William Byne

Columbia University | CU · Department of Psychiatry

Schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) resembles schizophrenia, but with attenuated brain abnormalities and the absence of psychosis. The thalamus is integral for processing and transmitting information across cortical regions and widely implicated in the neurobiology of schizophrenia. Comparing thalamic connectivity in SPD and schizophrenia could...

Behavioral and neurobiological effects of GnRH agonist treatment in mice—potential implications for puberty suppression in transgender individuals Christoph Anacker1,2,3,4, Ezra Sydnor5,9, Briana K. Chen 6 , Christina C. LaGamma1,10, Josephine C. McGowan6 , Alessia Mastrodonato1,2, Holly C. Hunsberger1,2, Ryan Shores1 , Rushell S. Dixon6 , Bruce...

Abstract Suicide is currently among the leading causes of death among individuals with schizophrenia. Reducing mortality from suicide remains a major clinical challenge in the care of veterans with schizophrenia. There is a need to increase our understanding of what elevates suicide risk in veterans with schizophrenia as a first step towards the fu...

In the United States, ~1.4 million individuals identify as transgender. Many transgender adolescents experience gender dysphoria related to incongruence between their gender identity and sex assigned at birth. This dysphoria may worsen as puberty progresses. Puberty suppression by gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonists (GnRHa), such as leuprolide,...

Gender Dysphoria in Adults: An Overview and Primer for Psychiatrists William Byne 1 2, Dan H Karasic 3, Eli Coleman 4, A Evan Eyler 5, Jeremy D Kidd 6, Heino F L Meyer-Bahlburg 7, Richard R Pleak 8, Jack Pula 9 PMID: 29756044 PMCID: PMC5944396 DOI: 10.1089/trgh.2017.0053 Free PMC article Abstract Regardless of their area of specialization, adult...

Studies examining physicians' knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions of their clinical competence have revealed that many are, or perceive themselves to be, poorly prepared to address the needs of sexual and gender minority (SGM) patients as well as military veterans. In this article, the authors examine these findings as they pertain to mental heal...

Brain function depends on interaction of diverse cell types whose gene expression and identity are defined, in part, by epigenetic mechanisms. Neuronal DNA contains two major epigenetic modifications, methylcytosine (mC) and hydroxymethylcytosine (hmC), yet their cell type–specific landscapes and relationship with gene expression are poorly underst...

Brain function depends on interaction of diverse cell types whose gene expression and identity are defined, in part, by epigenetic mechanisms. Neuronal DNA contains two major epigenetic modifications, methylcytosine (mC) and hydroxymethylcytosine (hmC), yet their cell type–specific landscapes and relationship with gene expression are poorly underst...

Gender Dysphoria and patient-initiated gender transition occur with increased frequency in individuals with somatic intersex conditions, a subset of disorders/differences of sex development (DSD). Providers need to be aware of assessment and treatment-relevant characteristics of these individuals that differ from gender-dysphoric individuals withou...

Regardless of their area of specialization, adult psychiatrists are likely to encounter gender-variant patients; however , medical school curricula and psychiatric residency training programs devote little attention to their care. This article aims to assist adult psychiatrists who are not gender specialists in the delivery of respectful, clinicall...

Available until Feb 12, 2018 at: http://bit.ly/2D3wTY3

This is an online supplement to : 2. Byne, W. Karasic, D.H., Coleman, E., Eyler, A.E, Kidd, J.D., Meyer-Bahlburg, H.F.L., Pleak, R.R., Pula, J. (2018) Gender dysphoria in adults: an overview and primer for psychiatrists Transgender Health 3: 57–A3. It addresses gender dysphoria in individuals somatic intersex conditions/differences of sex develop...

We employed Illumina 450 K Infinium microarrays to profile DNA methylation (DNAm) in neuronal nuclei separated by fluorescence-activated sorting from the postmortem orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) of heroin users who died from heroin overdose (N = 37), suicide completers (N = 22) with no evidence of heroin use and from control subjects who did not abuse...

Homosexual activity has been universal throughout history, but homosexuality as an orientation was recognized and its name was coined not earlier than 1869 by Kertbeny. The initial theoreticians of homosexuality were driven by the desire to emancipate homosexuals from oppression and believed that elucidation of the biological underpinnings would su...

Sexual disorders in DSM-5 include sexual dysfunctions (Erectile Dysfunction, Male Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder, Premature Ejaculation, Delayed Ejaculation, Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder, Female Orgasmic Disorder, Genito-Pelvic Pain/Penetration Disorder), gender dysphoria, and several specific paraphilic disorders. Sexual disorders ar...

