Rune Haubo Bojesen Christensen

Mental Health Centre Copenhagen · Copenhagen Research Center for Mental Health – CORE

Background: Antineuronal antibodies can cause psychotic symptoms, particularly NMDAR antibodies; however, studies on the prevalence of antineuronal antibodies in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and serum of patients with psychotic disorders compared to matched healthy controls are sparse. Methods: We included 104 patients with a first-time diagnosis o...

Objective Increasing rates of Caesarean sections has led to concerns on long-term effects on the offspring’s health and it has been hypothesized that Caesarean section induced differences in the child’s microbiota could potentially increase the risk of mental disorders. Methods N ationwide Danish cohort study of 2,196,687 births between 1980 and 2...

Depression has been associated with inflammatory pathophysiological mechanisms, including alterations in amount of circulating immune cells. However, no meta-analysis within the past 20 years have reevaluated the circulating immune cells in blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from patients with depression compared to healthy controls. The aim of th...

No large studies have investigated the prevalences of cerebrospinal fluid anti-neuronal autoantibodies in isolated depression. In this case-control study comparing 106 patients with isolated depression (ICD-10: F32) to 106 healthy controls, cerebrospinal fluid and serum were tested for seven immunoglobulin G autoantibodies using commercial fixed ce...

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic has affected mental health globally, but the impact on referrals and admissions to mental health services remains understudied. Objectives To assess patterns in psychiatric admissions, referrals, and suicidal behavior before and during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark. Methods Utilizing hospital and Emergency Me...

Introduction Biomarkers in CSF could provide etiological clues and diagnostic tools for psychotic disorders. However, an overview of all CSF findings in individuals with psychotic disorders compared to healthy controls is lacking. Objectives To analyse CSF findings from individuals with psychotic disorders compared to healthy controls. Methods Pu...

Background and Hypothesis Neuroinflammation and blood-brain barrier (BBB) dysfunction have been observed in patients with psychotic disorders. However, previous studies have mainly focused on selected patients and broad screenings of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of patients with recent onset psychosis compared to healthy controls are lacking. Study D...

Background Many patients with schizophrenia experience psychiatric symptoms long before being diagnosed. We investigated patterns of pre-diagnostic psychopharmacological treatment in individuals diagnosed with first-episode schizophrenia during the last two decades. Design Using Danish nationwide healthcare registers, we identified all individuals...

Background Work participation among people with rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs) remains reduced when compared to the general population. A EULAR taskforce was established to agree on Points to Consider (PtC) to support people with RMD in healthy and sustainable work participation. Non-pharmacological interventions (NPI) could have an...

Background: Mood stabilisers are the main treatment for bipolar disorder. However, it is uncertain which drugs have the best outcomes. Aims: To investigate whether rates of suicide, self-harm and psychiatric hospital admission in individuals with bipolar disorder differ between mood stabilisers. Method: A cohort design was applied to people ag...

Importance: Depression has been associated with alterations in neurotransmitters, hormones, and inflammatory and neurodegenerative biomarkers, and biomarkers quantified in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) are more likely to reflect ongoing biochemical changes within the brain. However, a comprehensive overview of CSF biomarkers is lacking and could c...

Background Neuroinflammation has been linked to depression; however, neuroinflammatory biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) have not previously been thoroughly investigated in a large group of patients with recent onset depression compared to healthy controls. Methods Individually matched case-control study comparing patients with recent on...

Importance: Prolonged neuropsychiatric and cognitive symptoms are increasingly reported in patients after COVID-19, but studies with well-matched controls are lacking. Objective: To investigate cognitive impairment, neuropsychiatric diagnoses, and symptoms in survivors of COVID-19 compared with patients hospitalized for non-COVID-19 illness. De...

Background A proinflammatory response has been suggested to be involved in the pathophysiology of depression in a subgroup of patients. However, comprehensive largescale studies on neuroimmunological investigations of the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) are lacking and no largescale longitudinal CSF studies comparing patients with depression to healthy c...

Background Though many previous studies have indicated immunological alterations in psychotic disorders, the role and prevalence of neuroinflammation is still unknown. Studies previously investigating immune related biomarkers in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of these patients are mainly small studies on few markers, and many have not compared pati...

Objective To assess the patterns in psychiatric admissions, referrals and suicidal behavior before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods This study utilized health records from hospitals and Emergency Medical Services (EMS) covering 46 % of the Danish population (n=2,693,924). In an time-trend study, we compared the number of psychiatric in-pa...

Objective: To investigate vagotomy, the severance of the vagus nerve, and its association with mental disorders, as gut-brain communication partly mediated by the vagus nerve have been suggested as a risk factor. Methods: Nationwide population-based Danish register study of all individuals alive and living in Denmark during the study period 1977...

The extinction of species is a non‐random process, and understanding why some species are more likely to go extinct than others is critical for conservation efforts. Functional trait‐based approaches offer a promising tool to achieve this goal. In forests, deadwood‐dependent (saproxylic) beetles comprise a major part of threatened species, but anal...

