Psychiatry / Psychology
Domestic violence may raise kids’ abuse risk
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Mothers who experience violence or aggression at the hands of an intimate partner are at greater risk for maltreating their children than mothers who do not experience intimate partner abuse.
Intimate partner aggression and violence “impacts the whole family, raising health risks for children in the home as well as adult victims,” Dr. Catherine A. Taylor told Reuters Health.
Moreover, the presence of intimate partner aggression and violence appears to confer a unique burden of maltreatment risk to children, Taylor, of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and colleagues have found.
Cascading effect of even minor early problems may explain serious teen violence
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How do minor behavior problems and experiences early in life lead to serious acts of violence in teenagers? A group of researchers has found that the answer may lie in a cascading effect in which early life experiences lead to behaviors and new experiences that lead to yet other experiences that culminate in serious violent behavior.
The researchers found that children who had social and academic problems in elementary school were more likely to have parents who withdrew from supervision and monitoring when the children entered middle school. When this happened, children were more likely to make friends with other children who had deviant behavior, and this ultimately was more likely to lead teens to engage in serious and sometimes costly acts of violence. Interestingly, violent outcomes in girls followed largely the same developmental path as those for boys.
“The findings indicate that these trajectories are not inevitable but can be deflected at each subsequent era in development, through interactions with peers, school, and parents along the way,” notes Kenneth A. Dodge, William McDougall Professor of Public Policy and psychology and neuroscience, director of the Center for Child and Family Policy at Duke University, and the study’s lead author. “Successful early intervention could redirect paths of antisocial development to prevent serious violent behavior in adolescence.”
Personal rehab helpful for multiple sclerosis
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Results of a study in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry suggest that an individualized rehabilitation program effectively reduces disability in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS).
“Persons with MS are expected to have a normal lifespan and live for many decades with a range of problems,” Dr. Fary Khan, of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues write.
In order to assess the effectiveness of rehabilitation in MS patients, the researchers conducted a study with 101 patients who were randomly assigned to an individualized program or standard care.
Holidays Don’t Have to be Difficult for People with an Eating Disorder
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Many people equate the holidays with food – big meals equals big times. Americans, especially, attach a lot of social and personal value to what, and how, we eat, often through family rituals or attitudes. For many, family gatherings are positive events, but for the 9 million men, women or young people who have an eating disorder, the holidays, without proper planning, can feel like nightmares.
Three out of four American women have “disordered eating” behavior, and 10 percent have an eating disorder such as anorexia or bulimia nervosa or binge eating disorder, says Cynthia Bulik, Ph.D., the William and Jeanne Jordan Distinguished Professor of Eating Disorders in the UNC School of Medicine’s department of psychiatry and director of the UNC Eating Disorders Program. Her latest book, “Crave: Why you binge eat and how to stop,” is due out in early 2009.
If you have an eating disorder, plan ahead. Bulik and the UNC Eating Disorders team offer the following suggestions to navigate the food minefields of the holidays:
PTSD Symptoms Linked to Increased Risk of Death After Heart Events
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Individuals who receive implantable cardiac defibrillators after a sudden heart event appear more likely to die within five years if they experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, regardless of the severity of their disease, according to a report in the November issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Surviving a life-threatening heart condition, such as heart attack or cardiac arrest, causes significant distress, according to background information in the article. Resulting symptoms—including intense fear, painful intrusive memories and hyperarousal (a state of physical and psychological tension resulting from the flight-or-fight response)—may qualify an individual for a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Between 8 percent and 20 percent of patients with acute coronary syndromes and 27 percent to 38 percent of those who survive a cardiac arrest develop PTSD.
Karl-Heinz Ladwig, Ph.D., M.D., of Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Munich, and Helmholtz Zentrum National Research Center for Environmental Health, Neuherberg, Germany, and colleagues studied 211 patients who had received implantable cardiac defibrillators (devices that administer shocks to help restore normal heartbeat) following a heart event in 1998. Participants were surveyed an average of 27 months after implantation and 38 reported severe PTSD symptoms. All patients were then tracked through medical records, telephone interviews, reports from family members and death certificates through March 2005.
