What drives doctors to drink?

Researchers from the University of Sydney have been looking into the factors that lead doctors to develop a mental-health and/or drink problem. They studied 2,999 doctors and found that factors associated with developing a mental-health problem were: being involved in legal action, not having had a holiday in the previous year, working long hours and having the personality traits of neuroticism or introversion. The factors associated with developing a drink problem were being a man, training in Australia, being between 40 and 59, being neurotic or extrovert, failing to meet continuing medical education requirements and being a one-person practice.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the link in the title of this post.

Young adults pay price for mental illness

People who have mental-health problems in early adulthood are likely to be much less well-off when they get to 30. Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand studied 950 people born in Christchurch. At the ages of 21 and 25 the participants were asked whether they suffered from symptoms of mental illness such as depression, anxiety, phobias and drug and alcohol misuse; the participants were also asked about their employment, income and educational achievements. Those yound adults who had experienced mental-health problems were significantly less likely to be in paid employment, were more likely to be working part time, were more likely to be receiving welfare and were earning less money than those who had had good mental health. Those people who had had four or more episodes of illness between 18 and 25 were 4X more likely to be welfare-dependent than those who had had no mental-health problems, on average they worked 6 hours fewer per week and earned NZ$166 less.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

New programme helps fostered children

Children who have been placed in foster care after being abused are at a much higher risk of developing mental-health problems and it has been estimated that as many as 57% of them might have a psychological problem such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), dissociation, suicidal behaviour, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 'conduct disorders.' Researchers from the University of Colorado studied the effectiveness of a programme called Fostering Health Futures in a study of 156 children aged between 9 and 11. The programme has two main elements; skills training which aims to help the children develop skills in emotion recognition, problem-solving, anger management, healthy relationships and dealing with peer pressure and a mentoring programme with a social-work student which helped them put the skills into practice. Compared to a control group the children who had taken part in the intervention had fewer symptoms of dissociation and reported a better quality of life. They had fewer symptoms of mental-health problems and were less likely to report symptoms of PTSD.

You can find out more about this study by clicking on the title of this post.

No evidence for SSRIs and autism

Serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) anti-depressants are often prescribed for people with autism as it is thought that improving the amount of serotonin in the brain might improve some of the psychological problems associated with the condition. Katrina Williams from the University of New South Wales has been leading a team reviewing the evidence for SSRIs for autism on behalf of the Cochrane database. The team reviewed seven studies involving 271 patients and found that SSRIs had no benefits for children and could cause serious harm. One child, who had been taking citalopram, had had a prolonged seizure. There was some slender evidence of improvement in the trials involving adults but not enough for the treatment to be recommended.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Brothers and sisters boost mental health

Children between the ages of 10 and 14 could be protected from depression if they have a sister. Researchers from Brigham Young University in Utah studied 395 families with more than one child, at least one of whom was an adolescent between the ages of 10 and 14. The researchers gathered a range of information about the families and followed them up again one year later. Having a sister was found to protect the adolescents from feeling lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscious and fearful regardless of whether the sister was younger or older or how far apart they were in age. Having a loving brother or sister promoted good deeds such as helping a neighbour or looking after other children at school and in fact the relationship between sibling affection and good deeds was twice as strong as that between parenting and good deeds.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Smokers' brains show subtle changes

Researchers from Yale University have been studying the brains of people trying to give up smoking. The participants in the study were using cognitive therapy to try and give up, a treatment which stresses the long-term benefits of not smoking. The participants showed increased activity in the prefrontal cortex - an area associated with cognitive control and rational thought - and decreased activity in the striatum, a part of the brain associated with drug-craving and reward-seeking behaviour.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Slowing down the dementia epidemic

Researchers estimate that 820,000 people in the U.K. have dementia - a number predicted to double by 2050. A team of researchers in France and the U.K. have been looking at the best ways to prevent more people developing the condition and have concluded that fighting diabetes and depression, eating more fruit and vegetables and having a better-educated population are the way forward. The researchers studied 1,433 people, all over 65, in the South of France. They tested their cognition two, four and seven years after the start of the study and asked the participants a number of questions about their lifestyle and education. They then used the results to estimate how much different measures could reduce the percentage of people developing Alzheimer's. They found that a combination of eliminating depression and diabetes and increasing fruit and vegetable consumption would lead to a 21% drop in new cases of dementia. Eliminating depression would have the most powerful effect leading to a 10% fall in the number of cases. Increasing education could lead to an 18% reduction in new cases of Alzheimer's more than double the effect of eliminating the main, known genetic risk factor which would only lead to a 7% fall.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Deleted genes and schizophrenia

