Vol 6, No 2 (2025)

BACKGROUND: Anticonvulsants are widely used in treating patients with mental and neurological disorders. Their long-term use increases the risk of a decrease in bone mineral density (BMD) and low-energy fractures. Despite the growing number of studies of drug-induced osteoporosis, the effect of anticonvulsants on bone microarchitecture remains poorly studied.

AIM: To study the effect of treatment duration with different generations of anticonvulsants on bone mineral density and fracture risk.

METHODS: We examined 100 adult patients with epilepsy who had been on anticonvulsants for more than 12 months and 58 healthy subjects who had never taken anticonvulsants. All the participants underwent a general clinical and neuropsychological assessment, as well as bone densitometry using quantitative computed tomography in three regions of interest (lumbar vertebrae L1, L2 and femoral neck).

RESULTS: BMD reductions were observed in 47 patients (47%) taking anticonvulsants and 29 (50%) subjects in the control group. The mean duration of anticonvulsant therapy was 8.7 years (SD=8.05) in patients with normal BMD, 10.7 years (SD=7.07) in patients with osteopenia, and 9.5 years (SD=5.24) in patients with osteoporosis. Age was found to significantly affect BMD, while the duration of anticonvulsant therapy affected it to a lesser extent. Patients taking first-generation anticonvulsants had lower BMD (p=0.018). ROC analysis confirmed the existence of a relationship between the duration of anticonvulsant therapy and the risk of fractures (p<0.001). The “duration of anticonvulsant therapy” threshold at the cut-off point corresponding to the highest Youden index value was 10 years.

CONCLUSION: Long-term treatment with conventional anticonvulsants adversely affects BMD and can lead to pathological bone resorption, increasing the risk of fractures in patients. New-generation anticonvulsants did not show any significant negative impact on BMD. The results of this study indicate the need for further research to better understand the effects of anticonvulsants on bone tissue.

BACKGROUND: Understanding the motives for suicide attempts is a necessary condition of suicide risk assessment in adolescents. However, there is a lack of measures in Russian that assess these motives, particularly, in adolescent populations. The Inventory of Motivations for Suicide Attempts (IMSA) measures a variety of theoretically grounded intrapersonal and interpersonal motives and can be used in adolescent samples.

AIM: To validate the Russian version of the IMSA in a clinical sample of adolescents with suicidal behavior.

METHODS: The Russian-language adaptation of the IMSA was conducted on a clinical sample of 522 inpatient adolescents 12–17 years old (M=14.51±1.52), including 425 girls and 97 boys. All the adolescents were hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital due to a suicide attempt, suicidal intentions, or a history of suicide attempts. To test the convergent and discriminative validity of the Russian version of the IMSA, the Interpersonal Needs Questionnaire, Interpersonal Sensitivity Measure and Self-Concept Clarity Scale were used.

RESULTS: Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the original 10-factor structure did not have a good fit. After modifications and removal of 12 items an 8-factor structure emerged, which had the following scales: Hopelessness, Psychache, Escape, Burdensomeness, Low belongingness, Fearlessness, Problem-solving, Interpersonal motivations. A generalizing Intrapersonal motivations scale was also defined. The fit measures for the final model were as follows: χ2(df)=1,757.23(808); CFI=0.911; RMSEA=0.053 (p=0.087); SRMR=0.058. All the scales in the Russian version of the IMSA displayed satisfactory internal (above 0.8 except for Problem-solving) and retest reliability (above 0.6 except for Interpersonal motivations) and statistically significant positive correlations with scales from the Interpersonal Needs Questionnaire and Interpersonal Sensitivity Measure and negative correlations with Self-Concept Clarity Scale.

CONCLUSION: The IMSA displayed satisfactory psychometric properties in a Russian adolescent inpatient sample and can be used to differentiate between the motives for suicide attempts in adolescents.

