The new study also estimated that if pregnant women stopped smoking, up to one-fifth of children could avoid an eventual ADHD diagnosis. The risk of ADHD is even higher if the child was also exposed to lead paint, or high levels of lead from soil or old water pipes.

The study estimated that up to 35 percent of ADHD cases in children between the ages of 8 and 15 could be reduced by eliminating both of these environmental exposures. This could translate into up to 800,000 children, or one-fifth of all children who carry an ADHD diagnosis.

“Tobacco and lead exposure each have their own important adverse effect,” says Tanya Froehlich, M.D., a physician in the Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics at Cincinnati Children’s Hopsital and the study’s lead author.

“But if children are exposed to both lead and prenatal tobacco, the combined effect is synergistic.”

“Although we tend to focus on ADHD treatment rather than prevention, our study suggests that reducing exposures to environmental toxicants might be an important way to lower rates of ADHD,” says Robert Kahn, MD, MPH., a physician and researcher at Cincinnati Children’s and the study’s senior author.

The researchers found that children exposed prenatally to tobacco smoke were 2.4 times more likely to have ADHD.

Those with blood lead levels in the top third had a 2.3 fold increased likelihood of ADHD, despite levels well below the Centers for Disease Control action level of 10 micrograms per deciliter.

Dr. Froehlich and her colleagues found the risk of ADHD more than eight times higher for children exposed to both tobacco and lead compared to unexposed children.

The study is based on data of 8 to 15 years olds gathered between 2001 and 2004 from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from the National Center for Health Statistics at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NHANES is a nationally representative sample of the United State population, designed to collect information about the health and diet of people in the U.S.

Prenatal tobacco exposure was measured by maternal reports of cigarette use during pregnancy. Lead exposure was assessed using current blood lead level.

Some 8.7 percent of the 3,907 children in the study met diagnostic criteria for ADHD. The diagnosis for ADHD was based on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, considered the “gold standard” for defining specific mental health conditions.

The study is to be published online Nov. 23 by Pediatrics.

Source: Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Northwestern University research participants were in a deep sleep when sounds, such as a teakettle whistle and a cat’s meow, were introduced.

Researchers presented 25 sounds during the nap and upon waking, memory tests showed that spatial memories, that is remembering how things are laid out or the positioning of items, had improved.

For example, participants were more accurate in dragging an object to the correct location on a computer screen for the 25 images whose corresponding sounds were presented during sleep (such as a muffled explosion for a photo of dynamite) than for another 25 matched objects.

“The research strongly suggests that we don’t shut down our minds during deep sleep,” said John Rudoy, lead author of the study and a neuroscience Ph.D. student at Northwestern.

“Rather this is an important time for consolidating memories.”

Most provocatively, the research showed that sounds can penetrate deep sleep and be used to guide rehearsal of specific information, pushing people’s consolidation of memories in one direction over another.

“While asleep, people might process anything that happened during the day — what they ate for breakfast, television shows they watched, anything,” said Ken Paller, senior author of the study and professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern.

“But we decided which memories our volunteers would activate, guiding them to rehearse some of the locations they had learned an hour earlier.”

The Northwestern study adds a new twist to a growing body of research showing that memories are processed during sleep. It substantiates the literature showing that the brain is very busy during sleep, going over recently acquired information and integrating it with other knowledge in a mysterious consolidation process that sustains our memory abilities when awake.

The study, “Strengthening Individual Memories by Reactivating Them During Sleep” is found in the journal Science.

Whether memories are processed during sleep has been a subject of controversy, with most of the research on the topic focusing on REM, a normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid movement of the eyes. Vividly recalled dreams mostly occur during REM sleep. Recent research, including the new Northwestern study, however, focuses on memory processing during deep sleep, rather than during REM sleep.

“We are beginning to see that deep sleep actually is a key time for memory processing,” Paller said.

Prior to their naps, the 12 study participants were taught to associate each of 50 images with a random location on a computer screen. Each object, such as a shattering wine glass, was paired with a corresponding sound, such as that of breaking glass, delivered over a speaker.

Locations were learned by repeating trials until study participants got quite good at placing all the objects in their assigned places. Approximately 45 minutes after learning, each participant reclined in a quiet, darkened room.

Electrodes attached to their scalp measured their brain activity to indicate when they were asleep.

