Psychiatry / Psychology
Postpartum mothers of twins have significant sleep restriction, depressive symptoms
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Postpartum mothers of twins have significant sleep restriction and depressive symptoms, according to a research abstract that will be presented on Monday at SLEEP 2008, the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).
The study, authored by Elizabeth Damato, PhD, of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, focused on 14 mothers of twins that were, on average, delivered three-and-a-half weeks early. Measures included actigraphy, sleep diaries, and standardized instruments for fatigue, sleep quality, and depression.
According to the results, by the time the twins reached full-term, mothers were sleeping an average of 5.4 hours in a 24-hour period, with over 70 percent reporting less than six hours of sleep. Furthermore, the sleep was very fragmented, with an average of 15.1 sleep episodes daily, each lasting an average of 22.4 minutes. Almost half of mothers reported mild to severe depressive symptoms. By the time the twins had been home for eight weeks, average sleep duration had only improved marginally to 5.6 hours daily, although this was achieved in fewer sleep episodes lasting an average of 31.8 minutes each. The percentage of women with depressive symptoms decreased to less than 25 percent. Mothers reported improved sleep quality and decreased fatigue levels over time.
Thinness vs. obesity not directly linked to eating habits, study suggests
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Whether you are fat or thin isn’t directly determined by your eating habits, suggest researchers who report new findings made in worms in the June issue of Cell Metabolism, a publication of Cell Press. While both feeding and fat in worms depends on serotonin levels in the nervous system, they found evidence that the nerve messenger acts through independent channels to control whether you eat versus what to do with those calories once you’ve eaten them.
“It says that the nervous system is a key regulator coordinating all energy-related processes through distinct molecular pathways,” said Kaveh Ashrafi of the University of California, San Francisco. “The nervous system makes a decision about its state leading to effects on behavior, reproduction, growth and metabolism. These outputs are related, but they are not consequences of each other. It’s not that feeding isn’t important, but the neural control of fat is distinct from feeding.”
If the results in worms can be extrapolated to humans, as Ashrafi suspects at a fundamental level they can given serotonin’s ancient evolutionary origins, then the finding may have clinical implications.
Family therapy helpful in young children with OCD
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Many young children who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder may get better with the help of psychological therapy that involves their parents as well, a small study suggests.
Children as young as 3 have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, an anxiety disorder in which people have persistent, intrusive thoughts that drive them to ritualistically perform certain actions.
Someone with an obsessive fear of germs, for example, might wash his or her hands over and over throughout the day. In a young child, the same obsession might cause the child to repeatedly lick his or her hands.
Reliving trauma can help prevent PTSD: study
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People who undergo a type of psychotherapy in which they relive a traumatic event are less likely to get post-traumatic stress disorder than those getting another common form of therapy, researchers said on Monday.
The Australian study, which involved people who had experienced a vehicle crash or a nonsexual assault, was the latest to show the value of using so-called prolonged exposure therapy for PTSD, a sometimes debilitating anxiety disorder.
The growing number of U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD has focused attention on the condition, adding urgency to efforts to learn how best to deal with it.
Report confirms increased risk of smoking, substance abuse in bipolar adolescents
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A study from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) supports previous reports that adolescents with bipolar disorder are at increased risk for smoking and substance abuse. The article appearing in the June Drug and Alcohol Dependence – describing the largest such investigation to date and the first to include a control group – also indicates that bipolar-associated risk is independent of the risk conferred by other disorders affecting study participants.
“This work confirms that bipolar disorder (BPD) in adolescents is a huge risk factor for smoking and substance abuse, as big a risk factor as is juvenile delinquency,” says Timothy Wilens, MD, director of Substance Abuse Services in MGH Pediatric Psychopharmacology, who led the study. “It indicates both that young people with BPD need to carefully be screened for smoking and for substance use and abuse and that adolescents known to abuse drugs and alcohol – especially those who binge use – should also be assessed for BPD.”
It has been estimated that up to 20 percent of children and adolescents treated for psychiatric problems have bipolar disorder, and there is evidence that pediatric and adolescent BPD may have features, such as particularly frequent and dramatic mood swings, not found in the adult form of the disorder. While elevated levels of smoking and substance abuse previously have been reported in young and adult BPD patients, it has not been clear how the use and abuse of substances relates to the presence of BPD or whether any increased risk could be attributed to co-existing conditions such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder or anxiety disorders.
“Silent” heart attack boosts dementia risk
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Men who are found to have had an unrecognized or “silent” heart attack are at increased risk of developing dementia or small lesions in the brain that can affect cognition, Dutch researchers report.
Dr. Monique M. B. Breteler told Reuters Health that her group had previously found that men, but not women, with a silent heart attack are more likely to have a stroke than men who had a recognized heart attack or those who had not had any heart attack.
To examine whether this might also be the case for dementia and so-called cerebral small vessel disease, Breteler of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and her colleagues examined data for more than 6300 participants in a population-based study.
People with ADHD Do One Month’s Less Work Per Year
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Workers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) do 22 days less work per year than people who do not have the disorder, finds research published online ahead of print in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
So much work is being lost that the researchers recommend employers consider screening staff for ADHD and providing treatment for those affected, because it would be more cost-effective for their businesses.