To the Editor The Tetens et al nationwide matched cohort study¹ of cases with positive Borrelia intrathecal antibody index¹ reported increased use of psychiatric medications during the first year after diagnosis, but no significant association was shown with hospital-based psychiatric diagnosis or psychiatric in-patient or outpatient hospital conta...

Many medical treatments, from oncology to psychiatry, can lower white blood cell counts and thus access to these treatments can be restricted to individuals with normal levels of white blood cells, principally in order to minimise risk of serious infection. This adversely affects individuals of African or Middle Eastern ancestries who have on avera...

Objective: Antipsychotic effects of immunomodulating drugs have been suggested; however, a thorough, comprehensive meta-analysis on the effect and safety of anti-inflammatory add-on treatment on psychotic disorders is lacking. Method: Multiple databases were searched up until February 2020. Only double-blinded, randomized, placebo-controlled cli...

Objectives The aim was to describe the pre‐diagnostic and post‐diagnostic psychopharmacological treatment of bipolar disorder over the past two decades. Methods We identified all 16,288 individuals aged ≥18 years, who received their first diagnosis of bipolar disorder at a psychiatric hospital in Denmark between 1997 and 2014. For each calendar ye...

Identification of forest stands with priority for the conservation of biodiversity is of particular importance in landscapes with a long cultural and agricultural history, such as Central Europe. A group of species with a high indicator value for the naturalness of forest ecosystems are saproxylic insects. Some of these species, especially within t...

Background CNS infections have been suggested as risk factors for cognitive decline and mental disorders; however, large-scale studies have been lacking regarding types and agents of CNS infections. Methods We utilized the unique personal registration number to create a cohort of 1,709,867 individuals born 1977-2010. CNS infection was exposure and...

When considering sensory discrimination studies, multiple d-prime values are often obtained from several sensory attributes. In this paper, we introduce principal component analysis as a way of gaining information about d-prime values across sensory attributes. Specifically, we propose estimating d-prime values using a Thurstonian mixed model for b...

Studies should be planned with due attention to power and sample size considerations. Abandoning power computations, including analyses of the utility of replications, is a sure way to reduce the likelihood that an experiment yields insights. This commentary describes how screening for effects with low power leads to biased effect estimates and det...

Background: Outcomes for people with first-episode psychosis are highly heterogeneous. Few reliable validated methods are available to predict the outcome for individual patients in the first clinical contact. In this study, we aimed to build multivariable prediction models of 1-year remission and recovery outcomes using baseline clinical variable...

Background In recent years, immunological hypotheses have gained momentum proposing that the immune system plays a critical role in the development of mental disorders in a subgroup of patients. Studies have shown that autoimmune mechanisms and infections increase the risk of mental disorders and also that some persons with mental disorders have in...

Often sensory discrimination tests are performed with replications for the assessors. In this paper, we suggest a new way of analyzing data from a discrimination study. The model suggested in this paper is a Thurstonian mixed model, in which the variation from the assessors is modelled as a random effect in a generalized linear mixed model. The set...

Producing entire male pigs entails a risk of boar taint in the meat due to increased levels of the compounds skatole and androstenone in the carcass. Allowing meat from entire male pigs to be marketed and sold together with meat from castrates and female pigs increases the risk of consumers being dissatisfied due to boar tainted samples. To reduce...

Identification of forest stands with priority for the conservation of biodiversity is of particular importance in landscapes with a long cultural and agricultural history, such as Central Europe. A group of species with a high indicator value for the naturalness of forest ecosystems are saproxylic insects. Some of these species, especially within t...

Objective: To investigate whether the efficacy and safety of liraglutide 3.0 mg differed between two subgroups, BMI 27 to <35 and BMI ≥ 35 kg/m², in individuals without and with type 2 diabetes (T2D). Methods: A post-hoc analysis of two 56-week, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials (SCALE Obesity and Prediabetes; SCALE Diabetes)....

Unimolecular dual incretins derived from hybridized glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) and glucose-dependent insulinotropic peptide (GIP) sequences have demonstrated synergistic reduction of adiposity in animal models and reductions of hyperglycemia in short-duration human trials. Here, we extend the characterization of NNC0090-2746 (also known as RG7...

It is crucial to understand influential parameters for acquisition of consumer liking to ensure succesful product introduction and competativeness in the marketplace. This article aims to study and understand liking in relation to sensory characteristics, consumer concept associations, arousal potential and appropriateness for use using apple juice...

Consumer liking was assessed for boneless chops (M. longissimus dorsi) and schnitzels (m. semitendinosus) from castrates and entire male pigs with an androstenone content of up to 9.4 ppm and a skatole content of up to 0.92 ppm in the back fat. Skatole affected both odour and flavour as assessed by trained sensory panellists (P < 0.05-P < 0.001), w...