Sleep sounds were presented without waking anyone up. When asked later, none of the participants thought sounds had been played during the naps. Yet, memory testing showed that placements of the objects were more accurate for those cued by their associated sounds during sleep than for those not cued.

“Our little experiment opens the door to many questions,” Paller said.

Source: Northwestern University

The study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) suggests the regimen reduces serious behavioral problems in children with autism and related conditions.

Results from a previous study reported in 2002 showed that the antipsychotic medication risperidone (Risperdal) reduced such behavior problems as tantrums, aggression and self-injury in children with autism.

However, most children’s symptoms returned when the medication was discontinued. Although effective, risperidone is associated with adverse effects such as weight gain, which can lead to metabolic changes, obesity and related health problems.

“Medication alone has been shown to help with some symptoms of autism, but its potential is limited,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel.

“This study shows promise of a more effective treatment protocol that could improve life for children with autism and their families.”

In the study, the RUPP group tested the benefits of medication alone compared to medication plus a parent training program that actively involves parents in managing their children’s severely disruptive and noncompliant behavior.

Parents were taught to modify their children’s behavior and learned to enhance their children’s daily living skills.

The 24-week, three-site trial included 124 children ages 4 to 13 with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) such as autism, Asperger’s or related disorders accompanied by tantrums, aggression and self-injury.

The children were randomized to a combination of risperidone and parent training, or to risperidone only. Parents in combination therapy received an average of 11 sessions of training over the course of the study.

Although both groups improved over the six-month trial, the group receiving combination therapy showed greater reduction in behavioral problems like irritability, tantrums and impulsiveness compared to the group receiving medication only.

The combination therapy group also ended the trial taking an average dose of 1.98 milligrams (mg) per day of risperidone, compared to 2.26 mg/day in the medication-only group—a 14-percent lower dose.

However, children in both groups gained weight, indicating “a need to learn more about the metabolic consequences of medications like risperidone,” said the authors.

“The combination group was able to achieve its gains with a lower dose of medication. Plus, it appeared that the benefits of added behavioral treatment increased over time, a strong signal that actively including parents in the treatment of children with PDD could only benefit families,” said lead author Michael Aman, Ph.D., of the Ohio State University.

“Future studies will evaluate whether the benefits of parent training endure over a long period of time,” concluded the authors. The investigators also plan to apply the parent training to younger children with PDD to prevent the evolution of serious behavioral problems.

Future studies may also look for ways in which the parent training program can be used in schools and community clinics.

The study will be published in the December 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Source: NIH/National Institute of Mental Health

Researchers from Johns Hopkins Children’s Center analyzed data from interviews with 262 mothers of African-American children with asthma — a population disproportionately affected by this inflammatory airway disorder.

The investigators found that children whose mothers had more depressive symptoms had more frequent asthma symptoms during the six months of the study.

Conversely, children whose mothers reported fewer depressive symptoms had less frequent asthma symptoms.

Researchers tracked ups and downs in maternal depression as related to the frequency of symptoms among children.

“Even though our research was not set up to measure just how much a mom’s depression increased the frequency of her child’s symptoms, a clear pattern emerged in which the latter followed the earlier,” says senior investigator Kristin Riekert, Ph.D.

Surprisingly, a child’s symptoms did not seem to affect the mother’s depressive symptoms, an important finding that suggests maternal depression is an independent risk factor that can portend a child’s symptoms.

Past studies have shown that children with chronic health conditions fare worse if their primary caregiver is depressed, but none have determined how the relationship evolves.

“Intuitively, it may seem that we’re dealing with a chicken-egg situation, but our study suggests otherwise,” Riekert says.

“The fact that mom’s depression was not affected by how often her child had symptoms really caught us off guard, but it also suggested which factor comes first.”

Researchers did not study why and how a mother’s depression affects a child’s asthma status, but because depression often involves fatigue, memory lapses and difficulty concentrating, it can affect a parent’s ability to manage the child’s chronic condition, which can involve daily, and sometimes complex, drug regimens and frequent visits to the doctor.

“Mom is the one who must implement the doctor’s recommendations for treatment and follow-up, and if she is depressed she can’t do it well, so the child will suffer,” says lead investigator Michiko Otsuki, Ph.D., a behavioral medicine fellow at Johns Hopkins at the time of the study, now at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

The study is published online in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology.

Investigators say their findings should prompt pediatricians who treat children with asthma to pay close attention to the child’s primary caregiver — whether or not it is the mother — and screen and refer them for treatment if needed.

