Runa Bhaumik

University of Illinois at Chicago | UIC · Department of Psychiatry (Chicago)

A non-optimal vaginal microbiome (VMB) is typically diverse with a paucity of Lactobacillus crispatus and is often associated with bacterial vaginosis (BV) and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Although compositional characterization of the VMB is well-characterized, especially for BV, knowledge remains limited on how different groups of bact...

Background: Nonhygienic products for managing menstruation are reported to cause reproductive tract infections. Menstrual cups are a potential solution. We assessed whether menstrual cups would reduce bacterial vaginosis (BV), vaginal microbiome (VMB), and sexually transmitted infections (STIs) as studies have not evaluated this. Methods and find...

Background: Reliable prediction of clinical progression over time can improve the outcomes of depression. Little work has been done integrating various risk factors for depression, to determine the combinations of factors with the greatest utility for identifying which individuals are at the greatest risk.

Background: Reliable prediction of clinical progression over time can improve the outcomes of depression. Little work has been done integrating various risk factors for depression, to determine the combinations of factors with the greatest utility for identifying which individuals are at the greatest risk. Method: This study demonstrates that data-...

A dysregulated hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis has repeatedly been demonstrated to play a fundamental role in psychiatric disorders and suicide, yet the mechanisms underlying this dysregulation are not clear. Decreased expression of the glucocorticoid receptor (GR) gene, which is also susceptible to epigenetic modulation, is a strong indi...

Objective: To examine the merits of using microRNAs (miRNAs) as biomarkers of disorders of consciousness (DoC) due to traumatic brain injury (TBI). Settings: Acute and subacute beds. Participants: Patients remaining in vegetative and minimally conscious states (VS, MCS), an average of 1.5 years after TBI, and enrolled in a randomized clinical...

In contrast to healthy controls, the heterotrimeric G protein, Gsalpha (Gsα) is ensconced predominantly in lipid rafts in subjects with major depressive disorder (MDD) resulting in impaired stimulation of adenylyl cyclase. In this small proof-of-concept study, we examined the hypothesis that translocation of Gsα from lipid rafts toward a more facil...

Background Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) are common and costly, impacting approximately one in five people annually. Reddit, the sixth most used internet site in the world, is a user-generated social media discussion platform that may be useful in monitoring discussion about STD symptoms and exposure. Objective This study sought to define a...

BACKGROUND Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) are common and costly, impacting approximately one in five people annually. Reddit, the sixth most used internet site in the world, is a user-generated social media discussion platform that may be useful in monitoring discussion about STD symptoms and exposure. OBJECTIVE This study sought to define a...

Background: Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are common and costly, impacting approximately 1 in 5 people annually. Reddit, the sixth most used internet site in the world, is a user-generated social media discussion platform that may be useful in monitoring discussion about STD symptoms and exposure. Objective: This study sought to define an...

Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) response during attentional control in the context of task-irrelevant emotional faces is a promising biomarker of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) outcome in patients with social anxiety disorder (SAD). However, it is unclear whether this biomarker extends to major depressive disorder (MDD) and is specific to CBT o...

The vaginal microbiome (VMB) impacts numerous health outcomes, but evaluation among adolescents is limited. We characterized the VMB via 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, and its association with Bacterial vaginosis (BV) and sexually transmitted infections (STIs; chlamydia, gonorrhea, trichomoniasis) among 436 schoolgirls in Kenya, median age 16.9...

Abnormalities of neuroinflammation have been implicated in the pathogenesis of depression and suicide. This is primarily based on the observation that cytokines, which are major inflammatory molecules and play an important role in depression and suicide, are increased in both serum and in postmortem brain of depressed and suicidal subjects. Another...

Background Neuroimaging studies have shown variance in brain response to emotional faces predicts cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) outcome. An important next step is to determine if individual differences in neural predictors of CBT response represent distinct patient groups. Methods In total, 90 patients with internalizing disorders completed a...

Objective: Report pilot findings of neurobehavioral gains and network changes observed in persons with disordered consciousness (DoC) who received repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) or amantadine (AMA), and then rTMS+AMA. Participants: Four persons with DoC 1 to 15 years after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Design: Alternate treat...

For people with disordered consciousness (DoC) after traumatic brain injury (TBI), relationships between treatment-induced changes in neural connectivity and neurobehavioral recovery have not been explored. To begin building a body of evidence regarding the unique contributions of treatments to changes in neural network connectivity relative to neu...

Background: We determined the predictive accuracy of penile bacteria for incident BV in female sex partners. In this prospective cohort, we enrolled Kenyan men aged 18–35 and their female sex partners aged 16 and older. We assessed BV at baseline, 1, 6, and 12 months. Incident BV was defined as a Nugent score of 7–10 at a follow-up visit, following...

