Specialized Cognitive Behavioral Treatment Available for People with PTSD and Serious Mental Illness
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Sufferers of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are receiving specialized treatment from UMDNJ-University Behavioral HealthCare as a part of a National Institute of Mental Health study in collaboration with Dartmouth Medical School whose researchers adapted the treatment for people with serious mental illness.
Steven Silverstein, Ph.D., director and Stephanie Marcello, Ph.D., both of the Division of Schizophrenia Research, are implementing the new therapy, which is based on principles of cognitive behavior therapy. The treatment process includes relaxation training, helpful information about how stress causes the symptoms, and “cognitive restructuring” or techniques that people learn to help replace anxiety-arousing thoughts with more realistic appraisals about themselves and the level of danger in their environments. Treatment is closely coordinated with clients’ clinicians.
UMDNJ is the first institution outside of Dartmouth Medical School to offer this new treatment to mentally ill patients in a culturally diverse urban environment. All the patients in the study come from UMDNJ community mental health centers in New Brunswick, South Brunswick, Piscataway, and Newark.
Young teens who smoke may boost MS risk
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Smokers who pick up the habit in their early teens may nearly triple their risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS) later on, according to the first study to look at the relationship between early smoking and MS.
In MS, the immune system attacks the protective myelin sheath that surrounds nerve cells, causing fatigue, movement problems, loss of coordination, and many other symptoms, which typically first appear in a person’s 20s, 30s or 40s.
Scientists first proposed in the early 1980s that the autoimmune disease could be triggered by some sort of early-life exposure, although this “mysterious factor” has not yet been identified, explained Dr. Joseph Finkelstein of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, the lead researcher on the study.
Study ties fast food to stroke risk
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People who live in neighborhoods packed with fast-food restaurants are more likely to suffer strokes, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
They said residents of one Texas county who lived in neighborhoods with the highest number of fast-food restaurants had a 13 percent higher risk of experiencing a stroke than those in neighborhoods with the fewest such restaurants.
The study, presented at the American Stroke Association’s International Stroke Conference, does not prove living near fast-food restaurants raises the risk of stroke, but it does suggest the two are linked in some way.
China probes “mystery” kidney stones in children
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China is baffled by a “drastic” rise in the number of infants falling ill with kidney stones in the wake of a tainted milk scandal which killed six children from kidney complications and made hundreds of thousands ill.
China sentenced two people to death last month for their part in producing or selling milk adulterated with melamine, an industrial compound used to cheat nutrition tests. Nearly 300,000 children fell ill with kidney stones and other kidney-related illnesses from drinking the tainted milk last year.
But a recent rash of kidney complaints in children with apparently no link to drinking milk tainted with melamine had puzzled Chinese health experts and prompted a new investigation, the China Daily said on Thursday, citing the Health Ministry.
TB treatment delays in Taiwan
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Older people suffer delayed tuberculosis treatment. A Taiwanese study of 78,118 pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB) cases, reported in the open access journal BMC Public Health has found that older people had both diagnosis and treatment delays in tuberculosis and those with an aboriginal background had a longer treatment delay.
Pesus Chou from the National Yang-Ming University in Taipei, Taiwan, studied information from the Taiwan TB reporting system over the period 2002 to 2006. She said, “According to literature review, diagnosis and treatment delay of tuberculosis (TB) may result in more extensive disease and more complications, which in turn leads to a higher mortality. So, studies on delays are important. This is the first study to investigate delays using the Taiwan reporting system.”
A period of longer than nine days between medical examination and TB diagnosis was defined as a diagnosis delay and a period of longer than two days between diagnosis and initiation of therapy was defined as a treatment delay. According to Chou, “During the five-year study period, 78,118 new PTB patients were reported. Of these, 19,413 (24.9%) experienced a diagnosis delay and 14,270 (20.3%) experienced a treatment delay.”
Formal “brain exercise” won’t help healthy seniors
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Healthy older people shouldn’t bother spending money on computer games and Web sites promising to ward off mental decline, the author of a review of scientific evidence for the benefits of these “brain exercise” programs says.