“We ask these parents if they are smokers all the time, so maybe it’s time to start asking them if they are coping well emotionally,” said co-investigator Arlene Butz, Sc.D., a pediatric asthma specialist at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

“Doctors are trained to pick up on subtle clues, so if they see a red flag in mom, they should follow up with a depression screener and referral if needed.”

Treating depressed mothers whose children are at high risk for asthma complications will likely benefit both mother and child, researchers say, while providing a clear treatment target to help reduce the burden of asthma in the United States.

The Hopkins study included only mothers but investigators believe a similar pattern would emerge regardless of who the primary caregiver is.

Researchers caution that the mothers in their study were screened for depression with a standard questionnaire, which is a reliable detector of symptoms but not a firm diagnosis.

The Hopkins findings came from a high-risk, inner-city population and thus cannot be statistically extended to other ethnic and socioeconomic groups, but researchers say the effect of caregiver depression on a child’s asthma likely transcends demographics.

The research was funded by the National Heart Lung Blood Institute.

Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine

Researchers from Butler Hospital and Brown University believe traumatized children have a reduction in the size of telomeres, the “caps” on the end of chromosomes that promote cellular stability.

The reduction is significant as telomeres typically shorten with age.

The findings are published online in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

After measuring DNA extracted from blood samples of 31 adults, researchers found accelerated shortening of telomeres in those who reported suffering maltreatment as children, compared to study participants who did not.

“It tells us something. It gives us a hint that early developmental experiences may have profound effects on biology that can influence cellular mechanisms at a very basic level,” said Dr. Audrey Tyrka, the study’s lead author.

The work of Tyrka and the other authors builds on previous research that established psychological stress and trauma as risk factors for a number of medical and psychiatric illnesses. Other work has linked some of these psychiatric and medical problems with shortened telomere length. This study now establishes a link between early psychosocial stress and shorter telomere length.

Researchers have also found that telomeres shorten at a higher rate when exposed to toxins, such as radiation or cigarette smoke. Other studies have looked at adult female caregivers who are responsible for children with developmental delays, determining a link between accelerated telomere shortening and the higher stress levels the caregivers faced.

This may be the first attempt to look at telomere length in relation to childhood mistreatment.

Researchers said the early findings are compelling, because they looked at adults who were otherwise healthy and had not had any current or past psychiatric disorders. The early data shows strong links between childhood stress and the accelerated shortening of telomeres.

More work is needed, Tyrka said. “We don’t know what the full implications of this are yet. Shorter telomere lengths are linked to aging and certain diseases, so it is possible that this is a mechanism of risk for illness following childhood abuse,” she said.

“But the precise role of telomeres in this process remains to be determined.”

Shorter telomere lengths have been linked to a variety of aging-related medical conditions including cardiovascular disease and cancer.

For this study, the scientists looked at 22 women and nine men between ages 18 and 64. Some of the subjects had no history of childhood maltreatment, but others said they had endured either moderate or severe mistreatment as children.

The adults who endured mistreatment as children varied in terms of the type of trauma they reported. They suffered individually from emotional abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse.

Grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders funded the study.

Source: Brown University

According to the researchers, of those parents with kids online, nearly two-thirds are concerned (32 percent very concerned) about online sexual predators. Similarly, about two-thirds of parents are concerned about loss of privacy (22 percent very concerned) and about one-half (21 percent are very concerned) about their children viewing pornographic material.

In contrast, smaller proportions of parents are concerned about their online kids playing games (35 percent), being the victims of cyber bullying (31 percent), or gambling (17 percent).

“Parents are quite aware of some online safety risks but seem less aware about others,” says Matthew Davis, M.D., MAPP, director of the poll.

“We know from other studies that about one in seven children between the ages of 10 and 17 have received sexual solicitation over the Internet and about one in three children have been exposed to sexually explicit material.

“So it’s not a surprise that most parents whose kids are online unsupervised are concerned about issues related to sexual predators and pornography. On the other hand, cyber bullying is a very worrisome problem for kids, yet the majority of parents say they are not concerned about it.”

Parents of girls who go online have different concerns than parents of boys who go online. For girls, parents’ leading Internet concern is sexual predators. For boys, parents’ leading Internet concern is viewing pornographic material.

