To evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of the Takeaway Masterclass, a three-hour training session delivered to staff of independent takeaway food outlets that promoted healthy cooking practices and menu options.

A mixed-methods study design. All participating food outlets provided progress feedback at 6 weeks post-intervention. Baseline and 6-week post-intervention observational and self-reported data were collected in half of participating takeaway food outlets.

North East England.

Independent takeaway food outlet owners and managers.

Staff from eighteen (10 % of invited) takeaway food outlets attended the training; attendance did not appear to be associated with the level of deprivation of food outlet location. Changes made by staff that required minimal effort or cost to the business were the most likely to be implemented and sustained. Less popular changes included using products that are difficult (or expensive) to source from suppliers, or changes perceived to be unpopular with customers.

The Takeaway Masterclass appears to be a feasible and acceptable intervention for improving cooking practices and menu options in takeaway food outlets for those who attended the training. Further work is required to increase participation and retention and explore effectiveness, paying particular attention to minimising adverse inequality effects.

Music and sporting events are mass gatherings with unique risks related to participation. “All-ages” events, which include participants below the age of majority (18 in many jurisdictions), have been observed to have an over-representation of patient presentations in the youth category. Peer helpers may lower the barrier to seeking on-site care. Youth (peer-aged) volunteerism provides opportunities for exposure to new environments, skills, and mentorship. Medical volunteerism may promote personal satisfaction through prosocial behavior (i.e., helping others), community engagement and immersion into a potential health professions career path.

We conducted an observational pilot feasibility study with feedback forms and semi-structured interviews. The pilot program paired youth with parents/guardians/responsible adults as health care volunteers at special events.

Youth/adult dyads volunteered for a variety of events in Canada during the 2018 event season. All participants in the “Juniors Program” completed at least a Standard First Aid course, including orientation to personal safety and confidentiality. Each pair worked in one of two areas: first aid or Festival Health (the harm reduction space at music events) providing peer-to-peer and “all-ages” support. Post-event feedback from the dyads revealed many positive experiences and universally called for more opportunities.

A strong volunteer base is an asset to any community. In this pilot study, the volunteer experiences were supervised by a team of credentialed health care professionals. The authors report on qualitative feedback in themes based on patient perspective, volunteer perspective, team perspective, and event management perspective. More research is needed to measure the outcomes of the Junior’s Program. More Investigation is needed to determine not only the long-term benefits of participation on event medical teams, but also to identify factors that shape a positive experience for youth, their parents, and the event participants that they support.

The USA is currently enduring an opioid crisis. Identifying cost-effective, easy-to-implement behavioral measures that predict treatment outcomes in opioid misusers is a crucial scientific, therapeutic, and epidemiological goal.

The current study used a mixed cross-sectional and longitudinal design to test whether a behavioral choice task, previously validated in stimulant users, was associated with increased opioid misuse severity at baseline, and whether it predicted change in opioid misuse severity at follow-up. At baseline, data from 100 prescription opioid-treated chronic pain patients were analyzed; at follow-up, data were analyzed in 34 of these participants who were non-misusers at baseline. During the choice task, participants chose under probabilistic contingencies whether to view opioid-related images in comparison with affectively pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral images. Following previous procedures, we also assessed insight into choice behavior, operationalized as whether (yes/no) participants correctly self-reported the image category they chose most often.

At baseline, the higher choice for viewing opioid images in direct comparison with pleasant images was associated with opioid misuse and impaired insight into choice behavior; the combination of these produced especially elevated opioid-related choice behavior. In longitudinal analyses of individuals who were initially non-misusers, higher baseline opioid v. pleasant choice behavior predicted more opioid misuse behaviors at follow-up.

These results indicate that greater relative allocation of behavior toward opioid stimuli and away from stimuli depicting natural reinforcement is associated with concurrent opioid misuse and portends vulnerability toward future misuse. The choice task may provide important medical information to guide opioid-prescribing practices.

The authors developed a practical and clinically useful model to predict the risk of psychosis that utilizes clinical characteristics empirically demonstrated to be strong predictors of conversion to psychosis in clinical high-risk (CHR) individuals. The model is based upon the Structured Interview for Psychosis Risk Syndromes (SIPS) and accompanying clinical interview, and yields scores indicating one's risk of conversion.

Baseline data, including demographic and clinical characteristics measured by the SIPS, were obtained on 199 CHR individuals seeking evaluation in the early detection and intervention for mental disorders program at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University Medical Center. Each patient was followed for up to 2 years or until they developed a syndromal DSM-4 disorder. A LASSO logistic fitting procedure was used to construct a model for conversion specifically to a psychotic disorder.