People who have ADHD find it difficult to concentrate because they may be hyperactive, easily distracted, forgetful or impulsive. Children with the disorder are being increasingly diagnosed because they are likely to be tested for ADHD if they have problems with their schoolwork. However, many adults with ADHD do not know they have the condition.
Study: Premature ejaculation defined
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Experts from 10 countries, including Australia, the United States, Germany and Egypt, say they have defined life-long premature ejaculation.
Co-author Dr. Chris G McMahon of the University of Sydney says they developed the first-ever evidence-based definition of lifelong premature ejaculation in the hope it will aid future diagnosis, treatment and research.
The definition was developed after lengthy critical evaluation of the evidence presented in more than 100 studies on the sexual problem published over the last 65 years. It was unanimously agreed by the experts that the definition of lifelong premature ejaculation should be a combination of three key factors:
Childhood anxiety may worsen anorexia
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Anorexic women with a history of childhood anxiety may have particularly severe symptoms of the eating disorder, a study suggests.
It’s known that anxiety disorders, like social phobia and obsessive compulsive disorder, are far more common among people with anorexia than in the general population. Often, these anxiety disorders appear before the eating disorder does.
In the new study, published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, researchers looked at whether a history of childhood “overanxious disorder” was related to the severity of women’s anorexia.
Rapid prostate cancer test does not ease anxiety
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The stress and anxiety associated with receiving results of a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test for prostate cancer is not relieved by using rapid PSA tests, but men still prefer to have their results quickly, results of a study indicate.
Waiting for PSA results often creates anxiety for patients and their families because of the potential implications, researchers explain. Dr. Simon Wilkinson from Weiss Memorial Hospital, Chicago, Illinois and colleagues investigated whether reporting PSA results within 15 minutes of obtaining the blood sample would cause less anxiety to patients than reporting the results 1 or 4 days later.
Adopted kids at increased risk for mental problems
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US adolescents who were adopted as infants are about twice as likely to have a disruptive behavior disorder as their non-adopted peers, research shows.
“Although most adopted American teens are psychologically healthy, adoptees appear to be at greater risk for some behavior disorders, especially among those domestically placed,” Dr. Margaret A. Keyes told Reuters Health.
Keyes, of the department of psychology, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and colleagues analyzed the mental health of 540 non-adopted adolescents, 514 internationally adopted adolescents and 178 domestically adopted adolescents. All of the adoptees were adopted in infancy.
Obesity tied to risk of psychiatric disorders
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Obesity is a well known risk factor for certain physical health problems, but a new study suggests that heavy adults also have higher rates of psychiatric disorders.
Using data from a national health survey of more than 40,000 Americans, researchers found that obese adults were up to twice as likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and other mental health conditions as normal-weight adults.
In addition, even moderately overweight people had elevated rates of anxiety disorders, the study found.
Female sex offenders often have mental problems
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Women who commit sexual offences are just as likely to have mental problems or drug addictions as other violent female criminals. This according to the largest study ever conducted of women convicted of sexual offences in Sweden.
Between 1988 and 2000, 93 women and 8,500 men were convicted of sexual offences in Sweden. Given that previous research has focused on male perpetrators, knowledge of the factors specific to female sex offenders has been scant.
A group of researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have now looked into incidences of mental illness and drug abuse in these 93 convicted women, and compared them with over 20,000 randomly selected women in the normal population and with the 13,000-plus women who were convicted of non-sexual crimes over the same period.
MS can affect children’s IQ, thinking skills
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Multiple sclerosis (MS) typically starts in young adulthood, but about five percent of cases start in childhood or the teen years. Children with MS are at risk to exhibit low IQ scores and problems with memory, attention and other thinking skills, according to a study published in the May 13, 2008, issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Children who developed the disease at a younger age were more likely to have low IQ scores than children who were older when the disease started.
“It’s possible that MS can show an even more dramatic effect on the thinking skills and intelligence in children than in adults, since the disease might affect the brain at a time when it is still developing,” said study author Maria Pia Amato, MD, of the University of Florence in Italy.
Genetic links to impaired social behavior in autism
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Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show profound deficits in social interactions and communications, and display repetitive behaviors and abnormal responses to sensory experiences. One aspect of an autistic child’s impaired social abilities is their lack of affiliative behaviors, i.e., behaviors such as touching and hugging that strengthen social bonds. On May 15th, Biological Psychiatry is publishing an article that reports new findings on genetic bases of these behaviors.
In this study, Yale University researchers recruited, genotyped, and clinically assessed a large sample of autistic children and their families. They specifically examined the genetic variants in six genes known to be involved in maternal and affiliative behaviors. Dr. Elena Grigorenko, the senior author, discusses their study, “Animal studies have taught us that genetic factors can play a crucial role in the development of close affiliative ties. With the help of Yale’s Autism Center of Excellence, led by Drs. Ami Klin and Fred Volkmar, and many families of individuals with ASD, we have registered a possible association between some of the genes identified in animal studies as controlling affiliative behaviors in ASD.” The strongest statistical findings of the study implicate the prolactin gene, the prolactin receptor gene, and the oxytocin receptor gene in these affiliative behavior deficits.