Although lesser concerns, online bullying is much more likely to be a concern for parents of girls (38 percent) than for parents of boys (24 percent), and playing online games is more a concern for parents of boys (42 percent) than for parents of girls (28 percent).

When comparing parents concerns by race/ethnicity, the report shows black parents are generally more concerned about the safety of their children online than Hispanic or white parents.

“Black parents are more concerned than other parents about all of the risks we measured,” says Davis, who is also associate professor of pediatrics and internal medicine in the U-Michigan Medical School and associate professor of public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

“For online gambling, black parents have about twice the level of concern as other parents.”

The poll also asked parents what actions they do take, if any, to safeguard their children online:

• 65 percent of parents report disabling pop-ups
• 62 percent monitor social networking sites
• 61 percent check Web history
• 49 percent block Web sites they don’t want their children to use
• 32 percent use child-safe software

Sixty-eight percent of parents report taking 1 to 4 of the above actions, while 19 percent take all 5 of the actions listed. However, 13 percent of parents whose children access the Internet report not taking any of these actions to protect or monitor that use.

“As the Internet has grown rapidly, so too has children’s access to everything the Internet has to offer - good and bad,” Davis says.

“Federal laws have been enacted to limit kids’ access to pornographic material and strengthen surveillance and stiffen penalties for online predators. But it is important for parents to remain vigilant about their children’s activities online.”

Source: University of Michigan

PE is defined as a male sexual dysfunction characterized by ejaculation which always or nearly always occurs prior to or within about one minute of vaginal penetration.

Premature ejaculation has a host of negative personal consequences for both partners ranging from distress to frustration or the avoidance of sexual intimacy.

Results of the double-blind treatment phase of the study showed that men who were treated with the drug five minutes before intercourse were able to delay ejaculation up to five times longer than those who used placebo.

Additionally, patients and partners in both trials reported significant improvements in sexual satisfaction, and the drug was well tolerated.

An estimated one-third of U.S. men ages 18-59 are affected by PE, making it twice as prevalent as erectile dysfunction. Currently, there are no prescription therapies approved in the U.S. to treat PE.

“Premature ejaculation can have a powerful negative impact on the emotional and sexual lives of men and their partners,” said Professor Stanley E. Althof, PhD, Center for Marital and Sexual Health of South Florida, West Palm Beach, Florida.

“Recently, the international sexual health community agreed that PE should be defined as ejaculation occurring within approximately one minute of penetration that causes the patient distress. Now we need to work to develop treatments, and these encouraging results with PSD502 seem to be a step in the right direction.”

Both trials showed clinically and statistically significant efficacy in the treatment of premature ejaculation, as measured by changes in Intravaginal Ejaculatory Latency Time (IELT) and Index of Premature Ejaculation (IPE), a patient-reported outcome of ejaculatory control, sexual satisfaction, and distress.

“We are excited that results from two pivotal studies have shown that PSD502 was effective for men with PE, and we look forward to the opportunity to help patients who have had no real options to date,” said Patrick Fourteau, Chief Executive Officer of Sciele Pharma, Inc.

“This data will support the New Drug Application for PSD502 that we are planning to submit to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), which upon FDA approval would make PSD502 be the first prescription treatment in the U.S. for premature ejaculation.”

Source: Sexual Medicine Society of North America

Many women believe nicotine suppresses the appetite and boosts metabolism and would rather take the health risks associated with smoking rather than being overweight.

But a new meta-analysis (results of several studies) shows that women who quit smoking while receiving treatment for weight control are better able to control their weight gain and are more successful at quitting cigarettes.

The finding disproves current clinical guidelines that say trying to diet and quit smoking at the same time will sabotage efforts to ditch cigarettes.

“Women who smoke often feel caught between a rock and hard place, because they’re concerned about their health but also concerned about their appearance,” said Bonnie Spring, lead author of the study and a professor of preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Now they don’t have to choose between the two.”

Previously, it was assumed that a person could only change one health risk behavior at a time. “But these findings show that, at least in the case of smoking and eating, you actually get an added benefit when you try to change a couple of behaviors at once,” Spring said.

Recently published in the journal Addiction, Spring’s paper examined the results from 2,233 smokers in 10 studies from 1991 to 2007.

The study showed that women whose treatment addressed both smoking and weight control were 29 percent more likely to quit smoking in the short term (at three months) and 23 percent in the long term (from six to 14 months) than those whose treatment addressed only smoking.

