Psychiatry / Psychology
Amsterdam clinic offers gamers path back to reality
|
|
Addiction expert Keith Bakker hopes the serenity of a 16th century townhouse on one of Amsterdam’s canals will coax those snared in the fantasy world of online games back to reality.
The townhouse, where sunlight warms the honey-colored wood of the centuries-old floors, houses Europe’s first clinic for people hooked on playing online games.
It is run by addiction consultants Smith & Jones, who felt there was a need for treatment even though experts are still debating whether excessive game playing is an addiction.
Hallucinogen in mushrooms creates mystical/spiritual experiences
|
|
Using unusually rigorous scientific conditions and measures, Johns Hopkins researchers have shown that the active agent in “sacred mushrooms” can induce mystical/spiritual experiences descriptively identical to spontaneous ones people have reported for centuries.
The resulting experiences apparently prompt positive changes in behavior and attitude that last several months, at least.
The agent, a plant alkaloid called psilocybin, mimics the effect of serotonin on brain receptors-as do some other hallucinogens-but precisely where in the brain and in what manner are unknown.
Swiss suicide helper says he is saving lives
|
|
A Swiss lawyer who has helped arrange 573 deaths believes his assisted suicide centre Dignitas, which has attracted people from all over the world, has saved many more lives than it has ended.
Ludwig Minelli, a spry 73-year-old who hopes to live beyond 100, said it was important to break social taboos over suicide, which he called “a marvellous possibility” for those wanting to control their conditions of their deaths.
By offering people a chance calmly to contemplate ending their lives and discuss their options with friends and family, Minelli said his non-profit association had actually kept many people from committing the act.
One strong drink can make you ‘blind drunk’
|
|
People who have been drinking may miss objects that appear unexpectedly in their field of sight, even when their blood alcohol levels are just half the legal driving limit.
“In light of this result, perhaps lawmakers should reconsider the level of intoxication deemed legal to operate a vehicle,” Dr. Seema L. Clifasefi of the University of Washington in Seattle and her colleagues suggest in a report.
This phenomenon, known as inattentional blindness, occurs commonly among people who are sober, Clifasefi and her team note. Alcohol is known to impair fine motor skills, reaction time and visual attention, they point out, but to date no one has studied what effect it may have on inattentional blindness.
Altered Activity in Brain Receptors Points to Schizophrenia Complexity
|
|
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, in collaboration with scientists at the City University of New York, have identified a striking dysregulation in neuronal receptor activity in the postmortem brain tissue from patients with schizophrenia. By stimulating receptors in the prefrontal cortex, the research team tracked heightened levels of erbB4 receptor activity, as well as decreased NMDA receptor activity in the tissue from patients with schizophrenia. Additionally, they were able to identify a relationship between these two receptor groups, suggesting a mechanism for decreased NMDA receptor function that has long been suspected in schizophrenia. The researchers report their findings in this week’s advanced online issue of Nature Medicine.
Schizophrenia, a mental disorder afflicting approximately one percent of the world population, is characterized by a variety of symptoms such as: hallucinations, paranoia, disorganized behavior, and the inability to experience pleasure. Previous studies of the brains of patients with schizophrenia suggest altered function in the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s organizational center for cognitive function, personality expression, and behavioral control. International, large-scale genetic studies of patients with schizophrenia have pointed researchers to a gene called neuregulin 1 (NRG1), which appears to play a role in determining one’s susceptibility to the disease.
Chang-Gyu Hahn, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Steven Arnold, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology, and Raquel Gur, MD, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry, and colleagues at Penn, in collaboration with Hoau-Yan Wang, PhD, at The City University of New York, took an approach to use NRG1 protein to activate its neuronal receptor, erbB4, to measure the molecular response in postmortem brain tissue.
Early insecurity risk factor for eating disorders
|
|
Insecure attachment plays a key role in promoting the development of a negative body image in women with eating disorders, a new study shows. This suggests that the prevention and treatment of eating disorders might be strengthened by a greater concentration on early separation anxiety and insecure attachment to caregivers.
The theory of attachment, Dr. Alfonso Troisi and colleagues explain in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, holds that early experiences shape adult personality. Infants who are emotionally cared for “develop a model of the self as loved and valued and a model of the other as loving.”
Infants, on the other hand, who experience neglect and/or rejection at the hands of a caregiver, and come to believe that they cannot depend on their caregiver, may begin to feel that they are unworthy of love.
Autism diagnosis remains through early childhood
|
|
Most children diagnosed with autism at 2 years of age will still have that diagnosis at age 9, investigators report.
In contrast, many young children first diagnosed with less severe conditions—called pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD)—later have their diagnoses changed to autism.
Dr. Catherine Lord, from the University of Michigan Autism and Communication Disorders Center in Ann Arbor, and her associates report that clinicians have been questioning the stability of these diagnoses.
Heel prick test can cause unnecessary parental stress
|
|
Virtually all babies in the U.S. have their heels pricked soon after birth to get a blood sample for genetic testing.
These “heel stick” tests identify rare metabolic disorders before they cause irreversible damage, but as more disorders are added to the screening - many states now test for 30 or more - false-positive results are on the rise. In the June issue of Pediatrics, researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston report that false-positive results cause considerable parental stress, even when the baby proves negative on retesting, and that the stress could be alleviated by better education for parents and pediatricians.