Response rates to antidepressants differ among English- and Spanish-speaking Hispanics
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In the first-ever study of its kind, a team led by researchers at Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (LA BioMed) report in November’s Psychiatric Services journal that Spanish-speaking Hispanics took longer to respond to medication for depression and were less likely to go into remission than English-speaking Hispanics.
Using data from the nation’s largest real-world clinical study of depression, the researchers found the Spanish-speaking participants in the study were older and were more likely to be women than the English speakers. The Spanish speakers also had less education and lower income, more medical issues and were more likely than English speakers to be seen in primary care than psychiatric clinics.
“Once we adjusted for these differences in their socioeconomic status, both groups responded about the same to medication for depression,” said Ira Lesser, M.D., a LA BioMed investigator who authored the report. “These results are important for clinicians and patients to be aware that Spanish-speaking Hispanics with depression who come from lower social economic groups may need more than medication for depression.”
US smokers increasingly hooked on nicotine
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Smokers who are seeking medical treatment to give up cigarettes are more highly addicted to nicotine than smokers who sought help two decades ago, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
The researchers examined nicotine dependence levels of about 600 smokers who entered treatment programs in northern California to quit smoking during three periods starting in 1989 and ending in 2006.
Seventy-three percent of those seeking medical help to quit smoking in 2005 to 2006 were deemed highly nicotine dependent using scores from a questionnaire given to assess the severity of nicotine addiction, the researchers said.
The woman in red drives the men crazy, study finds
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If a woman wants to drive the men wild, she might want to dress in red.
Men rated a woman shown in photographs as more sexually attractive if she was wearing red clothing or if she was shown in an image framed by a red border rather than some other color, U.S. researchers said Tuesday.
The study led by psychology professor Andrew Elliot of the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, seemed to confirm red as the color of romance—as so many Valentine’s Day card makers and lipstick sellers have believed for years.
Although this “red alert” may be a product of human society associating red with love for eons, it also may arise from more primitive biological roots, Elliot said.
Spanking may make kids aggressive
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In a study, children who were spanked frequently at age 3 years were 50 percent more likely to be aggressive 2 years later than their counterparts who were not spanked.
Dr. Catherine A. Taylor, of Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans reported her team’s findings Wednesday at the American Public Health Association’s annual convention in San Diego.
“When parents use discipline, they are usually trying to teach their children a lesson and to help their children learn to behave well in both the short and the long term,” Taylor told Reuters Health. “Although spanking may bring about immediate compliance, it may do more harm than good in the long run,” she warned.
Psychological Study Reveals That Red Enhances Men
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A groundbreaking study by two University of Rochester psychologists to be published online Oct. 28 by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology adds color—literally and figuratively—to the age-old question of what attracts men to women.
Through five psychological experiments, Andrew Elliot, professor of psychology, and Daniela Niesta, post-doctoral researcher, demonstrate that the color red makes men feel more amorous toward women. And men are unaware of the role the color plays in their attraction.
The research provides the first empirical support for society’s enduring love affair with red. From the red ochre used in ancient rituals to today’s red-light districts and red hearts on Valentine’s Day, the rosy hue has been tied to carnal passions and romantic love across cultures and millennia. But this study, said Elliot, is the only work to scientifically document the effects of color on behavior in the context of relationships.
Anti-inflammatory medications may become a treatment for schizophrenia
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Many of the structural and neurochemical features of schizophrenia are present long before the full syndrome of schizophrenia develops. What processes tip the balance between the ultra-high risk states and the development of schizophrenia? One candidate mechanism is cerebral inflammation, studied by Dr. Bart van Berckel and colleagues in the November 1st issue of Biological Psychiatry.