Women whose treatment included smoking and weight control also gained less weight than those whose treatment included only smoking. They gained an average of 2.1 pounds less in the short term and 2.5 pounds less in the long term.

Spring hopes the study results will change doctors’ attitudes and current clinical guidelines about combining weight control and smoking cessation.

“Perhaps this news also will encourage more women to quit,” she added, noting that cigarette smoking kills an estimated 178,000 women in the U.S. each year. About 17.4 percent of women in the U.S. smoke.

Her meta-analysis looked at different kinds of approaches to weight control.

“Some worked better than others, ” she said. “Now we need different investigators to test out those most promising treatments to see if they get the same good results.”

More studies also are needed that offer longer-term intervention for weight and smoking cessation. The literature on weight control shows patients lose the benefit when they stop treatment, Spring pointed out.

“We’re in the right ballpark, we just need to refine our pitch,” she said.

Source: Northwestern University

Phthalates have been used for more than 50 years and are important components of many consumer products, including toys, cleaning materials, plastics, and personal care items.

Phtalates have been widely studied with some linking exposure to hormone disruptions, birth defects, asthma, and reproductive problems, while others have found no significant association between exposure and adverse effects.

A new report by Korean scientists, published by Elsevier in the journal Biological Psychiatry, adds to the potentially alarming findings about phthalates.

They measured urine phthalate concentrations and evaluated symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) using teacher-reported symptoms and computerized tests that measured attention and impulsivity.

Researchers discovered a significant positive association between phthalate exposure and ADHD, meaning that the higher the concentration of phthalate metabolites in the urine, the worse the ADHD symptoms or test scores.

Senior author Yun-Chul Hong, MD, PhD, explained that “these data represent the first documented association between phthalate exposure and ADHD symptoms in school-aged children.”

John Krystal, MD, the editor of Biological Psychiatry, also commented: “This emerging link between phthalates and symptoms of ADHD raises the concern that accidental environmental exposure to phthalates may be contributing to behavioral and cognitive problems in children. This concern calls for more definitive research.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the summary of their 2005 Third National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, state that “very limited scientific information is available on potential human health effects of phthalates at levels” found in the U.S. population.

Although this study was performed in a Korean population, their levels of exposure are likely comparable to a U.S. population.

The current findings do not prove that phthalate exposure caused ADHD symptoms. However, these initial findings provide a rationale for further research on this association.

Source: Elsevier

Using this method they discovered patients with recent-onset schizophrenia have higher levels of inflammatory substances in their brains.

Although the cause of schizophrenia is unknown, this new finding may give support to the theory that infections early in life might increase the risk of developing schizophrenia.

Furthermore, the discovery improves the potential to treat schizophrenia with drugs that affect the immune system.

The new analysis technique assesses inflammatory substances in the spinal fluid of patients with schizophrenia, instead of, as in previous studies, in the blood.

The results show that patients with recent-onset schizophrenia have raised levels of a signal substance called interleukin-1beta, which can be released in the presence of inflammation. In the healthy control patients, this substance was barely measurable.

“This suggests that the brain’s immune defense system is activated in schizophrenia,” says Professor Göran Engberg, who led the study. “It now remains to be seen whether there is an underlying infection or whether the immune system is triggered by some other means.”

According to the dominant hypothesis, schizophrenia is related to an overactive dopamine system. Previous studies have shown that interleukin-1beta can upset the dopamine system in rats in a similar way to schizophrenia in humans.

“We would have made terrific progress if we were one day able to treat schizophrenia patients with immunotherapy, as it might then be possible to interrupt the course of the disease at an early stage of its development,” says Professor Engberg.

The group is now studying if the inflammatory process is only activated in connection with the development of schizophrenia, or whether chronic patients exhibit the same phenomenon.

Source: Karolinska Institutet

“The Transcendental Meditation Program, a widely-used standardized program to reduce stress, showed significant decreases in blood pressure and improved mental health in young adults at risk for hypertension,” said David Haaga, PhD, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at American University in Washington, D.C.

Researchers at American University studied 298 university students randomly allocated to either the Transcendental Meditation technique or wait-list control over a three-month intervention period.

A subgroup of 159 subjects at risk for hypertension was analyzed separately.

At baseline and after three months, blood pressure, psychological distress, and coping ability were assessed.