Psychologist Susan Waisbren, PhD and Elizabeth Gurian, MS in Children’s Division of Genetics interviewed 173 families who had received false-positive screening results and a comparison group of 67 families with normal newborn screening results.
Suicides up in Japan, overwork illnesses also rise
|
|
The number of Japanese who took their own lives rose slightly in 2005 to stay above 30,000 for the eighth straight year, with the number of serious illnesses and deaths blamed on overwork also climbing.
Work-induced stress is not a new problem in workaholic Japan, where the suicide rate is the second highest among the Group of Eight industrialized nations, but official recognition of the issue has lagged.
According to police figures released on Thursday, 32,552 people committed suicide in 2005, up from 32,325 last year but still below the record 34,427 in 2003.
Rise in Turkish girls’ suicides worries activists
|
|
Bahar Sogut was 14 when she shot herself in the head with her father’s gun. Her mother and grandmother, who live in a small mud-built house in a village outside Batman in Turkey’s poor southeast, said it was her fate.
“She died with Allah’s (God’s) bidding,” her mother, Nefise Sogut, told Reuters. Fate was the only explanation either gave for what happened.
Bahar Sogut was one of 14 people—10 of them women and girls aged under 23—who have killed themselves this year in Batman, a city of 250,000 people, activists say. Another was aged 12 and threw herself off a building opposite her school.
Rising suicides among women in the mainly Kurdish southeast has prompted the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Yakin Erturk, to visit the region, where rights activists say families are forcing young women into suicide because the government has clamped down on so-called “honour killings”.
Early violence exposure doesn’t raise future risk
|
|
Children who witness domestic or other interpersonal violence are no more likely to become adult victims of violence than those who do not witness abuse, results of a new study suggest.
Abuse is common and many children witness abuse, co-author Dr. Amy A. Ernst, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, told Reuters Health. “Still, it’s not necessarily a correlation,” she said.
The findings of the study were presented last week at the annual meeting of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine in San Francisco.
Fraternity/Sorority Members Who Get Drunk Weekly At Higher Risk
|
|
Members or pledges of college fraternities and sororities are twice as likely as non-Greek students to get drunk at least weekly - and are at significantly higher risk of being injured or injuring someone else - according to new research from Wake Forest University School of Medicine.
The research suggests that a simple screening question - “In a typical week, how many days do you get drunk?” - may help identify students at highest risk of injury from drinking.
Greek pledges who reported getting drunk at least weekly had five times the risk of falling from a height and two and a half times the risk of experiencing a burn than non-Greek students who do not get drunk, according to a study involving 10,635 students at 10 North Carolina universities. The students were surveyed in the fall terms of 2003-2005.
Suicide risk linked to month of birth
|
|
People born in the spring or early summer in the northern hemisphere have a 17 percent increased risk of committing suicide than those with birthdays in the autumn or early winter, researchers said on Tuesday.
They found that women born in April, May and June were 29.6 percent more likely to take their own lives while men had a 13.7 percent increased risk.
“Our results support the hypotheses that there is a seasonal effect in the monthly birth rates of people who kill themselves and that there is a disproportionate excess of such people born between late spring and midsummer compared with the other months,” Dr. Emad Salib, of Liverpool University, reported in the British Journal of Cancer.
Successful Treatment of Alcoholism Found in The Doctor’s Office
|
|
Alcoholism can be successfully treated in primary care settings, when brief sessions with health professionals are coupled with either the drug naltrexone or specialized counseling, according to new clinical trial results published in JAMA.
The randomized, controlled trial, called “Combining Medications and Behavioral Interventions for Alcoholism,” or COMBINE, is the largest ever conducted of drug and behavioral treatments for alcohol dependence. COMBINE included 1,383 subjects at 11 clinical sites across the country. Brown Medical School oversaw the largest site, enrolling 133 patients through Roger Williams Medical Center.
Robert Swift, M.D., served as principal investigator of the Roger Williams site and is an author of the JAMA report. Swift, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior and associate director of the Center for Alcohol and Addiction Studies at Brown Medical School and associate chief of staff for research at the Providence V.A. Medical Center, has studied alcoholism and drug addiction for more than 20 years. He said the COMBINE results send a clear message to problem drinkers - and the doctors who care for them.
Low-Intensity Therapy, Meds May Provide More Accessible Alcoholism Treatment
|
|
Low-intensity therapy offered by medical doctors, combined with either medication or specialized behavior therapy, can effectively treat alcoholism, making treatment more readily available to people who need it, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and numerous other sites nationwide.
The study, conducted over the past five years and sponsored by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), appears in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The NIAAA is a component of the National Institutes of Health.
The results show that medical doctors and other health-care professionals who prescribed the medication naltrexone and held nine brief sessions with the patient (called medical management) were as successful in treating alcohol dependence as when the patient also receives intensive behavioral counseling, for example, in an alcohol treatment facility. Medical doctors who held the nine sessions with patients but did not prescribe naltrexone were not as successful as those who did or as those whose patients also received more intensive behavioral counseling.
