DATE: April 05, 2025 at 10:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Scientists find age-related links between beverage choices and mental health risks

URL: https://www.psypost.org/scientists-find-age-related-links-between-beverage-choices-and-mental-health-risks/

A large study has found that different types of beverages are linked to the likelihood of developing depression and anxiety disorders. The study, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, found that higher intake of sugary and artificially sweetened drinks was related to a greater risk of depression among younger adults, while fruit juices and coffee were associated with a lower risk of both depression and anxiety across age groups.

The researchers, based at Wenzhou Medical University in China, conducted the study to explore how beverage choices might influence the risk of depression and anxiety disorders. While previous studies have suggested possible links between diet and mental health, most focused on broad dietary patterns or small groups. There has been less clarity on how specific beverages relate to mental health outcomes, especially across different age groups.

With mental health conditions on the rise globally, the research team wanted to examine whether commonly consumed drinks—like sugary soft drinks, diet beverages, fruit juice, coffee, milk, and tea—are linked to long-term mental health outcomes, and whether replacing one type of beverage with another might make a difference.

To answer these questions, the researchers used data from the UK Biobank, a large-scale health study that follows over 500,000 people in the United Kingdom. For this study, they focused on 188,355 adults between the ages of 37 and 73. Participants had completed one or more online diet surveys between 2009 and 2012.

These surveys recorded how many servings of specific beverages participants had consumed the previous day. One serving was defined as a glass, can, carton, or 250 milliliters. The study tracked six types of drinks: sugar-sweetened beverages (like soft drinks), artificially sweetened beverages (such as diet sodas), pure fruit and vegetable juices, milk, coffee, and tea.

To determine mental health outcomes, the researchers analyzed 11 years worth of hospital and primary care records. They identified new diagnoses of depression and anxiety using standardized medical codes. People who already had depression or anxiety at the start of the study were excluded. The analysis adjusted for a wide range of lifestyle, dietary, and health factors that might influence mental health, including age, sex, socioeconomic status, physical activity, body weight, sleep habits, smoking, alcohol use, and overall diet quality.

Over the follow-up period, more than 5,800 participants developed depression and over 6,400 developed anxiety disorders. Among people under age 60, those who drank more than one serving of sugar-sweetened beverages per day had a 14 percent higher risk of developing depression compared to those who avoided them. Similarly, those who drank more than one serving of artificially sweetened drinks per day had a 23 percent higher risk. On the other hand, people under 60 who consumed more than one serving of pure fruit or vegetable juice each day had a 19 percent lower risk of depression, while those who drank coffee regularly had a 12 percent lower risk. Coffee was also linked to a reduced risk of anxiety in this age group.

In people aged 60 and older, the patterns were somewhat different. There was no clear link between sugary or artificially sweetened drinks and mental health. However, drinking more pure fruit or vegetable juice and coffee was again associated with a lower risk of both depression and anxiety. Tea and milk did not show consistent relationships with either condition, although replacing milk with coffee or juice in this older group was associated with reduced risk.

To better understand how beverage swaps might influence mental health, the researchers performed a substitution analysis. This method estimates what might happen if one type of drink is replaced by another. For adults under 60, replacing one daily serving of a sugar-sweetened drink with a serving of pure fruit juice or coffee was linked to a significantly lower risk of both depression and anxiety. For example, switching from soda to juice was associated with a 16 percent lower risk of depression. For older adults, replacing milk with fruit juice or coffee was associated with a lower risk of both conditions.

The study’s findings remained consistent across various types of statistical analyses. These included removing participants who were current smokers or had early diagnoses, testing the results using different models, and examining the effects over shorter and longer time frames. These steps were taken to reduce the chance that the results could be explained by other factors or by changes in behavior that occurred after early symptoms of mental illness.

Despite its large sample size, the study has some limitations to consider. First, it relied on medical records to identify depression and anxiety diagnoses, which might miss milder cases that never reached clinical attention. The researchers also acknowledged that their findings are observational. This means they can show associations, but not prove that the beverages themselves caused the mental health outcomes. It is possible that people who were already at higher risk for depression or anxiety tended to drink more sweetened beverages, rather than the other way around.

The study, “Ages-specific beverage consumption and its association with depression and anxiety disorders: A prospective cohort study in 188,355 participants,” was authored by Jiali Xie, Zhixian Huang, Yinan Mo, Yixuan Pan, Yubin Ruan, Wen Cao, Yinuo Chen, Yaojia Li, Kezheng Li, Danqing Yu, and Binbin Deng.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/scientists-find-age-related-links-between-beverage-choices-and-mental-health-risks/

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April 5, 2025 at 10:02AM

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0:00 10 Good News That Will Make You Happy
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4:48 Saving Birds: The Window Film Revolution
6:10 China's Flash Ironmaking
7:38 Abu Dhabi's $6B Solar Revolution
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DATE: April 05, 2025 at 08:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Disrupted sleep and circadian rhythms linked to opioid addiction and relapse risk

URL: https://www.psypost.org/disrupted-sleep-and-circadian-rhythms-linked-to-opioid-addiction-and-relapse-risk/

A good night’s sleep often sets the stage for a positive day. But for the nearly quarter of American adults struggling with mental illness, a good night’s rest is often elusive.

