V.H. Dam's research while affiliated with IT University of Copenhagen and other places

... The protocol is a 12-week trial with a SSRI, escitalopram, which could be switched to a serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, duloxetine at week 4 if there were unacceptable side effects or poor treatment response (i.e., less than 25% improvement in depressive symptoms). MRI scans were acquired at baseline in healthy participants and at baseline and week 8 in MDD [33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. ...

... Unfortunately, there is no information about the progestins used by all (Egan and Gleason, 2012;Song et al., 2020) or the majority of participants in these retrospective studies, as in many other studies that evaluated the effects of COCs on the brain structure,function and cognitive function of women (e.g., Beck et al., 2008;Chen et al., 2021;De Bondt et al., 2013, 2015Hamstra et al., 2014;Holloway et al., 2011;Kuhlmann and Wolf, 2005;McFadden, 2000;Miedl et al., 2018;Mihalik et al., 2009;Nielsen et al., 2011;Petersen et al., 2015b;Pletzer et al., 2010;Rosenberg and Park, 2002;Rumberg et al., 2010;Wen et al., 2021). Some studies provided information about the type of progestins but did not take this factor into consideration in data analyses (Gogos, 2013;Gravelsins et al., 2021;Hamstra et al., 2015;Høgsted et al., 2021;Kerschbaum et al., 2017;Kimmig et al., 2022;Lisofsky et al., 2016;Merz, 2017;Mordecai et al., 2008;Plamberger et al., 2021;Pletzer, 2019;Pletzer et al., 2014a;Sharma et al., 2020), and other studies combined data from participants using different types of HCs (COCs, minipills, IUDs, implants, vaginal rings, etc.) (e.g., Bernal et al., 2020;Nobile et al., 2021;Petersen et al., 2015a). Despite the fact that the influence of specific progestins cannot be evaluated from these studies, they provided a substantial amount of evidence that brain structure and function are affected by HC use. ...

... Interestingly, preclinical and clinical evidence suggest that the 5-HT 4 R may serve as an inverse biomarker of the cerebral serotonin tonus [22][23][24], which makes it a relevant candidate when studying conditions with a presumed serotonergic involvement. The implications of 5-HT 4 R in MDD have been recognized [25] and recently, we showed that antidepressant-free patients with MDD had lower 5-HT 4 R binding compared with healthy controls, especially those responding well to escitalopram [26]. ...

... One moderately rated study recorded vigilance as an index of central-nervous system arousal, and found decreased arousal in patients following 8-weeks of SSRIs, but not SNRI (Olbrich et al., 2016). Two low quality rated studies recorded vigilance following SSRIs, mirtazapine, SNRIs, or other medications (Schmidt et al., 2017;Ip et al., 2021). At baseline, responders had high vigilance in relaxed wakeful states and low vigilance in drowsy states, trends which were reversed after 4 weeks (Schmidt et al., 2017) and 8 weeks of treatment (Ip et al., 2021). ...

... There are many theories explaining the genesis and mechanism of aggression in individuals, but the most common references to the theory of aggression are understood as instinct, frustration-libido, or as a result of social learning (Wojciszke, 2000). Throughout the study of human aggression, it has constituted a major societal burden with negative outcomes either for victims or perpetrators (Dam et al., 2021). According to research on aggression during adolescence, but also in early adulthood, aggressive behaviours progress from less to more severe forms (Loeber & Hay, 1997). ...

... The protocol is a 12-week trial with a SSRI, escitalopram, which could be switched to a serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, duloxetine at week 4 if there were unacceptable side effects or poor treatment response (i.e., less than 25% improvement in depressive symptoms). MRI scans were acquired at baseline in healthy participants and at baseline and week 8 in MDD [33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. ...

... The protocol is a 12-week trial with a SSRI, escitalopram, which could be switched to a serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, duloxetine at week 4 if there were unacceptable side effects or poor treatment response (i.e., less than 25% improvement in depressive symptoms). MRI scans were acquired at baseline in healthy participants and at baseline and week 8 in MDD [33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. ...

... Little is known of any such changes in human brains. However, Larsen et al. (2020) recently found that OC users have an approximately 10% lower global brain 5-HT4R binding potential compared to non-users, a fact that may afford a molecular bridge to the increased risk of depressive episodes reported amongst OC users. This type of research is in its infancy. ...

... Eleven primary cognitive outcomes were derived from seven neuropsychological tasks capturing both hot and cold cognitive functions with tasks from the hot cognitive domain being further subdivided into an emotion processing bias domain and a social cognitive domain. Emotion processing outcomes included affective bias in emotion recognition (hit rate) and misattribution (false alarm rate) from the Emotional Recognition Task (eyes version) [23]; affective bias in emotion detection threshold from the Emotional Intensity Morphing task [23]; and affective memory bias from the Affective Verbal Memory Task 26 (VAMT-26) [24]. Affective bias outcomes were constructed by subtracting negatively valenced scores (e.g., hit rate for sad faces) from positively valenced scores (e.g., hit rate for happy faces) with the exception of the Intensity Morphing Task where low scores reflect a better performance and here the affective bias was calculated by subtracting the happy condition from the sad condition: this was done to ensure that the interpretation of the bias scores were consistent across tasks such that a positive bias score reflects preferential processing of positive emotions over negative emotions. ...

... The protocol is a 12-week trial with a SSRI, escitalopram, which could be switched to a serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, duloxetine at week 4 if there were unacceptable side effects or poor treatment response (i.e., less than 25% improvement in depressive symptoms). MRI scans were acquired at baseline in healthy participants and at baseline and week 8 in MDD [33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. ...