Nicola Meda

University of Padova | UNIPD · Department of Neuroscience

Aims Prospective studies on the mental health of university students highlighted a major concern. Specifically, young adults in academia are affected by markedly worse mental health status than their peers or adults in other vocations. This situation predisposes to exacerbated disability-adjusted life-years. Methods We enroled 1,388 students at th...

This folder contains the R script and anonymized dataset for the analyses, figures and tables published in "Frequency and machine learning predictors of depressive, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and suicidal ideation among university students"

Introduction Prospective studies on mental health of students showed that young adults enroled in university are affected by poorer mental health than other working peers or adults, and this condition is responsible for a large proportion of disability-adjusted life-years Methods We enrolled 1388 students at the baseline (and 557 completed follow-...

Objectives: A third of people suffering from major depressive disorder do not experience a significant improvement in their symptoms even after adequate treatment with two different antidepressant medications. This common condition, termed treatment-resistant depression (TRD), severely affects the quality of life of millions of people worldwide, c...

The study of animal navigation is a complex and fertile field of research: several questions regarding how animals relate to external stimuli, integrating them to perform their everyday movement routine, have been or are being addressed in different organisms and taxa, both from the behavioural and the neuronal activity point of view. Several inver...

Introduction Suicide is the cause of death of approximately 800’000 people a year. Despite the relevance of this behaviour, risk assessment tools rely on clinician experience and subjective ratings. Methods Given that previous suicide attempts are the single strongest predictors of future attempts, we designed a systematic review and coordinate-ba...

Purpose Orthorexia Nervosa (ON) is characterised by excessive attention to a dietary regimen perceived as healthy. A critical factor in the distinction between ON and other eating disorders (EDs) is the dichotomy of quality-versus-quantity of food intake. We investigated whether specific types of diet or dieting frequency are associated with orthor...

During recent decades, model organisms such as Drosophila melanogaster have made it possible to study the effects of different environmental oxygen conditions on lifespan and oxidative stress. However, many studies have often yielded controversial results usually assigned to variations in Drosophila genetic background and differences in study desig...

Purpose: Catatonia is a psychomotor syndrome characterized by heterogeneous motor, behavioral and affective alterations, and, in some cases, neurovegetative abnormalities that can be life-threatening. Although the prevalence estimates of catatonia are 10-20% of the hospitalized population, its clinical recognition remains a challenge for most clin...

Humans rely on multiple types of sensory information to make decisions, and strategies that shorten decision‐making time by taking into account fewer but essential elements of information are preferred to strategies that require complex analyses. Such shortcuts to decision making are known as heuristics. The identification of heuristic principles i...

A growing number of studies support a bidirectional relationship between inflammation and bipolar disorders. Tumor Necrosis Factor-α (TNF-α) inhibitors have recently attracted interest as potential therapeutic compounds for treating depressive symptoms, but the risk for triggering mood switches in patients with or without bipolar disorders remains...

Compiled dataset with information available from the Global Burden of Disease Collaborative Network data sets, http://ghdx.healthdata.org/gbd-results-tool, the World Bank website https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/topics, the Center for Systemic Peace website https://www.systemicpeace.org/ and the International Disaster Database https://www.emdat.be/....

Background Every year, more than 800,000 people die by suicide, three-quarters of which are males. Economic factors influence suicide rates, but a worldwide perspective of their impact according to age and sex is lacking. Method We queried publicly available datasets on economic factors and on suicide rates stratified according to sex and age, fro...

The lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic may have exacerbated mental health problems. To what degree mental health may be affected by social isolation is still poorly known. We collected prospective data on students’ mental health in two instances: (i) in October and December 2019, and (ii) 6 months later, in April 2020 amidst the COVID-19 lock...

Animals rely on multiple sensory information systems to make decisions. The integration of information stemming from these systems is believed to result in a precise behavioural output. To what degree a single sensory system may override the others is unknown. Evidence for a hierarchical use of different systems to guide navigation is lacking. We u...

The lockdown due to coronavirus pandemic may exacerbate depressive symptoms, experts argue. Here we evidence that students, a high-risk category for mental disorders, report on average worse depressive symptoms than 6 months before isolation. The prospective data reported herein should alert clinician of a possible aggravation as well as new-onsets...

Full-text on PMC https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7202822/

Animals use relief-based place learning to pinpoint a specific location where noxious stimuli are diminished or abolished. Here we show how the optogenetically-induced activation of bitter-sensing neurons in Drosophila melanogaster elicits pain-like behavioural responses and stimulates the search for a place where this activation is relieved. Under...

peer-reviewed paper available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2020.112616 Animals use pain-relief learning to discern which actions can diminish or abolish noxious stimuli. If relief from pain is provided in a specific location, place learning is the mechanism used to pinpoint that location in space. Little is known about how physiological and no...

Published on SIMG, volume 25; number 4, 2018