Researchers from Emory University in Atlanta have been looking into the links between genetics and schizophrenia among Ashkenazi (from Germany and Europe) Jews. They compared people with and without schizophrenia and analyzed their genetic makeup. A deleted gene on the 3rd chromosome was linked to a seventeen-fold increase in the risk of schizophrenia.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Gum disease and Alzheimer's disease

People with gum disease are almost twice as likely to suffer from coronary artery disease as other people and new research suggests they may also be at risk of lower brainpower too. Researchers from New York University studied 152 70-year-old people measuring their IQ and assessing them for periodontal disease. They found that people with gum disease were nine times more likely to score in the lower range of the test compared to people with little or no gum disease. The research follows a 2008 study by the same team in which people with Alzheimer's were found to have a higher level of antibodies and inflammatory molecules associated with the disease in their bloodstream than healthy people.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Depression and Alzheimer's

People with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) which usually precedes it often have depression as well and some studies suggest that having a history of major depression can double the risk of developing dementia. But it is unclear whether depression is an early symptom of Alzheimer's disease or whether it actually plays a part in causing it. Researchers from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago studied 357 people who were taking part in a long-term study of the risk factors for Alzheimer's disease. Every three years the sample completed a brief questionnaire about their levels of depression and were evaluated to see whether they had Alzheimer's disease. The study found no change in the level of people's depression before, during and after their development of Alzheimer's disease suggesting that it was depression which caused people's dementia rather than vice versa. The other implication of the research is that depression does not automatically go hand-in-hand with dementia and should be treated just the same in people with Alzheimer's as those without.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Children with OCD - what's the long-term prognosis?

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a long-term condition that often starts in childhood. Researchers estimate that between 0.5-4% of children and teenagers develop the condition and between 30-50% of adults with OCD say their symptoms first started when they were children. However, there have been few long-term studies into how children with OCD get on in later life. Researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London studied 142 children who had been treated for OCD over a nine-year period. 41% still had OCD by the end of the study and 40% had another mental-health problem instead of, or as well as, OCD. People who had been iller for longer when they first started treatment were more likely to still have OCD nine years later. Around half the participants were still receiving and/or felt a need for further treatment by the end of the study.

Micali, N. ... [et al] - Long-term outcomes of obsessive-compulsive disorder: follow-up of 142 children and adolescents British Journal of Psychiatry August 2010, 197(2), 128-134

The true cost of mental illness

Mental illness can be a big financial cost both to individuals with mental-health problems and society as a whole. Most studies into the effects of mental illness on wages have been done in higher-income countries but mental illness is a problem all over the world and the World Health Organization surveyed 44,561 people in 19 different countries about their mental health and their earnings. The respondents were in countries all over the world with widely different incomes. The study found that, on average, respondents with serious mental illness earned on average a third less than median earnings.

Levinson, Daphna ... [et al] - Associations of serious mental illness with earnings: results from the WHO World Mental Health surveys British Journal of Psychiatry August 2010, 197(2), 114-121

Could 'Special K' be a solution for bipolar depression?

Ketamine could help people with bipolar disorder shake off depression. Ketamine was first introduced in 1962 and is legally used as a human, and animal, anaesthetic. It is also used as a 'party' drug when it is known, among other things, as 'Special K'. Researchers from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland used much smaller doses of the drug than are used recreationally on 18 patients with severe bipolar depression. The patients had tried an average of seven different drugs to treat their illness and 55% had had electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). However, 40 minutes after receiving a ketamine injection the patients depressive symptoms had improved - an effect that lasted for at least three days. Side effects included anxiety, feeling woozy, headaches and a temporary sense of disconnection from reality although there were no 'serious adverse effects.'

