Psychiatric disease is a critical unmet need across the globe. Improved understanding of the physiological manifestations of how disease states progress offers researchers the opportunity to develop safer and more efficacious drugs and evaluate new modalities of treatment.

Grip strength is a pre-clinical and clinical assay with strong face validity and predictive power for assessing progression of a host of varied diseases known to impact physiological and cellular stress (i.e. from depression and allodynia, to type-2 diabetes, neurodegeneration, and aging). Recent reports have shown the utility in dynamic grip strength responses in predicting the manifestation of a broad range of pain and stress-related psychopathologies. Due to its required engagement of both central and peripheral mechanisms contributing to efferent force production, it is an assay uniquely capable of dissecting central v peripheral mechanisms of pathophysiology. Therefore, understanding how psychiatric disease may impact the physiological mechanisms of grip strength impairment and augmentation of force during grip strength assays may facilitate broad, fruitful advances in therapeutic development to pathologies for which grip strength serves as a pragmatic preclinical assay.

In this Research Topic, we aim to aggregate impactful publications addressing psychiatric disease and their relation to effects on grip strength as well as the recruitment and maintenance of motor units may serve as a translational biomarker across species.

Submissions of Original Research, Reviews, and Clinical Trials and welcomed. Techniques may include but are not limited to the following:

· Differences in grip strength and/or force flux across preclinical and/or clinical groups with stress or anxiety related psychopathologies

· Real-time in-vivo neurophysiological measures during grip strength in preclinical and/or clinical groups with altered stress physiology

· Clinical and preclinical biomarkers of altered neurohormonal stress responses in relation to grip strength or force profile impairment

· Innovative and comparative exploration of grip strength-related methodologies in clinical/pre-clinical settings

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Frontiers in Psychiatry

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