BACKGROUND Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) pose a significant public health challenge in the United States. Traditional surveillance systems suffer from data quality issues, underreporting of cases, and delays in reporting which results in missed prevention opportunities to respond to trends in disease. Search engine data has the potential t...

Background Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) pose a significant public health challenge in the United States. Traditional surveillance systems are adversely affected by data quality issues, underreporting of cases, and reporting delays, resulting in missed prevention opportunities to respond to trends in disease prevalence. Search engine data...

Cytoskeletal proteins and post-translational modifications play a role in mood disorders. Post-translational modifications of tubulin also alter microtubule dynamics. Furthermore, tubulin interacts closely with Gαs, the G-protein responsible for activation of adenylyl cyclase. Postmortem tissue derived from depressed suicide brain showed increased...

Objective: The current study examined associations among organizational social context, after-school program (ASP) quality, and children's social behavior in a large urban park district. Method: Thirty-two park-based ASPs are included in the final sample, including 141 staff and 593 children. Staff reported on organizational culture (rigidity, p...

Cytoskeletal proteins and post-translational modifications play a role in mood disorders. Post-translational modifications of tubulin also alter microtubule dynamics. Furthermore, tubulin interacts closely with Gα s , the G-protein responsible for activation of adenylyl cyclase. Postmortem tissue derived from depressed suicide brain showed increase...

Background Little is known about the neural substrates of suicide risk in mood disorders. Improving the identification of biomarkers of suicide risk, as indicated by a history of suicide-related behavior (SB), could lead to more targeted treatments to reduce risk. Methods Participants were 18 young adults with a mood disorder with a history of SB...

Overactivity of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis function has been implicated in depression and suicidal behavior. This is based on the observation of an abnormal dexamethasone (DEX) and DEX-adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) test in patients with depression and suicidal behavior. Recently, some studies have also found abnormalities of glu...

1 Background Three well‐established intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) involved in cognitive‐affective processing include the cognitive control network (CCN), default mode network (DMN), and salience and emotional network (SEN). Despite recent advances in understanding developmental changes in these ICNs, the majority of research has focused on...

Background: Depression and stress are major risk factors for suicidal behaviour, and some studies show abnormalities of proinflammatory cytokines in the serum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of depressed and suicidal patients. However, it is not clear if similar abnormalities of cytokines are present in the brain of suicidal and depressed patients.

Background Reappraisal, an adaptive emotion regulation strategy, is associated with frontal engagement. In internalizing psychopathologies (IPs) such as anxiety and depression frontal activity is atypically reduced suggesting impaired regulation capacity. Yet, successful reappraisal is often demonstrated at the behavioral level. A data-driven appro...

Background Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a prevalent, disruptive illness. A majority of those with MDD are at high risk for recurrence and increased risk for morbidity and mortality. This study examined whether multimodal baseline (and retest) Cognitive Control performance and neuroimaging markers (task activation and neural connectivity betwe...

Abnormalities of Toll-like receptors (TLRs) have been implicated in the pathophysiology of depression and suicide. Interactions of TLRs with pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMP) and damage-associated molecular patterns (DAMP) initiate signaling through myeloid differentiation primary response-88 (MyD88) and produce cytokines through the ac...

Background: Depression and stress are major risk factors for suicidal behaviour, and some studies show abnormalities of proinflammatory cytokines in the serum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of depressed and suicidal patients. However, it is not clear if similar abnormalities of cytokines are present in the brain of suicidal and depressed patients....

The advances in neuroimaging methods reveal that resting-state functional fMRI (rs-fMRI) connectivity measures can be potential diagnostic biomarkers for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Recent data sharing projects help us replicating the robustness of these biomarkers in different acquisition conditions or preprocessing steps across larger numbers...

The human brain is an amazingly complex network. Aberrant activities in this network can lead to various neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and autism. fMRI has emerged as an important tool to delineate the neural networks affected by such diseases, particularly autism. In this paper, we prop...

Background: Evaluation of differences in neuropsychological outcomes in patients undergoing surgical clipping (SC) vs endovascular coiling (EC) for unruptured cerebral aneurysms is essential in guiding patients seeking treatment of asymptomatic cerebral aneurysms. Objective: To perform a prospective longitudinal analysis of neuropsychological ou...

Trait markers, or intermediate phenotypes linking different units of analysis (self-report, performance) from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) matrix across populations is a necessary step in identifying at-risk individuals. In the current study, 150 healthy controls (HC) and 456 individuals with bipolar disorder (BD) Type I or II, NOS (not othe...