For the students at risk for developing hypertension, significant improvements were observed in blood pressure, psychological distress and coping. Compared to the control group, students practicing the Transcendental Meditation program showed reductions of 6.3 mm Hg in systolic blood pressure and 4.0 mm Hg in diastolic blood pressure.

These reductions are associated with a 52 percent lower risk for development of hypertension in later years.

The findings are timely. Today, an estimated 18 million students are dealing with mental health issues on college campuses. Statistics from colleges nationwide indicate there has been a 50 percent increase in the diagnosis of depression, and more than twice as many students are on psychiatric medications as a decade ago.

According to recent national surveys of campus therapists, more students than ever are seeking psychiatric help on college campuses all across the United States.

“This is the first randomized controlled study to show in young adults at risk for hypertension reductions in blood pressure that were associated with changes in psychological distress and coping,” said Sanford Nidich, EdD, lead author and senior researcher at the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management.

“Previous research has shown that psychological distress such as anxiety, depression, and anger contribute to the development of hypertension in young adults,” said Dr. Nidich.

College students are particularly prone to psychological distress caused by interpersonal and social problems, pressures to succeed academically, financial strains, and uncertain futures. For the entire sample in this study, there was a significant improvement in students’ mental health.

“Hypertension is a common risk factor for cardiovascular disease in adulthood. Yet, decades of research show that high blood pressure begins in youth. This well-controlled clinical trial found that blood pressure can be effectively lowered in students with a stress-reducing intervention.

“This has major implications for the prevention of hypertension, heart attacks and strokes in adulthood,” said Robert Schneider MD, FACC, specialist in clinical hypertension, director of the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention and study co-author.

The study will be published in the American Journal of Hypertension, December 2009.

Source: Maharishi University of Management

Opioid medication include drugs such as Vicodin, OxyContin, Percodan, and Percocet.

Researchers discovered chronic pain patients with a history of depression are three times more likely to receive a prescription for this class of drug as compared to pain patients who do not suffer from depression.

The study, published in the November-December issue of the journal General Hospital Psychiatry, analyzed the medical records of tens of thousands of patients enrolled in the Kaiser Permanente and Group Health plans between 1997 and 2005.

Together, the insurers cover about 1 percent of the U.S. population. Long-term opioid use was defined as a patient receiving a prescription for 90 days or longer.

“It’s very widespread,” said Mark Sullivan, M.D., a study co-author and professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington.

“It’s a cause for concern because depressed patients are excluded from virtually all controlled trials of opioids as a high risk group [for addiction], so the database on which clinical practice rests doesn’t include depressed patients.”

Sullivan said most clinical trials exclude people with more than one disorder, but noted the problem is more worrisome here because depression affects so many — about 10 percent to 20 percent of the population.

The connection between pain and depression is complicated. First, no one really knows how often chronic pain and depression co-occur: 46 percent of patients seeing primary care doctors for ongoing pain have a history of depression and the vast majority of those seeing pain specialists have suffered both disorders, according to the authors.

“If you study depressed people, they tend to have lot of pain complaints that are poorly responsive to a lot of things so it’s not surprising that they end up on opioids,” Sullivan said.

Being depressed might make pain hurt more. “Emotional and physical pain aren’t all that different,” Sullivan added. “The same brain zones light up [in imaging studies].”

“Depression is mediated in some significant part by the brain’s opioid receptor systems; these things run together at every level that you look at them,” said Alex DeLuca, M.D., a consultant on pain and addiction and former chief of the Smithers Addiction Research and Treatment Center. He has no affiliation with the new study.

Consequently, it is impossible to tell whether pain is causing or exacerbating depression — or vice versa. To Sullivan, the bottom line is that “it is very important that opioid treatment for chronic pain does not replace or distract from treating mental disorders. ‘Both’ works better than ‘either/or.’”

Source: Health Behavior News Service

Two new studies of pedestrian safety found that using a cell phone while strolling can place one in peril. And for older pedestrians (over 60 years old), talking on cell phones is especially a problem when crossing a busy street.

The studies, in which participants crossed a virtual street while talking on the phone or listening to music, found that the music-listeners were able to navigate traffic as well as the average unencumbered pedestrian.

Users of hands-free cell phones, however, took longer to cross the same street under the same conditions and were more likely to get run over. Older cell phone users, especially those unsteady on their feet to begin with, were even more likely to become traffic casualties.

