Psychiatry / Psychology
Depression and anger can plague recent university graduates: Study
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The post-university years can start out tough. The good news: it gets better.
A new University of Alberta study of almost 600 of its graduates (ages 20-29 years old) tracked mental health symptoms in participants for seven years post-graduation and looked at how key events like leaving home and becoming a parent were related to depression and anger. Graduates showed a significant decrease in depressive symptoms over the seven years. Expressed anger also declined over time after graduation, suggesting improved mental health.
The researchers also found that while home may be a haven for young people in the early years of adulthood, the longer they stay at home, or if they return home, the more likely they are to experience symptoms of depression. Previous research has found that more than half of students under 25 in four-year university programs lived with their parents.
DVDs help caregivers of eating disorder patients
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Caregivers of eating disorder patients who used a skills training DVD along with telephone coaching to help them cope with their loved one’s illness were highly satisfied with the program, saying it helped reduce their stress levels, UK researchers report.
With just 14 participants, the study was too small to show a significant effect of the training program on caregivers’ psychological distress or depression, but there was a trend toward users having less distress after completing the program, Dr. Ana R. Sepulveda of Guy’s Hospital, London and colleagues found.
“The high acceptance rate of this pilot study also shows that the carers of people with eating disorders seem highly motivated to receive support and take an active part in helping their relatives to recover,” the researchers say.
Bladder trouble tied to depression, anxiety
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Women who suffer from “dysfunctional voiding”—like having to urinate often and having difficulty voiding—experience a greater degree of depression and anxiety compared to women without these symptoms, research suggests.
“Dysfunctional voiding ... is more commonly seen in recent years,” Dr. Alex T. L. Lin, of Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taiwan, told Reuters Health. “Although we suspect that depression and anxiety are reactions to the dysfunctional voiding, we could not preclude the possibility that psychological abnormalities might predispose one to the occurrence of lower urinary tract dysfunction,” he commented.
Lin noted that the stressful environment of modern society might be a contributing factor for the increased incidence of dysfunctional voiding.
Prior assault boosts PTSD risk after combat
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Men and women who were assaulted before entering military service are more than twice as likely to develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after combat deployment, Navy researchers report.
It’s estimated that as many as 1 in 10 veterans returning from the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have symptoms of PTSD. Some investigators have suggested that past stressful events can protect people from developing PTSD via “stress inoculation,” while others argue that such stresses actually make people more vulnerable.
To investigate the effect of having been assaulted before combat exposure on the likelihood of developing PTSD, Dr. Tyler C. Smith of the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego and colleagues looked at 5,324 men and women participating in the Millennium Cohort study. All were in military service as of October 1, 2000, were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, and were free from PTSD when they entered the study.
PTSD common in chronic migraine sufferers
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Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is more common in people who suffer from chronic migraine headache than in those with episodic migraine headache, research suggests.
“Recent data suggest that PTSD may be more common in headache sufferers than in the general population,” Dr. B. Lee Peterlin, of Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and colleagues note in the journal Headache.
They assessed the relative frequency of PTSD in 32 patients with episodic migraine and 28 with chronic migraine. People with chronic migraine typically have headaches on 15 or more days a month, while people with episodic migraine have fewer than 15 days of headache per month.
Low Levels of Vitamin D Associated With Depression in Older Adults
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Older adults with low blood levels of vitamin D and high blood levels of a hormone secreted by the parathyroid glands may have a higher risk of depression, according to a report in the May issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
About 13 percent of older individuals have symptoms of depression, and other researchers have speculated that vitamin D may be linked to depression and other psychiatric illnesses, according to background information in the article. “Underlying causes of vitamin D deficiency such as less sun exposure as a result of decreased outdoor activity, different housing or clothing habits and decreased vitamin intake may be secondary to depression, but depression may also be the consequence of poor vitamin D status,” the authors write. “Moreover, poor vitamin D status causes an increase in serum parathyroid hormone levels.” Overactive parathyroid glands are frequently accompanied by symptoms of depression that disappear after treatment of the condition.
Prolonged breastfeeding tied to higher IQ
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Children who are exclusively breastfed for at least 3 months tend to be more cognitively advanced at school age, according to findings from the Promotion of Breastfeeding Intervention Trial (PROBIT).
In the PROBIT Study, 31 maternal hospitals and affiliated clinics in the Republic of Belarus adopted a program supporting and promoting breastfeeding or continued their current practices and policies. More than 17,000 healthy newborns were enrolled between June 1996 and December 1997.
Significantly more infants born at the intervention hospitals were breastfed at 3 months (73 percent vs 60 percent), and remained so throughout their first year. The rate of exclusive breastfeeding was 7-fold higher in the intervention group at 3 months (43 percent vs 6 percent).
Low vitamin D boosts depression risk in seniors
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Older people with low blood levels of vitamin D and high blood levels of parathyroid hormone are more likely to be depressed, Dutch researchers report.