Reappraisal, a cognitive approach intended to alter an emotional response, is generally associated with prefrontal cortical recruitment and decreased limbic activity. However, the extent to which neurofunctional activity predicts successful reappraisal is unclear. During fMRI, 60 healthy participants completed a reappraisal paradigm, which included...

Predicting treatment response for major depressive disorder can provide a tremendous benefit for our overstretched health care system by reducing number of treatments and time to remission, thereby decreasing morbidity. The present study used neural and performance predictors during a cognitive control task to predict treatment response (% change i...

Abnormalities of protein levels of proinflammatory cytokines and their soluble receptors have been reported in plasma of depressed patients. In this study, we examined the role of cytokines and their membrane-bound receptors in major depressive disorder (MDD). We determined the protein and mRNA expression of proinflammatory cytokines, interleukin (...

Understanding abnormal resting-state functional connectivity of distributed brain networks may aid in probing and targeting mechanisms involved in major depressive disorder (MDD). To date, few studies have used resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to attempt to discriminate individuals with MDD from individuals without MDD,...

Background: Recent study of genome-wide DNA methylation profiling in the postmortem brain of suicidal and nonsuicidal subjects found that gene expression of spindle and kinetochore associated complex subunit 2 (SKA2) is decreased in the postmortem brain of suicide victims compared with nonsuicidal, nonpsychiatric control subjects. Methods: To dete...

This study examined a school- and home-based mental health service model, Links to Learning, focused on empirical predictors of learning as primary goals for services in high-poverty urban communities. Teacher key opinion leaders were identified through sociometric surveys and trained, with mental health providers and parent advocates, on evidence-...

Neurocognitive changes postsurgical clipping (SC) or endovascular coiling (EC) of unruptured aneurysms is not well studied. We aim to understand whether patients who undergo EC perform better on neurocognitive assessments in comparison with patients who undergo SC, and if such a difference exists how long the difference persists. This is a single-c...

Confusions between drug names that look and sound alike are common, costly, harmful, and difficult to prevent. One prevention strategy is to screen proposed new drug names for confusability before approving them. Widespread acceptance of pre-approval tests of confusability is compromised by the lack of experimental designs and statistical methods t...

In this article, we develop appropriate statistical methods for determining the required sample size while comparing the efficacy of an intervention to a control with repeated binary response outcomes. Our proposed methodology incorporates the complexity of the hierarchical nature of underlying designs and provides solutions when varying attrition...

Abnormalities of the immune function in depression and suicide are based in part on the observation of increased levels of proinflammatory cytokines in the serum and postmortem brain of depressed and suicidal patients. We have examined if abnormalities of the innate immune receptors, known as Toll-like receptors (TLRs), in the brain are associated...

Lognormal distributions have applications in health sciences, occupational exposures, environmental monitoring and several other fields. In this article we compare power functions of four testing procedures based on Student-t, Edgeworth expansion, generalized p-value, and permutation test for testing the mean of a lognormal distribution. We recomme...

Securing collaborative filtering systems from malicious attack has become an important issue with in-creasing popularity of recommender Systems. Since recom-mender systems are entirely based on the input provided by the users or customers, they tend to become highly vulnerable to outside attacks. Prior research has shown that attacks can significan...

There is considerable research in the field of content-based medical image retrieval; however, few of the current systems investigate the relationship between the radiologists' visual impression of image similarity and the computer calculated content-based similarity. Furthermore, those research studies that investigate these relationships analyze...

Social tagging systems provide an open platform for users to share and annotate their resources such as photos and URLs. Due to their open nature, however, these systems present a security problem. Malicious users may try to distort the sys-tem's behavior by inserting erroneous or misleading annota-tions, thus altering the way in which information...

As in the case of all open and adaptive systems that rely on user input to organize and present content, social tagging systems are vulnerable to spam-ming and profile injection attacks. Malicious users may try to distort the system's behavior by inserting erroneous or misleading annotations, thus altering the way in which information is presented...

Publicly accessible adaptive systems such as collaborative recommender systems present a security problem. Attackers, who cannot be readily distinguished from ordinary users, may inject biased profiles in an attempt to force a system to “adapt” in a manner advantageous to them. Such attacks may lead to a degradation of user trust in the objectivity...

Collaborative-filtering recommender systems are an electronic extension of everyday social recommendation behavior: people share opinions and decide whether or not to act on the basis of what they hear. Collaborative filtering lets you scale such interactions to groups of thousands or even millions. Publicly accessible user-adaptive systems such as...

