Psychiatry / Psychology
Say no to vodka, president tells Russians
President Dmitry Medvedev has told Russians they must kick the alcohol habit.
“We drink more now than in the 1990s, although those were difficult times,” the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Medvedev as saying on Tuesday.
Health Minister Tatyana Golikova has been ordered to devise an anti-alcohol strategy. “We need to prepare a corresponding programme and take appropriate measures,” Medvedev said.
A report by The Lancet medical journal last week said alcohol-related diseases caused around half of all deaths of Russians between the ages of 15 and 54.
Study shows 1 in 25 deaths worldwide attributable to alcohol
Research from Canada’s own Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) featured in this week’s edition of the Lancet shows that worldwide, 1 in 25 deaths are directly attributable to alcohol consumption. This rise since 2000 is mainly due to increases in the number of women drinking.
CAMH’s Dr Jürgen Rehm and his colleagues found that alcohol-attributable disorders are among the most disabling disease categories within the global burden of disease, especially for men. And in contrast to other traditional risk factors for disease, the burden attributable to alcohol lies more with younger people than with the older population.
Dr. Rehm still takes an optimistic ‘glass half full’ response to this large and increasing alcohol-attributable burden. “Today, we know more than ever about which strategies can effectively and cost-effectively control alcohol-related harms,” Dr. Rehm said today. “Provided that our public policy makers act on these practical strategies expeditiously, we could see an enormous impact in reducing damage.”
Measuring intellectual disability
Researchers from the University of California, Davis have developed a specific and quantitative means of measuring levels of the fragile X mental retardation 1 (FMR1) protein (FMRP), which is mutated in fragile X syndrome. The related report by Iwahashi et al, “A quantitative ELISA assay for the fragile X mental retardation 1 protein,” appears in the July 2009 issue of the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics.
Fragile X syndrome is the most common form of inherited intellectual impairment. Nearly one third of patients diagnosed with fragile X syndrome also have some degree of autism, and the mutation underlying fragile X syndrome is the most commonly known single gene cause of autism.
Fragile X syndrome is caused by low levels of the FMRP protein, which is thought to play a role in communication between nerve cells. In patients with fragile X syndrome, a sequence in the FMR1 gene that is repeated 10-40 times in normal individuals may be repeated from 200 to more than 1,000 times, decreasing levels of the FMRP protein.
Gene predicts how brain responds to fatigue, human study shows
New imaging research in the June 24 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience helps explain why sleep deprivation affects some people more than others. After staying awake all night, those who are genetically vulnerable to sleep loss showed reduced brain activity, while those who are genetically resilient showed expanded brain activity, the study found. The findings help explain individual differences in the ability to compensate for lack of sleep.
“The extent to which individuals are affected by sleep deprivation varies, with some crashing out and others holding up well after a night without sleep,” said Michael Chee, MBBS, at the Duke–National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School, an expert on sleep deprivation who was not affiliated with the study. However, studying how the brain produces these behavioral differences is difficult: researchers usually do not know whether their study participants will be vulnerable to sleep deprivation until after a study is complete. Previous studies have shown conflicting results, perhaps because the study subjects differed widely in vulnerability to sleep deprivation.
In the current study, the researchers, led by Pierre Maquet, MD, at the University of Lìege in Belgium and Derk-Jan Dijk, PhD, at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, avoided this problem by selecting study participants based on their genes. Previous research showed that the PERIOD3 (PER3) gene predicts how people will respond to sleep deprivation. People carry either long or short variants of the gene. Those with the short PER3 variant are resilient to sleep loss — they perform well on cognitive tasks after sleep deprivation. However, those with the long PER3 variant are vulnerable — they show deficits in cognitive performance after sleep deprivation. Now the new study explains why.
63 percent of RA patients suffer psychiatric disorders, with depressive spectrum conditions most lik
Copenhagen, Denmark, Friday 12 June 2009: Over half (63%) of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) also suffer from psychiatric disorders, with the majority of these (87%) occurring in the depressive spectrum, according to the results of a new study presented today at EULAR 2009, the Annual Congress of the European League Against Rheumatism in Copenhagen, Denmark. Interestingly, over half (52%) of the patients studied indicated that they had experienced stress events before the onset of their RA.
The study also revealed a number of other interesting findings about the emotional burden of RA:
* Cognitive dysfunction was diagnosed in 23% of patients, with 16% of this attributed to depression
* A third (33%) suffered from sleep disorders
* Those with depression also exhibited more severe RA (measured by X-ray), greater functional insufficiency and pain, as well as having received less aggressive treatment than patients without depression. (No significant differences in age, duration of illness, gender or DAS28* scores were noted between the two groups)
* Significantly, cognitive impairments were found more often (p=0.02) in patients older than 50 years (39% vs. 9%)
* The age of the first prednisone intake was significantly higher (p<0.05) in patients with depression compared to those without (48 vs. 30 years)
Relationship found between napping, hyperactivity, depression and anxiety
Napping may have a significant influence on young children’s daytime functioning, according to a research abstract that will be presented on Monday, June 8 at SLEEP 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.
Results indicate that children between the ages of 4 and 5 who did not take daytime naps were reported by their parents to exhibit higher levels of hyperactivity, anxiety and depression than children who continued to nap at this age.