Using positron emission tomography, or PET, imaging, the researchers provide evidence of a brain inflammatory state that may be associated with the development of schizophrenia. The authors reported increased binding levels of [11C]PK11195, a radiotracer with high affinity for the peripheral benzodiazepine receptor (PBR) in patients who had carried the diagnosis of schizophrenia for five years or less. PBR is a molecular target that is present at higher levels in activated microglia. Microglia are activated during inflammatory states. Drs. van Berckel and Kahn further explain: “It was found that microglia activation is present in schizophrenia patients early after disease onset, suggesting brain cells are damaged in schizophrenia. In addition, since microglia can have either a protective or a toxic role, activated microglia may be the result, but also the cause of damage to brain cells.”
John H. Krystal, M.D., Editor of Biological Psychiatry and affiliated with both Yale University School of Medicine and the VA Connecticut Healthcare System, adds, “It will be important to understand whether this process takes place in a special way in association with the first onset of symptoms or whether inflammation is more generally a process that contributes to worsening of symptoms.” Because this data suggests that inflammation may contribute to features of the early course of schizophrenia, a new potential avenue of treatment for schizophrenia may be to use anti-inflammatory agents. Although some anti-inflammatory medications have already been studied, with limited success, in schizophrenia patients, a new generation of these drugs that more specifically target activated microglia have yet to be explored.
Boston Medical Center researchers educating chief residents about addiction
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Researchers from Boston Medical Center (BMC) have found that education on addiction is inadequate during medical training, resulting in suboptimal medical care for those at risk. However, the research also found that a Chief Resident Immersion Training (CRIT) program in addiction medicine is an effective “train the trainers” model for dissemination of addiction knowledge and skills to generalist physician trainees. These findings appear in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
The goal of the CRIT program is to provide incoming generalist chief residents from internal medicine, family medicine and emergency medicine with the scientific foundation of addiction medicine and state-of-the-art diagnosis and management skills of addiction medicine, and to facilitate the integration of addiction medicine content into residency program curricula and chief resident teaching.
A total of 86 incoming chief residents applied to the annual CRIT program over a three year period, with 64 participating in the CRIT intervention group and 22 attended the control group. Each member of the program received a questionnaire at baseline and again at six months after the program to assess changes in addiction medicine knowledge, skills, clinical practice and teaching.
Early-onset depressive disorders predict the use of addictive substances in adolescence
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In a prospective study of over 1800 interviewed young Finnish twins, early-onset depressive disorders at age 14 significantly predicted daily smoking, smokeless tobacco use, frequent illicit drug use, frequent alcohol use and recurrent intoxication three years later, even among those adolescents who were not users at baseline.
Analysis of twins discordant for early-onset depressive disorders confirm predictive associations of early-onset depressive disorders with smokeless tobacco use and frequent drinking at age 17½, in within-family replications with co-twins matched on half or all their segregating genes, and on their family structure, socio-economic status, and household environment.
People With Intellectual Disabilities Face Health Care Hurdles
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People with intellectual disabilities face a variety of barriers when it comes to organizing their health care, and there’s little research to direct health care providers in helping them, according to a new review of studies.
“At a personal level, there are communication problems. They’re not able to communicate their health issues as well as the general population. At a community level, sometimes there are access problems; a lot of people have physical problems also, so they can’t get to the places that provide services,” said Robert Balogh, the lead review author.
Barriers also exist at the health service provider level. “Some of them are not trained to work with that population, are reluctant to see them and they don’t have very good attitudes,” Balogh said.
Dementia Won’t Improve With Procaine, and Health Might Suffer
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Procaine, a medication that functions as a topical anesthetic normally, has been touted as an anti-aging drug that might prevent or even reverse dementia. However, a new Cochrane Review suggests that the risks of bad side effects outweigh any benefit.
“There is a lot of information, especially on the Internet, about the effect of procaine, promoting this drug for age-related problems, including dementia,” said lead author Szabolcs Szatmàri at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Romania. “At the same time, there were no available updated medical guidelines or evidence-based data for doctors and patients about procaine.”
The review included three studies involving 427 patients. Data from these studies showed high incidence of side effects such as restlessness, dizziness, migraine headaches and systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease in which a person’s immune system attacks itself.