“These marketed products don’t confer any additional benefit over and above being socially and intellectually active in one’s normal daily life,” Dr. Peter J. Snyder of Lifespan Affiliated Hospitals in Providence, Rhode Island, told Reuters Health. “There are some things that we could be doing that have much more rigorous data to support their application.”
Types of “brain training” are known to help people with memory problems function better, but their benefits for those who don’t have measurable cognitive impairment isn’t clear, Snyder and his team note in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia. Meanwhile, Snyder said in an interview, the market for these products has swelled from $2 million in 2005 to an estimated $225 million this year.
Gender affects outcome of heart valve surgery
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Men and women have different long-term outcomes after surgery to replace a defective heart valve, according to a report by Canadian researchers.
Valves play a critical role in making sure that blood flows only one way through the heart. Of the four valves present in the heart, the mitral and aortic valves are, by far, the ones most commonly replaced.
The mitral valve prevents blood that has come into the left ventricle, the main pumping chamber of the heart, from backing up into the blood vessels of the lungs, whereas the aortic valve stops blood that has just been pumped out of the heart from flowing back in.
China needs better bird flu surveillance -experts
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China needs to improve its surveillance of the bird flu virus after a recent rise in human cases, but there are no signs the country is on the verge of an epidemic, U.N. experts said on Wednesday.
China reported eight human cases of the H5N1 strain of bird flu in January, five of whom died, which appeared independent of any known case in birds.
Hans Treason, the World Health Organisation’s China representative, said their risk assessment had not changed following the new cases as it was normal during the winter months.
Gene Mutation Adds Risk in Child Kidney Transplants
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Screening for mutations in a gene that helps the body metabolize a kidney transplant anti-rejection drug may predict which children are at higher risk for side effects, including compromised white blood cell count or organ rejection, according to new research.
Published online Feb. 18 by the Nature journal Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, the study suggests this genetic approach could also help physicians tailor personalized anti-rejection drug doses to prevent adverse reactions, said senior investigators Alexander A. Vinks, Pharm.D., Ph.D., and Jens Goebel M.D., of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center.
“There are better ways than just giving standard doses of these drugs, and in due course these types of technologies will be available worldwide to help patients,” said Dr. Vinks, director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology and the Pediatric Pharmacology Research Unit at Cincinnati Children’s. “This pilot study shows personalized and prospective MMF dosing and monitoring may be feasible to reduce the high incidence of drug toxicity in children without compromising the drug’s protective effects against kidney graft rejection.”
Can Exercising Your Brain Prevent Memory Loss?
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Participating in certain mental activities, like reading magazines or crafting in middle age or later in life, may delay or prevent memory loss, according to a study released today that will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology’s 61st Annual Meeting in Seattle, April 25 to May 2, 2009.
The study involved 197 people between the ages of 70 and 89 with mild cognitive impairment, or diagnosed memory loss, and 1,124 people that age with no memory problems. Both groups answered questions about their daily activities within the past year and in middle age, when they were between 50 to 65 years old.
The study found that during later years, reading books, playing games, participating in computer activities and doing craft activities such as pottery or quilting led to a 30 to 50 percent decrease in the risk of developing memory loss compared to people who did not do those activities. People who watched television for less than seven hours a day in later years were 50 percent less likely to develop memory loss than people who watched for more than seven hours a day.
Robot Playmates Monitor Emotional State of Children with ASD
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The day that robot playmates help children with autism learn the social skills that they naturally lack has come a step closer with the development of a system that allows a robot to monitor a child’s emotional state.
“There is a lot of research going on around the world today trying to use robots to treat children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). It has shown that the children are attracted to robots, raising the promise that appropriately designed robots could play an important role in their treatment,” says Nilanjan Sarkar, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University. “However, the efforts so far have been quite limited because they haven’t had a way to monitor the emotional state of the children, which would allow the robot to respond automatically to their reactions.”
If these limitations can be overcome, the use of robots to treat children with ASD could have a significant social and financial impact. One baby in every 150 born today in the United States is diagnosed with ASD, making it more common than pediatric cancer, diabetes and AIDS combined. Currently, treatment of these children involves a combination of behavioral, educational, physical, occupational and speech therapies, sometimes accompanied by medication for co-occurring conditions such as anxiety, irritability, bi-polar and other disorders. The average cost of caring for one person with autism for life is $3.2 million. In total, autism currently costs the U.S. more than $90 billion per year, and that cost is projected to double by 2017 due to the growing population of those affected.