Publicly accessible adaptive systems such as collaborative recommender systems present a security problem. Attackers, who cannot be readily distinguished from ordinary users, may inject biased profiles in an attempt to force a system to "adapt" in a manner advantageous to them. Such attacks may lead to a degradation of user trust in the objectivity...

Abstract—User profiles derived from Web navigation data are used in important e-commerce applications such as Web personalization, recommender systems, and Web analytics. In the open environment of the Internet, malicious third parties may seek to manipulate the output of such applications (such as the suggestions produced by a recommender system)...

The modeling of Web user navigational patterns is a critical component of many Web applications such as those involving Web personalization, recommender systems, and Web analyt- ics. Because such open adaptive systems depend on users' input, malicious third parties may seek to distort the system's behavior by generating false clickstreams. Recent r...

Collaborative recommender systems have been shown to be vulnerable to profile injection attacks. By injecting a large number of biased profiles into a system, attackers can manipulate the predictions of targeted items. To decrease this risk, researchers have begun to study mechanisms for detecting and preventing profile injection attacks. In prior...

Collaborative recommender systems are highly vulnerable to attack. Attackers can use automated means to inject a large number of biased profiles into such a system, resulting in recommendations that favor or disfavor given items. Since collaborative recommender systems must be open to user input, it is difficult to design a system that cannot be so...

Collaborative recommender systems are known to be highly vulnerable to profile injection attacks, attacks that involve the insertion of biased profiles into the ratings database for the purpose of altering the system's recommendation behavior. In prior work, we and others have identified a number of models for such attacks and shown their effective...

Collaborative filtering recommenders are highly vulner-able to malicious attacks designed to affect predicted ratings. Previous work related to detecting such at-tacks has focused on detecting profiles. Approaches based on profile classification to a large extent depend on profiles conforming to known attack models. In this paper we examine approac...

Collaborative recommender systems have been shown to be vulnerable to profile injection attacks. By injecting a large number of biased profiles into a system, attackers can ma-nipulate the predictions of targeted items. To decrease this risk, researchers have begun to study mechanisms for detect-ing and preventing profile injection attacks. In prio...

Significant vulnerabilities have recently been identified in collaborative filtering recommender systems. Researchers have shown that attackers can manipulate a system's recommendations by injecting biased profiles into it. In this paper, we examine attacks that concentrate on a targeted set of users with similar tastes, biasing the system's respon...

Significant vulnerabilities have recently been identified in collaborative filtering recommender systems. These vulnerabilities mostly emanate from the open nature of such systems and their reliance on user-specified judgments for building profiles. Attackers can easily introduce biased data in an attempt to force the system to "adapt" in a manner...

Recent research in recommender systems has shown that collaborative filtering algorithms are highly susceptible to attacks that insert biased profile data. Theoretical analyses and empirical experiments have shown that certain attacks can have a significant impact on the recommendations a system provides. These analyses have generally not taken int...

Significant vulnerabilities have recently been identified in collaborative recommender systems. Attackers who cannot be readily distinguished from ordinary users may inject biased data in an attempt to force the system to "adapt" in a manner advantageous to them. Re-searchers have studied simple attack models and their impact on a system's populati...

Significant vulnerabilities have recently been identified in collaborative filtering recommender systems. These vulnerabilities mostly emanate from the open nature of such systems and their reliance on user- specified judgments for building profiles. Attackers who cannot be readily distinguished from ordinary users may introduce biased data in an a...

Recommender systems help users overcome the information overload problem and have been widely used in an ever-increasing number of e-commerce websites. However, most existing recommender systems use simplistic user model. In this paper, we describe how context can be brought to bear on recommender systems. We propose a new approach to integrating u...

Significant vulnerabilities have been identified in collaborative recommender systems. The open nature of collaborative filtering allows attackers to inject biased profile data and force the system to "adapt" in a manner advantageous to them. Previous work has shown both user-based and item-based recommender systems are vulnerable to the segment at...

Publicly-accessible adaptive systems such as recommender systems present a security problem. Attackers, who cannot be readily distinguished from ordinary users, may introduce biased data in an attempt to force the system to "adapt" in a manner advantageous to them. Recent research has begun to examine the vulnerabilities of different recommendation...

The vulnerability of collaborative recommender systems has been well established; particularly to reverse-engineered attacks designedtobiasthesystemin anattacker'sfavor. Recentresearchhas begun to examine detection schemes to recognize and defeat the ef- fects of known attack models. In this paper we proposeseveral tech- niques an attacker might us...

Social tagging systems provide an open platform for users to share and annotate their resources such as photos and URLs. Due to their open nature, however, these systems present a security problem. Malicious users may try to distort the systems behavior by inserting false user profiles. This paper addresses the problem of security and robustness of...