Purpose: The Veteran's Health Administration (VHA) has created a training program for interdisciplinary teams of providers on the unique treatment needs of transgender veterans. An overview of this program's structure and content is described along with an evaluation of each session and the program overall. Methods: A specialty care team delivered...

Diagnostics spanning a wide range of new biotechnologies, including proteomics, metabolomics, and nanotechnology, are emerging as companion tests to innovative medicines. In this Opinion, we present the rationale for promulgating an "Essential Diagnostics List." Additionally, we explain the ways in which adopting a vision for "Health in All Policie...

Prior diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies examining schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) and schizophrenia, separately have shown that compared with healthy controls (HCs), patients show frontotemporal white matter (WM) abnormalities. This is the first DTI study to directly compare WM tract coherence with tractography and fractional anisotropy...

Transgender individuals face challenges dealing with health care providers. For reasons that are poorly understood, the prevalence of gender dysphoria (GD) in veterans is higher than in the general population. LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) health issues, particularly those of the trans-gender community, are inadequately covered in rece...

We applied Illumina Human Methylation450K array to perform a genomic-scale single-site resolution DNA methylation analysis in neuronal and nonneuronal (primarily glial) nuclei separated from the orbitofrontal cortex of postmortem human brain. The findings were validated using enhanced reduced representation bisulfite sequencing. We identified thous...

T his is a historical moment for launching a journal de-voted to LGBT health, and it is with great enthusiasm that we do so. Recent progressive developments have created an extraordinary window of opportunity to profoundly lower the barriers to healthcare for LGBT-identified persons, to research the most important health concerns and needs of speci...

William Byne: Access to care is a major contributor to LGBT health disparities, and adequate health insurance is a vital component of access. We would like for you to ad-dress several issues for our readers pertaining to insurance for sexual orientation and gender identity minority individ-uals. These include the impact of the Affordable Care Act—...

Objective: To (a) compare the size of the dorsal and ventral striatum (caudate and putamen) in a large sample of antipsychotic-naïve individuals with schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) and healthy control participants; (b) examine symptom correlates of striatal size in SPD. Methods: The left and right caudate and putamen were hand-traced on...

Mounting evidence suggests that white matter abnormalities and altered subcortical-cortical connectivity may be central to the pathology of schizophrenia (SZ). The anterior limb of the internal capsule (ALIC) is an important thalamo-frontal white-matter tract shown to have volume reductions in SZ and to a lesser degree in schizotypal personality di...

Both the diagnosis and treatment of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) are controversial. Although linked, they are separate issues and the DSM does not evaluate treatments. The Board of Trustees (BOT) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), therefore, formed a Task Force charged to perform a critical review of the literature on the treatment of...

Both the diagnosis and treatment of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) are controversial. Although linked, they are separate issues and the DSM does not evaluate treatments. The Board of Trustees (BOT) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), therefore, formed a Task Force charged to perform a critical review of the literature on the treatment of...

The optimal approach to treating minors with gender dysphoria/gender variance (GD/GV) is much more controversial than treating these phenomena in adults. This is because children have limited capacity to participate in decision making regarding their own treatment, and even adolescents have no legal ability to provide informed consent. Minors must,...

The cingulate cortex frequently shows gray matter loss with age as well as gender differences in structure and function, but little is known about whether individual cingulate Brodmann areas show gender-specific patterns of age-related volume decline. This study examined age-related changes, gender differences, and the interaction of age and gender...

Background / Purpose: Impaired myelination of the white matter tracts that interconnect nodes of gray matter may contribute to the dysconnection syndrome that characterizes schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BP). In both disorders, oligodendrocyte (Ol) and myelin mRNA expression deficits have been well described in gray matter regions but l...

Consistent with the clinical picture of milder symptomatology in schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) than schizophrenia, morphological studies indicate SPD abnormalities in temporal lobe regions but to a much lesser extent in prefrontal regions implicated in schizophrenia. Lower fractional anisotropy (FA), a measure of white-matter integrity wit...

Ventricular enlargement is one of the most consistent abnormal structural brain findings in schizophrenia and has been used to infer brain shrinkage. However, whether ventricular enlargement is related to local overlying cortex and/or adjacent subcortical structures or whether it is related to brain volume change globally has not been assessed. We...

Most studies of the neurobiology of schizophrenia have focused on neurotransmitter systems, their receptors, and downstream effectors. Recent evidence suggests that it is no longer tenable to consider neurons and their functions independently of the glia that interact with them. Although astrocytes have been viewed as harbingers of neuronal injury...

Gender-specific medicine is medicine guided by the science of how normal function and disease are influenced by factors that are associated with gender. As evidenced by a survey of over 30 million academic articles; however, gender is often used as a synonym for sex. Thus, gender-specific medicine is often reduced to medical practice guided by the...

