Codrin Mironiuc, PhD candidate
Unfortunately, weight (re)gain occurs quite frequently after treatment has ended. On average, people regain approximately one third of their lost weight in the first year after an intensive lifestyle intervention, but the degree of weight regain is highly variable across people. Codrin’s PhD project is part of the End of Average project, which investigates if and how long-term (6- and 12-month follow-up) weight change after the intervention depends on the comprehensive individual profiles as well as on the post-treatment daily lifestyle networks. Weight regain has been associated with a drop in adherence to a healthy lifestyle. For people with overweight and obesity, it would be valuable to catch this adherence-drop early, and be able to predict weight change early on within an individual.
The project includes an extensive case-series, and will closely follow a subgroup of 50 participants with overweight or obesity post-treatment for 6 months. These participants will measure their bodyweight daily, and will continue the measurements for the daily lifestyle networks during these 6 months. Their lifestyle networks will be updated daily during this period, based on data from a 7-day moving window. The End of Average will investigate if weight change during this 6-month period can be predicted early, based on characteristics of the daily updated individual’s network. Codrin’s research focuses on the follow-up phase of the project using the techniques mentioned above.
Publications that I’m most proud of
Gesture dynamics and therapeutic success in patient-therapist dyads. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2021.
In this article, we investigated gesture dynamics by examining wrist-worn accelerometer data from 28 patient-therapist dyads involved in mentalization-based therapy. We considered fractal dynamics (fractals are structures that exhibit self-similarity over temporal and spatial scales, including in natural psychological and physiological processes). These characteristics can be identifiable by measuring patterns of autocorrelation in time series data. We predicted that wrist movements of patients and therapists would produce fractal scaling exponents, and then we tested if there are correlations between the scaling exponents (complexity matching) in patient-therapist dyads.
Immuno-Metabolic Dysregulation in Depression: Combined Associations With Anhedonia and Atypical Energy-Related Symptoms. Biological Psychiatry, 2023.
This article supplement investigates the overlap and specificity of associations between immuno-metabolic dysregulation and anhedonia and atypical energy-related symptoms. We included 2,938 participants of the Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA) study. We found that anhedonia and atypical energy-related depressive symptoms were both associated with increased inflammation and metabolic risk, and partial overlap was observed. A future full article may potentially be published on this work.