At 2 years, 64 patients (32.2%) converted to a psychotic disorder. The top five variables with relatively large standardized effect sizes included SIPS subscales of visual perceptual abnormalities, dysphoric mood, unusual thought content, disorganized communication, and violent ideation. The concordance index (c-index) was 0.73, indicating a moderately strong ability to discriminate between converters and non-converters.

The prediction model performed well in classifying converters and non-converters and revealed SIPS measures that are relatively strong predictors of conversion, comparable with the risk calculator published by NAPLS (c-index = 0.71), but requiring only a structured clinical interview. Future work will seek to externally validate the model and enhance its performance with the incorporation of relevant biomarkers.

Different diagnostic interviews are used as reference standards for major depression classification in research. Semi-structured interviews involve clinical judgement, whereas fully structured interviews are completely scripted. The Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI), a brief fully structured interview, is also sometimes used. It is not known whether interview method is associated with probability of major depression classification.

To evaluate the association between interview method and odds of major depression classification, controlling for depressive symptom scores and participant characteristics.

Data collected for an individual participant data meta-analysis of Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) diagnostic accuracy were analysed and binomial generalised linear mixed models were fit.

A total of 17 158 participants (2287 with major depression) from 57 primary studies were analysed. Among fully structured interviews, odds of major depression were higher for the MINI compared with the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) (odds ratio (OR) = 2.10; 95% CI = 1.15–3.87). Compared with semi-structured interviews, fully structured interviews (MINI excluded) were non-significantly more likely to classify participants with low-level depressive symptoms (PHQ-9 scores ≤6) as having major depression (OR = 3.13; 95% CI = 0.98–10.00), similarly likely for moderate-level symptoms (PHQ-9 scores 7–15) (OR = 0.96; 95% CI = 0.56–1.66) and significantly less likely for high-level symptoms (PHQ-9 scores ≥16) (OR = 0.50; 95% CI = 0.26–0.97).

The MINI may identify more people as depressed than the CIDI, and semi-structured and fully structured interviews may not be interchangeable methods, but these results should be replicated.

Drs Jetté and Patten declare that they received a grant, outside the submitted work, from the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, which was jointly funded by the Institute and Pfizer. Pfizer was the original sponsor of the development of the PHQ-9, which is now in the public domain. Dr Chan is a steering committee member or consultant of Astra Zeneca, Bayer, Lilly, MSD and Pfizer. She has received sponsorships and honorarium for giving lectures and providing consultancy and her affiliated institution has received research grants from these companies. Dr Hegerl declares that within the past 3 years, he was an advisory board member for Lundbeck, Servier and Otsuka Pharma; a consultant for Bayer Pharma; and a speaker for Medice Arzneimittel, Novartis, and Roche Pharma, all outside the submitted work. Dr Inagaki declares that he has received grants from Novartis Pharma, lecture fees from Pfizer, Mochida, Shionogi, Sumitomo Dainippon Pharma, Daiichi-Sankyo, Meiji Seika and Takeda, and royalties from Nippon Hyoron Sha, Nanzando, Seiwa Shoten, Igaku-shoin and Technomics, all outside of the submitted work. Dr Yamada reports personal fees from Meiji Seika Pharma Co., Ltd., MSD K.K., Asahi Kasei Pharma Corporation, Seishin Shobo, Seiwa Shoten Co., Ltd., Igaku-shoin Ltd., Chugai Igakusha and Sentan Igakusha, all outside the submitted work. All other authors declare no competing interests. No funder had any role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis and interpretation of the data; preparation, review or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Bipolar disorder is a highly heritable polygenic disorder. Recent enrichment analyses suggest that there may be true risk variants for bipolar disorder in the expression quantitative trait loci (eQTL) in the brain.

We sought to assess the impact of eQTL variants on bipolar disorder risk by combining data from both bipolar disorder genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and brain eQTL.

To detect single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that influence expression levels of genes associated with bipolar disorder, we jointly analysed data from a bipolar disorder GWAS (7481 cases and 9250 controls) and a genome-wide brain (cortical) eQTL (193 healthy controls) using a Bayesian statistical method, with independent follow-up replications. The identified risk SNP was then further tested for association with hippocampal volume (n = 5775) and cognitive performance (n = 342) among healthy individuals.

Integrative analysis revealed a significant association between a brain eQTL rs6088662 on chromosome 20q11.22 and bipolar disorder (log Bayes factor = 5.48; bipolar disorder P = 5.85×10–5). Follow-up studies across multiple independent samples confirmed the association of the risk SNP (rs6088662) with gene expression and bipolar disorder susceptibility (P = 3.54×10–8). Further exploratory analysis revealed that rs6088662 is also associated with hippocampal volume and cognitive performance in healthy individuals.

Our findings suggest that 20q11.22 is likely a risk region for bipolar disorder; they also highlight the informative value of integrating functional annotation of genetic variants for gene expression in advancing our understanding of the biological basis underlying complex disorders, such as bipolar disorder.