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Brief intervention makes a big difference to teenagers in A&E

Brief motivational interviewing is a technique in which people are encouraged to think about their goals and how their current behaviour does, or does not, contribute towards achieving them. Researchers from the University of Michigan have been carrying out a project using the technique to counsel teenagers attending an A&E department in Flint, Michigan. They offered help to 726 teenagers aged between 14 and 18 who said that they had experienced aggression or had had at least two or three drinks in the past year. The brief interviews resulted in a 34% reduction in peer aggression compared to only a 16% reduction in a control group. The intervention also lead to a 32% reduction in alcohol-related problems over the next six months.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Flower arranging and schizophrenia

Schizophrenia can affect people as much from the losses - of memory and cognition - it causes as from the delusions and hallucinations it inflicts upon them. The severity of these losses predicts quality of life, social functioning and how independent people remain so anything that could restore them would have a very beneficial effect. Researchers from the National Institute of Floricultural Science in Japan have been testing out whether flower arranging can help improve cognition in people with schizophrenia. They carried out a small study comparing people who went to flower-arranging classes with a control group. The study found that the group who had done flower arranging had a better working memory and were better at copying complex figures than the other group. This was a very small-scale study though and will need to be replicated in a much larger group of patients to really prove flower-arranging's effectiveness.

Type 2 diabetes hits teenagers' brainpower as well as their health

Type-2 diabetes - caused by being too fat and not taking enough exercise - usually occurs in middle age but more and more teenagers are also being diagnosed with the condition. Researchers from the New York University Langone Medical Center studied 36 obese adolescents comparing those with and without type-2 diabetes. The teenagers with type-2 diabetes had significant reductions in performance on tests measuring overall intellectual functioning, memory and spelling, and, when their brains were scanned with MRIs had 'clear abnormalities in the integrity of the white matter in their brains.'

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Judging others and revealing ourselves

What we say about other people could actually say much more about ourselves. Researchers at Wake Forest University in North Carolina studied friends rating one another, first-year students rating others they knew in their dormitories and fraternity and sorority members rating others in their organization. They found that those who judged others most positively were themselves described as enthusiastic, happy, kind-hearted, courteous and emotionally-stable whereas those with negative perceptions of others had higher levels of narcissism and anti-social behaviour. The students were tested again one year later and how people rated others was found to be a highly stable trait that did not change substantially over time.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Autism and vision

People with autism can also have problems with their visual perception and new research suggests that their relatives may have difficulty too. Researchers from the University of Chicago studied 97 people, 57 of whom had first-degree relatives (siblings or parents) with autism. They tested the participants' saccades - their ability to move quickly from looking at one thing to looking at another - and their 'smooth-pursuit' eye movements i.e. the ability to follow a slowly-moving object. Compared to the other participants the people with autistic relatives performed more slowly and less accurately. The abnormalities in performance were associated with several brain pathways that have also been linked to autism.

You can find out more about this research by clicking on the title of this post.

Teenage internet 'addicts' at higher risk of depression

Teenagers who are compulsive internet users are more likely to be depressed. Researchers from the School of Medicine in Sydney and Sun-Yat-Sen University in China studied over 1,000 teenagers - who had an average age of 15 - and asked them about their internet use. They found that 6% of the sample felt depressed, moody and anxious when they were not on the internet. Nine months later the teenagers were examined again for signs of anxiety and depression; the 'pathological' internet users were two-and-a-half times more likely to show signs of depression.

You can find out more about this story by clicking on the link in the title of this post.

Sleep, brainpower and health

A lack of sleep can seriously affect people's performance but just one good night's sleep can more or less restore you to normal. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania studied 159 healthy adults who had an average age of 30. The participants were divided into groups and were allowed different amounts of sleep. Every two hours, while they were awake, they completed a 30-minute computerized test. Those whose sleep had been restricted were found to have a shorter attention span, be less alert and have slower reactions. However, people's performance went back to normal after just one full night's worth of sleep. Another study of more than 30,000 adults in the same journal - Sleep - found that the optimum amount of sleep for good health is seven hours a night. People who had less than five hours a night had double the risk of cardiovascular disease while those getting more than nine hours also had a higher risk.

You can find out more about this study by clicking on the link in the title of this post.