Consumer liking was assessed for streaky bacon and pork belly roll from entire male pigs with an androstenone (AND) content of up to 9.4ppm and a skatole (SKA) content of up to 0.92ppm in the back fat and castrates. No clear effect of either AND or SKA was seen in consumer liking, although an insignificant tendency was seen for SKA. A sensory profi...

The recurring need to assess product reformulations has kept difference testing at the forefront of sensory science. Within the realm of difference testing, the Tetrad test has risen in popularity recently as its superiority over the Triangle test has been demonstrated both in theory and in practice. But it remains to compare the Tetrad test in det...

One of the frequent questions by users of the mixed model function lmer of the lme4 package has been: How can I get p values for the F and t tests for objects returned by lmer? The lmerTest package extends the 'lmerMod' class of the lme4 package, by overloading the anova and summary functions by providing p values for tests for fixed effects. We ha...

Reducing sodium content in foods and beverages has become very important, and great efforts are being made to achieve this while maintaining overall taste/acceptance of food. This requires more robust sensory discrimination test methods in terms of operational power because discrimination tests using food/beverages with high sodium contents might b...

Interest in the Tetrad test has increased recently as it has become apparent that this methodology can be a more powerful alternative to the Triangle test within the standard difference testing paradigm. But when products are tested following an ingredient or process change, a pressing question is whether a sensory difference is large enough to be...

There is considerable intraspecific variation in metabolic rates and locomotor performance in aquatic ectothermic vertebrates, however, the mechanistic basis remains poorly understood. Using pregnant Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata Peters), a live-bearing teleost, we examined effects of reproductive traits, pectoral fin use, and burst-assi...

Is being, say, a macaroon or a smoothie a matter of what these products look and taste like and how they feel in the mouth? Or is it a matter of which ingredients have been used and how they have been processed? Will ordinary consumers always rely on their own judgment in such matters, or delegate the final judgment to experts of some sort? The pre...

Contamination from tank installations in the Arctic is an important issue, since tanks are a necessary feature of all communities, and may be a source of local pollution. Soil samples from below and around three tank installations and one reference site in the Northwest Greenlandic village of Tasiusaq were analysed for the total content of hydrocar...

It is shown by example how a cumulative link mixed model is fitted with the clmm2 function in package ordinal. Model interpretation and inference is briefly discussed. A tutorial for the more recent clmm function is work in progress. We will consider the data on the bitterness of wine from Randall (1989) presented in Table 1 and available as the ob...

The 2-AC protocol is a 2-AFC protocol with a “no-difference” option and is technically identical to the paired preference test with a “no-preference” option. The Thurstonian model for the 2-AC protocol is parameterized by δ and a decision parameter τ, the estimates of which can be obtained by fairly simple well-known methods. In this paper we descr...

The A-not A protocol with sureness produce multinomial observations that are traditionally analyzed with statistical methods for contingency tables or by calculation of an R-index. In this paper it is shown that the Thurstonian model for the A-not A protocol can be written as a cumulative link model including the binormal unequal variances model. T...

Sensory discrimination tests such as the triangle, duo-trio, 2-AFC and 3-AFC tests produce binary data and the Thurstonian decision rule links the underlying sensory difference δ to the observed number of correct responses. In this paper it is shown how each of these four situations can be viewed as a so-called generalized linear model. The underly...

Inference for the Thurstonian δ in the same–different protocol via the well known Wald statistic is shown to be inappropriate in a wide range of situations. We introduce the likelihood root statistic as an alternative to the Wald statistic to produce CIs and p-values for assessing difference as well as similarity. We show that the likelihood root s...

This study tested the effect of reproduction on the volitional travel speed of mature female brown trout Salmo trutta L. The downstream travel speed in the pre-spawning state was 0.25 m s(-1) (95% CI : 0.19, 0.34) while it increased significantly to 0.65 m s(-1) (95% CI: 0.49, 0.87) in the post-spawning state. The results suggest state-dependent tr...

Downstream migration of immature salmonids (smolts) may be associated with severe mortalities in anthropogenically altered channels. In Pacific salmon, several investigations have suggested the use of the dominating surface orientation of smolts to improve fish by-pass structures in large and deep hydroelectric reservoirs. The present study tested...

Response: We appreciate Dr Sheikh’s thoughtful comments on our work.1 The key issue is whether or not total serum cholesterol (TSC) taken within 24 hours after a stroke reflects usual cholesterol levels. There are pros and cons. This is discussed in the article. It is important to note, however, that a correlation between stroke severity and an al...

Evidence of a causal relation between serum cholesterol and stroke is inconsistent. We investigated the relation between total serum cholesterol and both stroke severity and poststroke mortality to test the hypothesis that hypercholesterolemia is primarily associated with minor stroke. In the study, 652 unselected patients with ischemic stroke arri...

The statistical methodology of sensory discrimination analysis is described. This forms the basis of the implementation in the sensR package for R. Implementation choices will be motivated when appropriate and examples of analysis of sensory discrim-ination experiments will be given throughout using the sensR package. This document currently covers...