BACKGROUND: Schizotypy (ST) and psychotic-like experiences and negative symptoms (PENS) are commonly used phenotypes in high-risk and early intervention research for schizophrenia and other non-affective psychoses. However, the origin of these phenotypes in the general population is poorly understood and their association with the genetic predisposition to psychoses has not yet been proven.

AIM: The aim of this study is to answer the question of whether data on the relations of ST and PENS with polygenic risk scores for schizophrenia (SZ-PRS) support the hypothesis that these phenotypes are subclinical manifestations of genetic liability for schizophrenia.

METHODS: Literature describing these relations in the general population was analyzed. The literature search was performed in the PubMed database using the following keywords in English: ((“schizotyp*” OR “psychotic-like experiences” OR “psychosis proneness” OR “psychotic experiences”) AND (”polygenic risk” OR “genetic liability” OR “polygenic score”)); the search in eLIBRARY.RU was conducted using the Russian words for “schizotypy”, “schizotypal features”, “psychotic experiences”, “psychotic experience”, “psychotic symptoms”, and “polygenic risk”, covering publications from 2009 to 2024.

RESULTS: Of the identified records, 45 publications were found eligible. No expected positive correlations of SZ-PRS with common ST measures have been observed. For PENS, the results are inconsistent. Overall, SZ-PRS correlate more often with the PENS general factor and negative symptoms than with psychotic experiences per se.

CONCLUSION: The literature does not provide convincing evidence of the association between SZ-PRS and ST/PENS. The search for the substantive psychological meaning of polygenic vulnerability to psychosis captured by SZ-PRS should be expanded to other personality processes and traits.

BACKGROUND: The advent of neuroleptics and antidepressant therapy marked a significant step forward in clinical psychiatry. Numerous experiments worldwide had been dedicated to a search for the potential neurobiological mechanisms underlying the potency of new psychopharmacological drugs. The first laboratory of psychopharmacology in the USSR was established in 1960 at the Leningrad Psychoneurological Institute. It was headed by Professor Izyaslav Petrovich Lapin. The foundational article by Lapin I.P. and Oksenkrug G.F. (The Lancet, 1969) continues to be cited 55 years after its publication, which determines the interest in the role of this research team in shaping temporal concepts of the pathogenesis of depression and the development of psychopharmacology.

AIM: To analyze the contribution of Lapin I.P. and his research team to the development of experimental approaches for studying the mechanisms of depression.

METHODS: We analyzed the articles and monographs authored by Professor Lapin I.P., both individually and in co-authorship, available in PubMed, Google Scholar, eLIBRARY.RU, and in the bibliographic collection of the V.M. Bekhterev National Medical Research Centre for Psychiatry and Neurology.

RESULTS: This analysis highlights the significance of Lapin I.P. and his scientific team’s work in advancing our understanding of serotonin role in the mechanisms of depression and in the development of animal depression models. The scientific contribution of this team is an important milestone towards future research into the neurobiological mechanisms underlying depression, as well as the development of therapeutic approaches.

CONCLUSION: Lapin’s scientific publications and the work of his team in the field of psychopharmacology have had a significant impact on the development of neuroscience and continue to be of unquestionable importance in advancing scientific practice more than 50 years later.

In the article by M.S. Osetrova et al. titled "Comparative Analysis of Corpus Callosum Lipidome and Transcriptome in Schizophrenia and Healthy Brain", published in the Consortium PSYCHIATRICUM journal (Volume 6, Issue 1), the editorial team made some technical errors. Without any malicious intent, the quantitative indicators in Figure 1 "Experiment design" were incorrectly stated: 1,254 genes instead of 14,254 in the RNAseq section and 385 peaks instead of 384 in the LC-MS section.

The technical errors in Figure 1 have been corrected, and updated PDF and HTML versions of the article have been uploaded on the journal's website. The editorial team of the journal hopes that the mistakes could not significantly affect the perception and interpretation of the published work by readers, and should not become the reason for retraction. The editorial team apologizes to the authors and readers for the mistakes made.