Psychiatric brain research has historically focused on gray matter due, in part, to difficulties inherent in white matter studies. Recent innovations have greatly facilitated white matter research, and abnormalities of myelin, and the oligodendrocytes that elaborate it, have been described in psychotic and mood disorders, including bipolar disorder...

Deficits in the expression of oligodendrocyte (Ol) and myelin genes have been described in numerous brain regions in schizophrenia (SZ) in association with abnormalities of cell cycle markers. We have previously reported a SZ-associated decrease in the expression of genes expressed after, but not prior to, the terminal differentiation of Ols in the...

Homosexual activity has been universal throughout history but its name was coined not earlier than 1869 by Kertbeny. The initial theoreticians of homosexuality were driven by the desire to emancipate homosexuals from oppression and believed that elucidation of the biological underpinnings would support the liberation of homosexuals. Hirschfeld and...

Serotonin 2C receptor (5-HT2CR) exerts a major inhibitory influence on dopamine (DA) neurotransmission within the mesocorticolimbic DA pathway that is implicated in drug reward and goal-directed behaviors. 5-HT2CR pre-mRNA undergoes adenosine-to-inosine editing generating numerous receptor isoforms in brain. Because editing influences 5-HT2CR effic...

Deficits in the expression of oligodendrocyte and myelin genes have been described in numerous cortical regions in schizophrenia and affective disorders; however, relatively little attention has been paid to subcortical structures. Here we employed quantitative real time PCR to examine the mRNA expression of 17 genes that are expressed by oligodend...

This study examined the main and interactive effects of age and sex on relative glucose metabolic rate (rGMR) within gray matter of 39 cortical Brodmann areas (BAs) and the cingulate gyrus using (18)FDG-PET during a verbal memory task in 70 healthy normal adults, aged 20-87 years. Women showed significantly greater age-related rGMR decline in left...

We previously reported a schizophrenia associated reduction of neuronal and oligodendrocyte number in the anterior principal thalamic nucleus (APN) in a cohort of severely impaired elderly subjects with schizophrenia (SZ) relative to age matched nonpsychiatric controls (NCs). The present study was undertaken to determine 1) if those findings could...

"Clinicians should be quick to evaluate unexpected cognitive or neurological symptoms that may be interpreted mistakenly as psychiatric in origin or as side effects ofneuroleptics and anticholinergic medications."

The thalamus provides a nodal link for multiple functional circuits that are impaired in schizophrenia (SZ). Despite inconsistencies in the literature, a meta analysis suggests that the volume of the thalamus relative to that of the brain is decreased in SZ. Morphometric neuroimaging studies employing deformation, voxel-based and region of interest...

Abnormalities in glutamate neurotransmission are thought to be among the major contributing factors to the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Although schizophrenia has been regarded mostly as a disorder of higher cortical function, the cortex and thalamus work as a functional unit. Existing data regarding alterations of glutamate receptor subunit e...

Immunohistochemical staining of tissues is a powerful tool used to delineate the presence or absence of an antigen. During the last 30 years, antigen visualization in human brain tissue has been significantly limited by the masking effect of fixatives. In the present study, we have used a new method for antigen retrieval in formalin-fixed human bra...

Considerable evidence based on the study of postmortem brain tissue suggests deficits in both neuronal and myelin systems in schizophrenia (SZ). To date, the majority of the biochemical and molecular biological studies have focused on the cerebral cortex. Most information traveling to or from the cortex is relayed or synaptically gated through the...

Several studies have described a reduction of pulvinar volume and/or neuronal number in schizophrenia (SZ). In order to better localize these changes, we assessed volume and neuronal number of the pulvinar and several of its subdivisions in postmortem material from subjects with chronic SZ and subjects with no psychiatric history. Total pulvinar vo...

We acquired diffusion tensor images on 33 normal adults aged 22-64 and 15 adolescents aged 14-21. We assessed relative anisotropy in stereotaxically located regions of interest in the internal capsule, corpus callosum, anterior thalamic radiations, frontal anterior fasciculus, fronto-occipital fasciculus, temporal lobe white matter, cingulum bundle...

The purpose of this chapter is to provide clinicians with an overview of current knowledge pertaining to the biology of sexual minority status. Under the umbrella of sexual minority are included homosexuals, bisexuals, transgenders and intersexes. The most developed biologic theory pertaining to sexual minority status is the prenatal hormonal hypot...

When a baby is born, the first medical pronouncement is usually, "It's a boy," or "It's a girl." In most cases, this pronouncement is based simply upon the appearance of the child's external genitalia. Due to variations in the process of sexual differentiation, sometimes the gender that should be assigned is not apparent from inspection of the exte...