For patients with psychiatric conditions from addiction to mood disorders such as depression, disrupted sleep can often exacerbate symptoms and make it harder to stay on treatment.

Despite the important role circadian rhythms and sleep play in addiction, neuroscientists like me are only now beginning to understand the molecular mechanisms behind these effects.

Sleep and addictive drugs have an entangled relationship. Most addictive drugs can alter sleep-wake cycles, and sleep disorders in people using drugs are linked to addiction severity and relapse. While this poses a classic “chicken-or-egg” dilemma, it also presents an opportunity to understand how the sleep-addiction connection could unlock new treatments.

Circadian rhythms and health

At the center of the connection between sleep and mental health lies circadian rhythms: your body’s internal clock.

These rhythms align your bodily functions with your environment, synchronizing your body to day and night down to the molecular level. It does this through a series of proteins that interact in a feedback loop, turning genes on and off in regular patterns to support specific functions. Although your sleep-wake cycles are the most visible expression of circadian rhythms, these rhythms orchestrate most of your physiology.

If you have ever traveled across time zones, you have likely experienced a common form of circadian disruption called jet lag. This misalignment impairs your sleep and concentration, and can leave you feeling irritable.

While jet lag is a temporary nuisance, chronic circadian disruption such as frequent night shifts can lead to long-term health consequences, including an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Circadian rhythms, sleep and opioid use

A major focus of my lab is on opioid addiction, a disease that has claimed nearly 80,000 lives a year since 2021 in the U.S. and has limited treatment options.

People addicted to opioids often experience disruptions to circadian rhythms, such as in their sleep and their levels of corticotropin, a key hormone that regulates stress. These disruptions are associated with many negative health consequences. In the short term, these disruptions can impair cognitive functions such as attention and increase negative emotions. Over time this can worsen mental and physical health. Studies of opioid addiction in mice reveal similar disruptions in sleep and various hormonal rhythms.

Importantly, poor sleep is common throughout a person’s experience with opioid use disorder, from actively using to withdrawal from opioids, and even while on treatment. This complication can have profound consequences. Studies have linked sleep disruption to a 2.5-fold increased risk of relapse among those undergoing treatment.

Unlocking the clock for opioid addiction

Using brain tissue from deceased donors and experiments in mice, my team is identifying molecular changes associated with psychiatric disorders in people. We model these changes in mice to explore how they affect disease severity and behavior.

Through genetic sequencing and computer modeling, my lab is able to profile all the RNA molecules in a brain region and understand how their rhythmicity – the peaks and troughs of their activity across the day – changes due to opioids. This provides a complete snapshot of which genes change at what time, allowing my team to peer into the molecular mechanics that may drive opioid addiction.

For example, we looked at two brain regions strongly associated with addiction: the nucleus accumbens and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We found that patients with opioid addiction had completely different gene expression patterns in these brain regions compared with those without addiction. Some genes had adopted a completely different rhythm of activity, while others had lost their rhythmicity altogether.

Genes that lost rhythmicity included those involved in various components of the molecular clock and those linked to sleep duration. This further highlights how circadian disruption is a symptom of opioid use while beginning to uncover its underlying mechanisms.

In work that is pending peer review, my team focused on one major gene that lost rhythmicity in patients with opioid addiction: NPAS2. This component of the molecular clock is highly active in the nucleus accumbens and important for sleep and circadian regulation. We found that blocking functional NPAS2 formation led to increased fentanyl-seeking behavior in mice. Interestingly, we observed that female mice were willing to press a lever more times than male mice to obtain fentanyl, reflecting documented sex differences in opioid addiction among people. In another study, we also found that lack of NPAS2 exacerbated sleep disruption in mice that were administered fentanyl.

Together, our findings reinforce the role circadian rhythms play in addiction. Future work may clarify whether targeting NPAS2 could treat opioid addiction symptoms. Quality sleep isn’t just about waking up refreshed – it could also lead to reduced opioid use and fewer overdoses.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/disrupted-sleep-and-circadian-rhythms-linked-to-opioid-addiction-and-relapse-risk/

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DATE: April 05, 2025 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Teens with depression show unique eye movement patterns linked to memory and attention problems

URL: https://www.psypost.org/teens-with-depression-show-unique-eye-movement-patterns-linked-to-memory-and-attention-problems/

A new study published in Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging has found that adolescents with major depressive disorder display unusual eye movement patterns, which are linked to cognitive problems such as memory and attention deficits. The researchers used eye-tracking technology to compare the visual behavior of adolescents with and without depression during different visual tasks. They found that certain eye movement characteristics were significantly different in adolescents with depression and were associated with poorer performance on cognitive tests.

