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Call for papers - Neurodevelopmental disorders

Guest Editors:
Michael Absoud: King's College London, United Kingdom
Victoria Cosgrove: Stanford University, United States
Kirsty Donald: University of Cape Town, South Africa

Submission Status: Open   |   Submission Deadline: 31 March 2024


BMC Medicine is calling for submissions to our Collection on Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD).

This special article collection encourages global contributions aiming to improve the understanding, identification, and management of NDD and pave the way towards comprehensive care and well-being in patients with NDD. We also welcome life-course studies that seek to delineate the complex pathophysiology of NDD and investigate the social and environmental effects of influencing factors. Building on our current article collection on ‘Maternal factors during pregnancy influencing maternal, fetal and childhood outcomes,’ a particular focus is on exploring maternal factors in neurodevelopmental outcomes in offspring, including pre-existing conditions, environmental exposures, and genetic predisposition.

Please click the ‘About the Collection’ tab for further information on what is considered. Articles will be published as soon as they are proofed post-acceptance. 

Meet the Guest Editors

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Michael Absoud: King's College London, United Kingdom
Dr. Michael Absoud is a consultant in Paediatric Neurodisability at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, and an Honorary Reader at the Department of Women & Children’s Health at King’s College London. His research focuses on translational and implementation science in childhood neurodevelopmental, neurogenetic and acquired neurologic disorders.
 

Victoria Cosgrove: Stanford University, United States
Dr. Victoria Cosgrove is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her work advances clinical medicine by concentrating on ways that individual biological and psychological responses to social stress impact health and well-being. She serves as Director of the Stress Responsivity, Emotion, and Mood (StREaM) Laboratory which transdiagnostically studies ways that psychobiological stress responsivity is implicated in emerging and protracted affective symptomatology.

Kirsty Donald: University of Cape Town, South Africa
Dr. Kirsty Donald leads the Division of Developmental Paediatrics at Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital, and is also the Deputy Director of the Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town. Her interests include understanding developmental conditions as they present in resource-limited settings such as South Africa, identification, assessment and care for children with these conditions and underlying genetic and environmental contributors to child outcomes in this context.

About the collection

BMC Medicine is calling for submissions to our Collection on Neurodevelopmental Disorders.

Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) refer to a group of conditions that result from the alteration of typical brain developmental processes, leading to difficulties in cognitive, communicative, behavioral, and motor processes. These disturbances are usually associated with distress or impairment in personal, family, social, educational, or occupational areas of functioning. Given the complexity of NDDs, it is necessary to have cross-disciplinary collaboration among experts from various fields (i.e., pediatrics, psychology, neurology, reproductive medicine) and those with lived experience to address challenges associated with NDDs effectively and to support those who live with them.

This special article collection particularly encourages global contributions aiming to improve the understanding, identification, and management of NDDs and pave the way towards comprehensive care and well-being in NDD patients. We also welcome life-course studies that seek to delineate the complex pathophysiology of NDDs and investigate the social and environmental effects of influencing factors. Building on our current article collection on "Maternal factors during pregnancy influencing maternal, fetal and childhood outcomes," a particular focus is on exploring maternal factors in neurodevelopmental outcomes in offspring, including pre-existing conditions, environmental exposures, and genetic predisposition.

We are particularly interested in papers that fall under the following topics as they relate to NDDs:

Diagnosis and treatment

  • Treatment access, under- and misdiagnosis
  • Sex, socioeconomic, geographical and ethnic inequalities in disease identification, outcomes, and treatment
  • Educational and psychosocial interventions for a life-course approach
  • Disease complexity, heterogeneity and subtype stratification
  • RCTs and related new methodologies, personalized prediction modeling and measurement tools
  • Diagnosis in underrepresented groups, including those with learning disabilities, aging, sex differences, and minority ethnic groups
  • Underrepresented topics, such as regression

Pathophysiology and influencing factors

  • Risk/ resilience factors and comorbidities
  • Environmental exposures and managing determinant complexity
  • Effects of maternal factors on NDD outcomes (for example, diet/physical activity, environmental exposures, perinatal medication, preterm birth, mental health, genetics)
  • Impact of medications, immunity and inflammation on NDDs

Disease management and wellbeing

  • Influence of societal norms and stigmatization 
  • Peer-to-peer and family network recognition and support of patients
  • The importance of lived experiences and community influenced patient-reported outcomes 
  • Embracing neurodiversity, complexity and holistic lifestyles

Research conducted in the Global South, patient perspectives, longitudinal cohorts, and studies incorporating patient and public involvement (PPI) are particularly of interest. BMC Medicine is keen to ensure an inclusive article collection, so the authors mentioned above are encouraged to apply to become commissioned contributors. Moreover, submissions with clear evidence of public involvement to ensure outcomes and interventions important for NDDs community should be noted in the cover letter, as these contributions will be championed.

We also welcome outstanding mechanistic laboratory studies that provide superb translational insights into the future of neurodevelopment and altered developmental processes. 

Image credit: Eoneren / Getty images / iStock

  1. Germline mosaicisms could be inherited to offspring, which considered as “de novo” in most cases. Paternal germline MECP2 mosaicism has been reported in fathers of girls with Rett syndrome (RTT) previously. For f...

    Authors: Yongxin Wen, Jiaping Wang, Qingping Zhang, Xiaoxu Yang, Liping Wei and Xinhua Bao
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2023 21:155
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  2. Although both peer victimization and bullying perpetration negatively impact preadolescents’ development, the underlying neurobiological mechanism of this adverse relationship remains unclear. Besides, the spe...

    Authors: Xue Wen, Yinuo Shu, Diyang Qu, Yinzhe Wang, Zaixu Cui, Xiaoqian Zhang and Runsen Chen
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2023 21:141
    Content type: Research article Published on:

  3. Individuals with mental health problems have been shown to have an increased risk of cardiovascular disorder (CVD), but little is known about the risk of early-onset CVD among those with intellectual disabilit...

    Authors: Hui Wang, Priscilla Ming Yi Lee, Jun Zhang, Katrine Svendsen, Fei Li and Jiong Li
    Citation: BMC Medicine 2023 21:41
    Content type: Research article Published on:

Submission Guidelines

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BMC Medicine encourages submissions of front matter articles and original research, including clinical trials (phase I - III, randomized-controlled, either positive or negative trials), epidemiological studies (retrospective or prospective), systematic reviews and meta-analyses, -omics, medical imaging, genomics studies and biomarkers research.

Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have read our submission guidelines. Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Editorial Manager. During the submission process you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select "Neurodevelopmental Disorders" from the dropdown menu. You should also indicate that you are targeting this Collection in your cover letter. Alternatively, you can email a pre-submission query to the editorial team at bmcmedicineeditorial@biomedcentral.com.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the Collection as they are published.

The Guest Editors have no competing interests with the submissions which they handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Guest Editors have competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests. 

Guest Editors provide guidance on the scope of this collection, advice on commissioned content, and editorial recommendations. However, they are not involved in the final editorial decision-making on papers submitted to this collection. All final editorial decisions are with the Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Lin Lee.