Forgotten and lost - when proteins “shut down” our brain
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Which modules of the tau protein, in neurons of Alzheimer disease patients, may act in a destructive manner were investigated by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (Göttingen) and the Max Planck Unit for Structural Molecular Biology (Hamburg) with the help of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (PLoS Biology, February 17, 2009).
Coordination becomes difficult, items disappear, keeping new information in the mind is impossible. Worldwide almost 30 million people suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, a neurodegenerative, irreversible ailment which starts with memory gaps and ends in helplessness and the loss of personality. The most critical factor in developing Alzheimer’s disease is age. Most cases occur after the age of 65.
Two hallmarks are typical for Alzheimer affected brains. One of them, located between nerve cells, is amyloid plaques - extracellular protein aggregates mainly composed of a protein named beta-amyloid. The other clue is intracellular tau fibrils. In the interplay with genetic factors, the latter contribute to a disordered communication within the cell. This triggers cell death.
An adjuvant chemotherapeutic agent in gastric cancer therapy
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Peritoneal carcinomatosis can be thought of as a series of events that together form a peritoneal metastatic cascade. The peritoneal stromal tissue appears to be a friendly host for tumour proliferation, providing a rich source of growth factors and chemokines known to be involved in tumour metastasis. Till now, our understanding of the molecular mediators that orchestrate this cascade is weakly understood. Astragalus memebranaceus,a traditional chinese herbal medicine used for the treatment of common cold , diarrhea, fatigue anorexia and cardiac diseases. In recent years, it has been proposed that Astragalus may possess anti-apoptosis potential in peritoneal mesothelial cell. In spite of this, the anti-apoptosis effects of Astragalus saponin extract in human peritoneal mesothelial cells during peritoneal carcinomatosishas has not been studied. In this study, the anti-apoptosis effects of Astragalus saponin extract were investigated in human peritoneal mesothelial cells during peritoneal gastric cancer metastasis.
A research article to be published on February 7, 2009 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. The research team led by Professor Hui-Mian Xu from Department of Oncology, The First Affiliated Hospital, China Medical University.Human peritoneal mesothelial cell line HMrSV5 was co-incubated with gastric cancer cell supernatant and/or Astragalus injection. Morphological changes were observed. Apoptosis was determined by transmission electron microscope.
A potential marker of increased histological activity in hepatitis C virus infection
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Early, vigorous and sustained lymphocyte proliferative responses specific to hepatitis C virus (HCV) have been regarded as pivotal for viral clearance. On the other hand, antibody responses’ contribution is still controversial. Research data have been accumulated regarding the significance of specific antibody classes during chronic infection. Particularly, the relation of IgA and alcohol-induced hepatic damage has been recognized, but its possible implication in HCV chronic infection has not been explored so far.
A research article to be published on November 28, 2008 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology addresses this question. This article investigated the HCV-specific immune responses in chronic treated and untreated patients, in paired samples taken 6 months apart. IgG, IgM and IgA levels, as well as IgG1-4 subclasses and peripheral blood lymphocyte proliferative responses against core, envelope and NS3 antigens were assayed by ELISA and CFSE staining, respectively.
Over 70% of the patients showed specific IgG and IgM against HCV capsid, E1 and NS3, while the hypervariable region-1 of E2 was recognized by half of patients. Anti-capsid IgM and IgG levels increased over time, while IgA levels did not; instead, an increase in IgA positive samples was observed.
Breastfeeding cuts baby girls’ pneumonia risk
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Breastfeeding appears to reduce the risk for severe lung infection and associated hospitalization among infant girls, but not among infant boys.
The finding comes from a study of babies in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Dr. Fernando Polack, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and colleagues.
Boys may derive some protection from breastfeeding, noted Polack, but this study may have been too small to sufficiently identify this benefit.
Still, the results mirror previous research conducted in Argentina and the United States, Polack told Reuters Health, and when taken together indicate that “mothers of girls should pay close attention to the importance of breastfeeding to protect their infant’s lungs.”