Methods based on the analysis of metabolic and volumetric interregional correlations have been used in neuroimaging research, yet metabolic and volumetric interregional correlations for identical regions of interest have never been compared in the same group of subjects. Magnetic resonance and [18F]-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography b...

This fMRI study investigates the activation of the thalamic nuclei in a spatial focusing-of-attention task previously shown to activate the pulvinar with FDG-PET and assesses the connectivity of the thalamic nuclei with cortical areas. Normal right-handed subjects (eight men, eight women, average age=32 years) viewed four types of stimuli positione...

The anterior principal thalamic nucleus provides a nodal link for intralimbic circuits involved in the execution of multiple complex functions that are impaired in schizophrenia (SZ). Using stereologic sampling procedures, we assessed the volume and the number of neurons and oligodendrocytes in this nucleus in well-characterized postmortem material...

Thanks to the complementary expertise of its authors, Human Sexuality, second edition, by Simon LeVay and Sharon Valente, is an exceptional book that addresses nearly every aspect of sexuality from multiple theoretical, historical, and cultural perspectives. Valente holds a doctorate in counseling psychology and has taught human sexuality at the un...

Correlations between the MRI-assessed volumes of the pulvinar, centromedian, and mediodorsal nuclei of the thalamus and 39 cortical Brodmann's areas were evaluated and compared in 41 unmedicated schizophrenia patients and 59 healthy comparison subjects. For the right pulvinar, positive intercorrelations with ipsilateral orbitofrontal and occipital...

The authors' goal was to examine interregional correlations of thalamocortical metabolic activity during a verbal learning task in schizophrenia. They used [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography in 41 unmedicated patients with schizophrenia and 59 normal comparison subjects. A metabolic disconnection was observed in patients with schi...

Because neuroleptic treatment may cause long-lasting changes in brain structure and function, a group of patients with schizophrenia who had never been medicated was recruited to examine regional glucose metabolic rates in the frontal-striato-thalamic circuit. Twelve never medicated patients with schizophrenia (seven men, five women; mean age=29 ye...

The size of the thalamus was assessed in 106 patients with schizophrenia and 42 normal controls using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging. The thalamus was traced at five axial levels proportionately spaced from dorsal to ventral directions. Patients with schizophrenia had significantly smaller thalamic areas at more ventral levels. Thalamic...

Upon the birth of a baby, the first medical pronouncement is usually based upon the appearance of the child's external genitalia. However, due to variations in the process of sexual differentiation, sometimes the gender is not apparent from inspection of the external genitalia. Thus, decisions must be made concerning the most appropriate gender to...

Three thalamic nuclei--the mediodorsal nucleus, pulvinar, and centromedian nucleus--each have unique reciprocal circuitry with cortical and subcortical areas known to be affected in schizophrenia. To determine if the disorder is also associated with dysfunction in the mediodorsal nucleus, pulvinar, and centromedian nucleus, relative glucose metabol...

Postmortem and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data have suggested volume reductions in the mediodorsal (MDN) and pulvinar nuclei (PUL) of the thalamus. The centromedian nucleus (CMN), important in attention and arousal, has not been previously studied with MRI. A sample of 41 patients with schizophrenia (32 men and 9 women) and 60 healthy volunte...

Brain imaging, molecular genetic, and ultrastructural evidence indicate the existence of pathologic alterations in the cortical and subcortical white matter of schizophrenic patients. We performed a stereologic analysis of numbers, densities, and spatial distribution of oligodendrocytes in layer III and in the gyral white matter of Brodmann's area...

A variety of lines of converging evidence implicates the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in schizophrenia. Previous neuroanatomical studies have shown schizophrenia-associated changes in neuron density, soma size and spine number. We recently demonstrated a schizophrenia-associated decrease in microtubule-associated protein 2 (MAP2) immunostaining in lamin...

A variety of lines of converging evidence implicate the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in schizophrenia. Studies employing Nissl stains have suggested that PFC dendrites may be atrophic in schizophrenia; however, Nissl stains do not reveal dendrites. We employed MAP2 immunocytochemistry, which stains dendrites to examine cortical layers III and V in two a...

Four studies have examined the cross-sectional area of the anterior commissure (AC) for variation with sex, with conflicting results. One also reported the AC to be larger in homosexual as opposed to heterosexual men. We examined the cross-sectional area of the AC in postmortem material from 120 individuals, and found no variation in the size of th...

The authors assessed schizophrenia-associated changes in volume and neuronal number in the mediodorsal nucleus and the pulvinar regions of the thalamus. Right-hemisphere thalami obtained at autopsy from 14 schizophrenic and eight comparison subjects were examined. Computer-assisted morphometric techniques were used to determine volumes for the medi...