Major depressive disorder often begins during adolescence, a period of intense emotional, social, and cognitive development. Depression in teenagers is not only becoming more common but also tends to recur and interfere with many areas of life, including school, family relationships, and social functioning. In many cases, even when mood symptoms improve with treatment, cognitive difficulties—like trouble with memory, attention, and understanding social cues—can persist. These problems can make it hard for adolescents to return to normal daily activities and may contribute to poor treatment outcomes and higher relapse rates.

In recent years, researchers have become interested in using eye-tracking technology as a non-invasive way to study how the brain processes information. Eye movements, including how often people look at certain parts of an image or how well they can follow a moving object, are known to reflect underlying cognitive processes. For example, smooth and coordinated eye movements require good attention control, while frequent or erratic eye movements might indicate difficulty with focus or information processing. Since brain areas involved in eye control also play a role in cognitive functioning, the researchers wanted to explore whether eye movement patterns could serve as indicators of cognitive problems in depressed adolescents.

The study was carried out by researchers at Central South University’s Second Xiangya Hospital in China. They recruited a total of 113 participants aged 12 to 17 years. Of these, 71 had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder, while the remaining 42 were healthy adolescents with no psychiatric conditions. All participants had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and those with other medical or neurological issues were excluded. The researchers collected demographic information, assessed depression severity using standardized questionnaires, and evaluated cognitive performance using a battery of neuropsychological tests.

Cognitive testing included measures of memory, attention, language, and social reasoning. For example, the Children’s Depression Inventory and the Hamilton Depression Scale were used to evaluate mood symptoms, while the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) measured various areas of cognitive functioning. Social cognition was assessed using a test designed to measure the ability to detect social blunders, known as the faux pas test.

Eye movement data were collected using a high-precision eye tracker that monitored the dominant eye while participants completed two tasks. The first was a free-viewing task, in which participants were shown a series of neutral images—such as landscapes and geometric shapes—for eight seconds each. The second was a smooth pursuit task, which involved tracking a dot moving in a complex sinusoidal pattern across the screen. The researchers measured various aspects of eye movement, including how many times participants looked at different parts of the image (fixation count), how long their eyes remained still (fixation duration), and how fast and far their eyes moved (saccade measures).

When comparing the groups, the researchers found several differences in both cognitive functioning and eye movement patterns. Adolescents with depression scored significantly lower on overall cognitive performance, particularly in areas related to immediate memory, attention, and delayed memory. They also performed worse on the faux pas test, suggesting difficulties in understanding social situations.

In the free-viewing task, the depressed group showed a smaller average saccade amplitude, meaning their eye movements covered shorter distances as they scanned the images. This could indicate a more restricted or cautious visual exploration pattern. In the smooth pursuit task, which tests the ability to follow moving targets, the depressed group showed more frequent fixations and saccades. These patterns suggest that they may have had difficulty smoothly tracking the moving object and had to compensate with more frequent adjustments.

The most interesting part of the study came from the correlations between eye movement variables and cognitive test scores. In the group with depression, some specific eye movement characteristics were linked to better or worse cognitive performance. For example, more frequent fixations were associated with better immediate memory, while longer fixation durations were linked to poorer memory. Faster eye movements and longer saccade durations were connected with better attention and memory. One measure—the number of saccades in a complex background tracking task—was also positively associated with better performance on the faux pas test, suggesting that how adolescents scan visual scenes may reflect how well they can understand social situations.

These associations were not observed in the healthy group, indicating that the eye movement patterns seen in the depressed group may reflect compensatory strategies or underlying difficulties specific to the condition. For instance, adolescents with depression may rely on faster or more frequent eye movements to make up for cognitive limitations, particularly in tasks that require sustained attention or memory encoding.

The study adds to growing evidence that eye-tracking can serve as a useful tool for understanding how depression affects the brain and behavior. It also highlights the potential for using eye movement data as part of clinical assessments, especially for detecting subtle cognitive deficits that might not be apparent through traditional interviews or questionnaires.

However, the study has several limitations. All of the participants with depression were already receiving treatment, so it is unclear how medications may have influenced their cognitive functioning or eye movements. The groups also differed in age and gender distribution, which could affect the results. Additionally, the tasks used were relatively simple and involved neutral images, which might not fully capture how adolescents with depression respond to more emotionally charged or socially complex situations. The cross-sectional design also limits the ability to determine whether eye movement abnormalities cause cognitive problems, result from them, or develop alongside them.

The researchers suggest that future studies should explore these relationships using more varied tasks, longitudinal designs, and possibly treatment-naive patients. They also emphasize the need to refine eye movement tests to better capture the unique features of adolescent cognitive development.

The study, “The association between eye movement characteristics and cognitive function in adolescents with major depressive disorder,” was authored by Yuanyuan Lu, Lintong Song, Chunxiang Huang, Tianqing Fan, Jinqiao Huang, Leyin Zhang, Xuerong Luo, Yanhua Li, and Yanmei Shen.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/teens-with-depression-show-unique-eye-movement-patterns-linked-to-memory-and-attention-problems/

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