But it remains unclear whether these abnormalities are a cause or a consequence of depression, Dr. Witte J. G. Hoogendijk and colleagues from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam say.
Past studies have linked altered levels of vitamin D and parathyroid hormone with depression, but the relationship “has never been studied systematically,” Hoogendijk and colleagues note. To investigate, they looked at 1,282 men and women aged 65 to 95 years participating in a long-term study of aging.
Nearly 40 percent of the men and 57 percent of women had low levels of vitamin D in their blood.
Children and Video Games: How Much Do We Know?
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There is no shortage of hyperbole when politicians of all stripes describe the nature and effects of video games. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney proclaimed, “Pornography and violence poison our music and movies and TV and video games. The Virginia Tech shooter, like the Columbine shooters before him, had drunk from this cesspool.” Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke of the game, “Grand Theft Auto, which has so many demeaning messages about women, and so encourages violent imagination and activities, and it scares parents.”
Some researchers have echoed similar sentiments, noting that Columbine High School shooters Dylan Harris and Eric Klebold were avid computer gamers. Several television pundits quickly drew a link between the recent Virginia Tech shootings and video games, as well. (Ironically, Seung-Hui Cho’s college roommates found it odd that he never joined them in playing video games.)
Do these assumptions about video-game violence leading to similarly violent behavior among child and adolescent players make sense? A review of the research gives us insights into which patterns of video game play may serve as potential markers of more serious problems among children and adolescents, and which are normal or even possibly beneficial.
Haunted by hallucinations: Children in the PICU traumatized by delusions
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Nearly one in three children admitted to pediatric intensive care will experience delusions or hallucinations, which put them at higher risk for post-traumatic stress symptoms, according to a new study of children’s experiences in a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU).
The study, which appears in the first issue for May of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, published by the American Thoracic Society, is believed to be the largest ever conducted on children’s memories of PICU.
The results confirmed the clinical experience of the study’s first author, Gillian Colville, B.Sc., M.Phil., a clinical psychologist, and underscore the need to look at this issue more closely. “I have worked for 16 years in pediatric intensive care and have seen a considerable number of children in distress, but have found that there is very little in the literature about children’s experiences,” said Ms. Colville.
Alzheimer Disease Risks Are Gender Specific
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The risks of developing Alzheimer’s disease differ between the sexes, with stroke in men, and depression in women, critical factors, suggests research published ahead of print in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.
The French researchers base their findings on almost 7000 people over the age of 65, drawn from the general population in three French cities.
None had dementia, but around four out of 10 were deemed to have mildly impaired mental agility (mild cognitive impairment) at the start of the study.
Drinking dulls the brain’s response to threats
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Drinking alcohol dulls the brain’s ability to detect threats, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday in a study that helps explain why people who are drunk cannot tell when the guy at the end of the bar is angling for a fight.
They said the study is the first to show how alcohol affects the human brain as it responds to threats.
“You see this all of the time. People get into confrontations when they are intoxicated that they probably wouldn’t get into when they are sober,” said Jodi Gilman of the National Institutes on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, whose study appears in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Late-pregnancy depression predicts postnatal woes
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Helping women who suffer from depression during pregnancy could reduce their risk of remaining depressed after giving birth and, in turn, reduce the level of stress they experience in early parenthood, Australian researchers report.
The strongest predictor of whether or not a woman would have postnatal depression was whether she was depressed shortly before giving birth, also known as the antenatal period, Drs. Bronwyn Leigh of Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital Austin Health in Heidelberg Heights and Jeannette Milgrom of the University of Melbourne found. And postnatal depression was, in turn, the only significant risk factor for high levels of parenting stress.
To date, research and treatment efforts have targeted postnatal depression, the researchers note, but less is known about risk factors for antenatal depression and early parenting stress.
Job characteristics may be linked to dementia risk
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High-complexity jobs that primarily involve work with people or things are associated with a reduced risk of developing dementia, a Canadian study suggests.
Dr. Edeltraut Kroger and colleagues found the risk of dementia may be 34 percent lower in occupations like teaching that require highly complex interactions with people, as opposed to jobs requiring lower levels of people interaction.
The investigators also observed about a 28 percent reduced risk for dementia among people with jobs that involve high levels of complex interactions with things, such as farming. However, this association was “less reliable, and the result we observed has not been confirmed by other studies,” Kroger told Reuters Health.
Ritalin may help seniors stay steady on their feet
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Taking methylphenidate—familiar as the drug Ritalin used to treat attention-deficit disorder—could help older people reduce their risk of falling by sharpening their mental function, Israeli researchers report.
After taking one dose of methylphenidate, seniors walked with a more even gait and did better on a standard screening test for fall risk, Dr. Jeffrey M. Hausdorff and colleagues found.
“Our study suggests that it may be possible to reduce the risk of falls in older adults by treating cognitive deficits associated with aging (and/or disease),” Hausdorff, of Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center in Israel, told Reuters Health by email.
