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Predictors and prevalence of hazardous alcohol use in middle-late to late adulthood in Europe
(2022)
Objectives:
Even low to moderate levels of alcohol consumption can have detrimental health consequences, especially in older adults (OA). Although many studies report an increase in the proportion of drinkers among OA, there are regional variations. Therefore, we examined alcohol consumption and the prevalence of hazardous alcohol use (HAU) among men and women aged 50+ years in four European regions and investigated predictors of HAU.
Methods:
We analyzed data of N = 35,042 participants of the European SHARE study. We investigated differences in alcohol consumption (units last week) according to gender, age and EU-region using ANOVAs. Furthermore, logistic regression models were used to examine the effect of income, education, marital status, history of a low-quality parent-child relationship and smoking on HAU, also stratified for gender and EU-region. HAU was operationalized as binge drinking or risky drinking (<12.5 units of 10 ml alcohol/week).
Results:
Overall, past week alcohol consumption was 5.0 units (+/- 7.8), prevalence of HAU was 25.4% within our sample of European adults aged 50+ years. Male gender, younger age and living in Western Europe were linked to both higher alcohol consumption and higher risks of HAU. Income, education, smoking, a low-quality parent-child relationship, living in Northern and especially Eastern Europe were positively associated with HAU. Stratified analyses revealed differences by region and gender.
Conclusions:
HAU was highly prevalent within this European sample of OA. Alcohol consumption and determinants of HAU differed between EU-regions, hinting to a necessity of risk-stratified population-level strategies to prevent HAU and subsequent alcohol use disorders.
Objectives. Recent work suggests that a genetic variation associated with increased dopamine metabolism in the prefrontal cortex (catechol-O-methyltransferase Val158Met; COMT) amplifies age-related changes in working memory performance. Research on younger adults indicates that the influence of dopamine-related genetic polymorphisms on working memory performance increases when testing the cognitive limits through training. To date, this has not been studied in older adults. Method. Here we investigate the effect of COMT genotype on plasticity in working memory in a sample of 14 younger (aged 24-30 years) and 25 older (aged 60-75 years) healthy adults. Participants underwent adaptive training in the n-back working memory task over 12 sessions under increasing difficulty conditions. Results. Both younger and older adults exhibited sizeable behavioral plasticity through training (P < .001), which was larger in younger as compared to older adults (P < .001). Age-related differences were qualified by an interaction with COMT genotype (P < .001), and this interaction was due to decreased behavioral plasticity in older adults carrying the Val/Val genotype, while there was no effect of genotype in younger adults. Discussion. Our findings indicate that age-related changes in plasticity in working memory are critically affected by genetic variation in prefrontal dopamine metabolism.
Different systems for habitual versus goal-directed control are thought to underlie human decision-making. Working memory is known to shape these decision-making systems and
their interplay, and is known to support goal-directed decision making even under stress. Here, we investigated if and how decision systems are differentially influenced by breaks filled with diverse everyday life activities known to modulate working memory performance. We used a within-subject design where young adults listened to music and played a video game during breaks interleaved with trials of a sequential two-step Markov decision task, designed to assess habitual as well as goal-directed decision making. Based on a neurocomputational model of task performance, we observed that for individuals with a rather limited
working memory capacity video gaming as compared to music reduced reliance on the goal-directed decision-making system, while a rather large working memory capacity prevented such a decline. Our findings suggest differential effects of everyday activities on key decision-making processes.
Substance-dependent individuals often lack the ability to adjust decisions flexibly in response to the changes in reward contingencies. Prediction errors (PEs) are thought to mediate flexible decision-making by updating the reward values associated with available actions. In this study, we explored whether the neurobiological correlates of PEs are altered in alcohol dependence. Behavioral, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were simultaneously acquired from 34 abstinent alcohol-dependent patients (ADP) and 26 healthy controls (HC) during a probabilistic reward-guided decision-making task with dynamically changing reinforcement contingencies. A hierarchical Bayesian inference method was used to fit and compare learning models with different assumptions about the amount of task-related information subjects may have inferred during the experiment. Here, we observed that the best-fitting model was a modified Rescorla-Wagner type model, the “double-update” model, which assumes that subjects infer the knowledge that reward contingencies are anti-correlated, and integrate both actual and hypothetical outcomes into their decisions. Moreover, comparison of the best-fitting model's parameters showed that ADP were less sensitive to punishments compared to HC. Hence, decisions of ADP after punishments were loosely coupled with the expected reward values assigned to them. A correlation analysis between the model-generated PEs and the fMRI data revealed a reduced association between these PEs and the BOLD activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) of ADP. A hemispheric asymmetry was observed in the DLPFC when positive and negative PE signals were analyzed separately. The right DLPFC activity in ADP showed a reduced correlation with positive PEs. On the other hand, ADP, particularly the patients with high dependence severity, recruited the left DLPFC to a lesser extent than HC for processing negative PE signals. These results suggest that the DLPFC, which has been linked to adaptive control of action selection, may play an important role in cognitive inflexibility observed in alcohol dependence when reinforcement contingencies change. Particularly, the left DLPFC may contribute to this impaired behavioral adaptation, possibly by impeding the extinction of the actions that no longer lead to a reward.
Cities and Mental Health
(2017)
Background: More than half of the global population currently lives in cities, with an increasing trend for further urbanization. Living in cities is associated with increased population density, traffic noise and pollution, but also with better access to health care and other commodities. Methods: This review is based on a selective literature search, providing an overview of the risk factors for mental illness in urban centers. Results: Studies have shown that the risk for serious mental illness is generally higher in cities compared to rural areas. Epidemiological studies have associated growing up and living in cities with a considerably higher risk for schizophrenia. However, correlation is not causation and living in poverty can both contribute to and result from impairments associated with poor mental health. Social isolation and discrimination as well as poverty in the neighborhood contribute to the mental health burden while little is known about specific inter actions between such factors and the built environment. Conclusion: Further insights on the interaction between spatial heterogeneity of neighborhood resources and socio-ecological factors is warranted and requires interdisciplinary research.