sample...

Background National Health Service use the Community Mental Health Service User Questionnaire (NHS-CMH) to assess care quality. However, its reliability and internal validity is uncertain. Aims To test the NHS-CMH structure, reliability and item-level characteristics. Methods We used data from 11,373 participants who answered the 2017 NHS-CMH sur...

Introduction The associations of anxiety and depression with metabolic syndrome (MetS) are not consistent across studies. Anxiety and depression are highly correlated and traditional methods don't take the structure of this correlation into account. Our aim is to disentangle the relationship of these emotional conditions with MetS, using bifactor m...

Evidence on the relationship between genetics and mental health are flourishing. However, few studies are evaluating early biomarkers that might link genes, environment, and psychopathology. We aimed to study telomere length (TL) and epigenetic age acceleration (AA) in a cohort of adolescents with and without anxiety disorders (N = 234). We evaluat...

Most mental health questionnaires only probe behavior and emotion over one domain (e.g., frequency) by using an adverbial phrase such as 'How often...?'. This single-domain approach to behavior sampling may limit the scope of psychiatric evidence that these instruments can capture. We investigated whether adding domains such as intensity, duration,...

Objectives: To translate and validate the Reported and Intended Behaviour Scale (RIBS) into Brazilian Portuguese. Methods: A native Brazilian speaker fluent in English translated the RIBS into Brazilian Portuguese. Comprehensibility and face validity were assessed through discussions with mental health professionals and volunteers recruited from th...

The mental capital of the world’s young people is essential to global economic development. However, formation of this essential resource is jeopardised by the high prevalence and costly impacts of mental disorders, which predominantly emerge early in life. To reduce the impact of these disorders on mental capital formation, we recommend tackling t...

Background : Although low-grade inflammation is associated with onset and persistence of depression, most biomarkers display modest predictive effects. GlycA (glycoprotein acetylation) is a unique metabolomic composite of pro-inflammatory acute-phase glycoproteins. We hypothesized that GlycA levels would predict depression incidence, remission and...

Few studies investigate temperament interactions and its association with education in young adolescents. Here we examine a sample of 1540 adolescents (9–14 years of age, 733 females) from a community-based study in Brazil. Temperament was derived from adolescents' reports to the Early Adolescence Temperament Questionnaire. Educational outcomes wer...

Research suggested accumulation of tau proteins might lead to the degeneration of functional networks. Studies investigating the impact of genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease (AD) on early brain connections might shed light on mechanisms leading to AD development later in life. Here, we aim to investigate whether the polygenic risk score for Alzhe...

Here we evaluate the cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between temperament and mental disorders in adolescents. Temperament was assessed in a cohort of 1540 youths by the revised self-report Early Adolescence Temperament Questionnaire (EATQ-R) at baseline and confirmatory factor analyses were used to test the best empirical model. Menta...

Few studies investigate temperament interactions and its association with education in young adolescents. Here we examine a sample of 1,540 adolescents (9-14 years of age) from a community-based study in Brazil. Temperament was derived from adolescents’ reports to the Early Adolescence Temperament Questionnaire. Educational outcomes were measured b...

Background Emotional disorders are risk factors for atherosclerosis and consequent cardiovascular disease. However, it is not clear whether emotional symptoms (ESs) have direct effects on cardiovascular disease. The aim of the present study is to investigate the effects of early ESs on carotid atherosclerosis in young adults. Methods and Results W...

Table S1. Unweighted and Weighted Means for Covariates and Standardized Mean Difserences (SMD) According to SDQ Group at 15 Years‐old: The Pelotas Birth Cohort Table S2. Unweighted and Weighted Means for Covariates and Standardized Mean Differences (SMD) According to SDQ Group at 15 Years‐Old: The Pelotas Birth Cohort Figure S1. Relative influenc...

Objective: To investigate how a set of positive social and personality characteristics called 'positive attributes' affects the emergence and persistence of Psychotic Experiences (PE) in adolescence. Method: We used data from a community-based Brazilian High-Risk Cohort (HRC). 2511 6-12 year-old children were evaluated at baseline, and 80.05% co...

Instruments designed to evaluate the necessity of compulsory psychiatric treatment (CPT) are scarce to non-existent. We developed a 25-item Checklist (scoring 0 to 50) with four clusters (Legal, Danger, Historic and Cognitive), based on variables identified as relevant to compulsory treatment. The Compulsory Treatment Checklist (CTC) was filled wit...

Objective:: To distinguish normative fears from problematic fears and phobias. Methods:: We investigated 2,512 children and adolescents from a large community school-based study, the High Risk Study for Psychiatric Disorders. Parent reports of 18 fears and psychiatric diagnosis were investigated. We used two analytical approaches: confirmatory f...

High rates of comorbidities and poor validity of disorder diagnostic criteria for mental disorders hamper advances in mental health research. Recent work has suggested the utility of continuous cross-cutting dimensions, including general psychopathology and specific factors of externalizing and internalizing (e.g., distress and fear) syndromes. The...

Objective To describe the case of a patient with schizophrenia on clozapine treatment who had an episode of heat stroke. Case description During a heat wave in January and February 2014, a patient with schizophrenia who was on treatment with clozapine was initially referred for differential diagnose between systemic infection and neuroleptic malig...

Objective: This study examines the extent to which children’s positive attributes are distinct from psychopathology. We also investigate whether positive attributes change or “buffer” the impact of low intelligence and high psychopathology on negative educational outcomes. Method: In a community sample of 2,240 children (6–14 years of age), we inve...

Objective This study examines the extent to which children’s positive attributes are distinct from psychopathology. We also investigate whether positive attributes change or “buffer” the impact of low intelligence and high psychopathology on negative educational outcomes. Method In a community sample of 2,240 children (6–14 years of age), we inves...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a major cause of acquired epilepsy and significant resources are required to develop a better understanding of the pathologic mechanism as targets for potential therapies. Thus, we decided to investigate whether physical exercise after fluid percussion injury (FPI) protects from oxidative and neurochemical alteration...

To determine the epidemiological profile of women admitted for urinary tract infection as well as to verify the most prevalent agents and response to antibiotic therapy. A retrospective study of 106 pregnant women admitted to a university hospital for urinary tract infection treatment during the period between January 2007 to December 2010. The eva...