Psychiatry / Psychology
Growing up with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders
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Saint Louis University researchers in the department of family and community medicine have received an $880,000, three-year grant from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to develop and test a new program aimed at helping older children and young adults with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD) successfully transition into adulthood.
The new program will focus on teaching important life skills, such as how to cope with new situations and minimize disruptive behaviors that could lead to loss of employment or trouble with the law.
According to Leigh Tenkku, Ph.D., assistant professor of family and community medicine at Saint Louis University, while the effects of FASD are life-long, currently there are very few support systems in place to help these individuals and their families as they get older.
Understanding the implications of prenatal testing for Down syndrome
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With new prenatal tests for Down syndrome on the horizon promising to be safer, more accurate, and available to women earlier in pregnancy, the medical community must come together and engage in dialogue about the impact of existing and expected tests, argues a new leading article published Online First by Archives of Disease in Childhood. Authored by Brian Skotko, MD, MPP, clinical genetics fellow at Children’s Hospital Boston, the article shows a steady decrease in the number of babies being born with Down syndrome since the introduction of prenatal testing and poses the question: “As new tests become available, will babies with Down syndrome slowly disappear?”
Research reviewed by Skotko showed a 15% decrease in births of babies with Down syndrome between 1989 and 2005 in the United States. In the absence of prenatal testing, researchers would have anticipated the opposite - a 34% increase in births - due to the trend of women waiting longer to have children; known to increase the chances of having a baby with Down syndrome.
Postpartum Baby Blues Impact Majority of New Moms
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Tracy Perkins Rodriguez, 36, thought her life was finally on the upswing. When her husband returned from his third tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, the couple purchased their dream home and promptly became pregnant with the child they had always hoped to conceive together. However, as Rodriguez entered her third trimester of pregnancy, she began feeling tired with little enthusiasm for everyday life.
“Before my last trimester of pregnancy, I was an upbeat person who was always on the go,” Rodriguez said. “After I delivered my baby and returned home, I began crying every day and found that I no longer had energy to get out of bed and leave the house.”
Rodriguez is not alone. Postpartum blues impact more than 80 percent of women who give birth. Symptoms include temporarily feeling sad and weepy or anxious and moody. Other signs include being angry at the baby, husband or other children.
Study finds US prison system falls short in treating drug addiction
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Almost a quarter of a million individuals addicted to heroin are incarcerated in the United States each year. However, many prison systems across the country still do not offer medical treatment for heroin and opiate addiction, despite the demonstrated social, medical and economic benefits of opiate replacement therapy (ORT).
According to new research from The Miriam Hospital, Brown University and their affiliated Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights, just half of all federal and state prison systems offer ORT with the medications methadone and buprenorphine, and only in very limited circumstances. Similarly, only twenty-three states provide referrals for some inmates to treatment upon release from prison. These policies are counter to guidelines issued by both the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which say prisoners should be offered ORT for treatment of opiate dependence.
The study’s findings are published online by Drug and Alcohol Dependence.
One in 10 binge-drinkers drive afterward: study
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More than 10 percent of U.S. adults who binge-drink admits to getting behind the wheel after doing so, a government study finds.
Researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that among more than 14,000 Americans who reported binge-drinking, 12 percent said they drove within two hours of their most recent binge.
In more than half of those cases, the driver had been drinking at a bar, club or restaurant.
Both binge-drinking and drunk driving are well-known public health problems in the U.S., with Americans going on 1.5 billion drinking binges a year. A binge is defined as downing five or more drinks on a single occasion.
Sildenafil, aka Viagra, may not help vets with PTSD
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Sildenafil - marketed as Viagra—may not be much help to men who have erectile dysfunction (ED) related to post-traumatic stress disorder, a new study suggests.
Viagra is often effective for ED related to various causes—including heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. But studies indicate that as many of half of men who try the drug do not respond adequately.
In the new study, Iranian researchers looked at whether Viagra was helpful for combat veterans who were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as well as ED. It’s unclear how many men with PTSD suffer from sexual problems such as ED, although some studies have shown that a majority do so.
Binge drinking a problem for older adults too
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Binge drinking is usually seen as a problem of college campuses, but many older adults may be overindulging in alcohol as well, a study published Monday suggests.
Using data from a government survey of nearly 11,000 Americans age 50 and up, researchers found that 23 percent of men between the ages of 50 and 64 admitted to binge drinking in the past month, as did roughly 9 percent of women.
Among adults age 65 and older, more than 14 percent of men and 3 percent of women reported bingeing—defined as having five or more drinks on one occasion, on at least one day in the past month.
Antidepressant use doubles in U.S., study finds
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Use of antidepressant drugs in the United States doubled between 1996 and 2005, probably because of a mix of factors, researchers reported on Monday.
About 6 percent of people were prescribed an antidepressant in 1996 - 13 million people. This rose to more than 10 percent or 27 million people by 2005, the researchers found.
“Significant increases in antidepressant use were evident across all sociodemographic groups examined, except African Americans,” Dr. Mark Olfson of Columbia University in New York and Steven Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia wrote in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Sinai Physiatrist Enthusiatic About Word Addition
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It’s a word that’s been around since the days of the Truman presidency. But a patient looking up “physiatry” would find nothing in the dictionary.
Until now.
Last week, Merriam-Webster Inc. released its list of the more than 100 entries now included in the latest edition of its Collegiate Dictionary. Physiatry, a synonym for physical medicine and rehabilitation, made the cut, along with locavore, fan fiction and earmark.
The physiatrists at Sinai Hospital couldn’t be happier about the linguistic recognition of their field.
Swiss group agrees on rules for assisted suicide
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Swiss right-to-die group Exit has agreed to rules to govern the practice of assisted suicide with prosecutors in the city of Zurich that it hopes might eventually form the basis of national regulation, they said on Friday.
The rules include that assisted suicide is only allowed for those in serious suffering due to health problems, accident or disability; all other options must be exhausted and only a deadly dose of anaesthetic sodium pentobarbital can be used.
The deal, which was signed on Tuesday, said Exit was not allowed to make a profit from helping people die and can charge a maximum of 500 Swiss francs ($461) per assisted suicide.
Teens’ drinking linked to mental health problems
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Teenagers who drink heavily are also more likely than their peers to have behavioral problems or symptoms of depression and anxiety, a new study finds.
The study, of nearly 9,000 Norwegian teenagers, found that those who said they had been drunk more than 10 times in their lives were more likely to have attention and conduct problems in school. Meanwhile, heavy-drinking girls showed higher rates of depression and anxiety symptoms.
The findings, published in the online journal Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health, are based on a one-time survey. They do not, therefore, show whether the drinking came before or after the teenagers’ other problems.
Say no to vodka, president tells Russians
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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
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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
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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
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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.