According to lead author Brian Crosby, PhD, postdoctoral fellow of psychology at Pennsylvania State University, previous studies have shown that poor or inadequate sleep is linked with symptoms of hyperactivity, anxiety and depression; researchers involved in this study were happy to demonstrate the potential importance of napping for optimal daytime functioning in young children, as napping is often overlooked in favor of nighttime or total sleep.
Antidepressant curbs cancer-related mental ills
People with cancer often suffer mental impairment, but it seems this can be alleviated by treatment with Paxil, an SSRI-type antidepressant, according to results of a National Cancer Institute-supported study.
The findings were reported this week at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in Orlando.
“Cancer and its treatment impact important areas of cognitive function such as attention and memory, which are essential to patients’ effective psychosocial functioning and quality of life,” Dr. Pascal Jean-Pierre, from the University of Rochester, New York and colleagues point out in a meeting paper.
Drinking to up mood tied to alcoholism, depression
People who drink to cope with the blues are more prone to becoming depressed and at greater risk of alcohol dependence, a new study shows.
The study team sought to determine whether drinking to manage mood might be related to both alcoholism and depression by looking at 5,181 twins aged 30 and older. Twin studies allow scientists to tease out the effects of environment and genes on certain traits.
Kelly C. Young-Wolff of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and her colleagues found that drinking to manage mood was strongly inherited and accounted for basically all of the genetic and environmental influences shared by depression and alcohol dependence.
Researchers find promotion is bad for mental health and stops you visiting the doctor
New research by economics and psychology researchers at the University of Warwick has found that promotion on average produces 10% more mental strain and gives up to 20% less time to visit the Doctors.
In a research paper entitled “Do People Become Healthier after Being Promoted” Chris Boyce and Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick questioned why people with higher job status seem to have better health. A long-held assumption by researchers is that an improvement to a person’s job status, through a promotion, will directly result in better health due to an increased sense of life control and self-worth.
The researchers tested this. They drew upon the British Household Panel Survey data set, collected annually between 1991 and 2005, with information on approximately 1000 individual promotions. They found no evidence of improved physical health after promotion – nor that self-assessed feelings of health declined.
Mothers’ bereavement does not raise autism risk
Severe stress during pregnancy has been proposed as a risk factor for autism, but a new study finds that at least one source of such stress appears unrelated to the disorder.
The study, which analyzed records on 1.5 million children born in Denmark, found no evidence of an increased autism risk among children whose mothers lost a close family member shortly before or during pregnancy.
The findings, reported in the journal Pediatrics, suggest that mothers’ bereavement—as an indicator of substantial stress—does not contribute to autism risk.
Risk of progression to dementia overestimated
People with mild cognitive impairment appear to have a lower risk of progressing to full blown dementia than previously thought, according to a new report.
Mild cognitive impairment is a transitional stage between normal brain function and dementia/Alzheimer’s disease.
It’s estimated that up to 15 percent of people with mild cognitive impairment go on to develop dementia, Dr. Alex J. Mitchell, of the University of Leicester, and Dr. M. Shiri-Feshki, of Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, note in a report in the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica.
Psychiatric disorders are common in adults who have had anorexia
The study was initiated in 1985. A total of 51 teenagers with anorexia nervosa were studied, together with an equally large control group of healthy persons. The groups have been investigated and compared several times as the years have passed.
“This study is unique in an international perspective. It is the only study in the world that reflects the natural course of anorexia nervosa in the population”, says Elisabet Wentz, Associate Professor in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the Sahlgrenska Academy.
The research group has published new results from the study in two scientific journals: the British Journal of Psychiatry and the International Journal of Eating Disorders.
Heightened Level of Amygdala Activity May Cause Social Deficits in Autism
Something strange is going on in the amygdala – an almond-shaped structure deep in the human brain – among people with autism.
Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered an increased pattern of brain activity in the amygdalas of adults with autism that may be linked to the social deficits that typically are associated with the disorder. Previous research at the UW and elsewhere has shown that abnormal growth patterns in the amygdala are commonly found among young children diagnosed with autism.
The amygdala is popularly associated with the “fight-or-flight response” in dangerous situations. But it has other functions, including identifying faces and situations and evaluating social information such as emotions.
Stigma worse for “gender-typical” mentally ill
How we feel towards a mentally ill person has a lot to do with how closely that person’s symptoms hew to gender stereotypes, new research shows.
People “don’t have much sympathy” for someone with more stereotypical problems, specifically a woman with major depression or an alcoholic man, Dr. Galen V. Bodenhausen of Northwestern University in Chicago explained in an interview. But when a person’s symptoms are out of line with these stereotypes—say, an alcoholic woman or a depressed man—we will view them more positively, and want to help them, he said.
Stereotypes of the mentally ill fall into two categories: “violence/dangerousness” or “dependency/incompetence,” Bodenhausen and Dr. James H. Wirth of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana note. Men are more likely to be seen as violent, while women are typically seen as dependent.
Need for control drives assisted suicide seekers
People who request a doctor’s help in dying are doing so out of a desire to remain independent and in control, new research from Oregon shows.
At the time the study was done, Oregon was the only state in the US where physician-assisted suicide was legal; Washington state has since passed a nearly identical law, Dr. Linda Ganzini of Oregon Health & Science University noted in an interview with Reuters Health.
When Oregon passed its law in 1994, Ganzini added, the perception had been that people seeking help in dying would be vulnerable minority women without access to good end-of-life care. But these findings show that the real story is quite different, she said; “these are overwhelmingly white, well-educated, economically advantaged people who have a strong need to be in control.”