“Many people assume that walking is so automatic that really nothing will get in the way,” said University of Illinois psychology professor Art Kramer, who led the research with psychology professor Jason McCarley and postdoctoral researcher Mark Neider.

“And walking is pretty automatic, but actually walking in environments that have lots of obstacles is perhaps not as automatic as one might think.”

The first study, in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, found that college-age adults who were talking on a cell phone took 25 percent longer to cross the street than their peers who were not on the phone.

They were also more likely to fail to cross the street in the 30 seconds allotted for the task, even though their peers were able to do so.

Each participant walked on a manual treadmill in a virtual environment, meaning that each encountered the exact same conditions – the same number and speed of cars, for example – as their peers.

The second (and not yet published) study gave adults age 60 and above the same tasks, and included some participants who had a history of falling. The differences between those on and off the phone were even more striking in the older group, Kramer said.

“Older adults on the phone got run over about 15 percent more often” than those not on the phone, he said, and those with a history of falling fared even worse.

“So walking and talking on the phone while old, especially, appears to be dangerous,” he said.

Source: University of Illinois

According to a University of Missouri scholar, female breadwinners experience a range of emotions and challenges ranging from control, independence, ambition, pressure, worry, guilt and resentment.

Dr. Rebecca Meisenbach believes there are more and more female breadwinners in industrialized societies and they challenge the traditional Western gender norms.
In many countries, the male as breadwinner model is the ‘ideal,’ and it influences the creation of public policies.

The breadwinner ideal has also been linked to issues of masculine identity, such that a husband’s un- or underemployment threatens his perceived masculinity.

Her paper was just published online in Springer’s journal Sex Roles.

In her study, Dr. Meisenbach asks women to talk about and describe how they experience being the breadwinner. She hypothesizes that gender stereotypes and breadwinning may generate more tensions for women than for men, partially because women still face the cultural expectation of taking care of children, even when they are working.

Dr. Meisenbach conducted in-depth interviews with 15 women aged between 26 and 63 years old, recruited via electronic message boards and personal contacts. She asked them about their personal history and work-life expectations; how they became a breadwinner; their experiences as the breadwinner; and to describe the transition to a new situation, if they no longer were the primary breadwinner.

The women’s experiences highlighted six common themes - the ‘essence’ of being a female breadwinner in the midwestern and eastern US:

• Opportunities for control: though not all women wanted it, many female breadwinners enjoyed having this power
• Independence, which all women valued as part of their identities
• Pressure and worry – the downside of being the breadwinner
• Valuing, or being expected to value, their partner’s contributions to the family as a way of helping him maintain his gender identity
• Guilt and resentment – women struggling with societal and personal expectations of themselves and their partners
• Ambition, manifested by goal-setting and a strong drive to achieve.

Dr. Meisenbach’s paper also discusses some practical implications of her findings. On an individual level, knowing these essential experiences of female breadwinners may help women create and manage their own identities.

Couples and families struggling with the implications of the female breadwinner model may find this description of the essence of the female’s experience helpful in managing the way they communicate.

Organizations need to implement policies that recognize that both male and female employees may be the primary source of income for their households.

In Dr. Meisenbach’s view, the challenges that breadwinner motherhood offers to existing family leave policies has not been addressed in corporate America.

Source: Springer

Researchers at the University of Bergen, Norway, and the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London discovered the relationship while comparing survey findings of 60,000 people to that of a comprehensive mortality database for four years after the survey.

Dr. Robert Stewart, who led the research team at the IoP, explains the possible reasons that may underlie these surprising findings: ‘Unlike smoking, we don’t know how causal the association with depression is but it does suggest that more attention should be paid to this link because the association persisted after adjusting for many other factors.’

The study also shows that patients with depression face an overall increased risk of mortality, while a combination of depression and anxiety in patients lowers mortality compared with depression alone. Dr. Stewart explains: ‘One of the main messages from this research is that ‘a little anxiety may be good for you.’

‘It appears that we’re talking about two risk groups here. People with very high levels of anxiety symptoms may be naturally more vulnerable due to stress, for example through the effects stress has on cardiovascular outcomes. On the other hand, people who score very low on anxiety measures, i.e. those who deny any symptoms at all, may be people who also tend not to seek help for physical conditions, or they may be people who tend to take risks. This would explain the higher mortality.’

In terms of the relationship between mortality and anxiety with depression as a risk factor, the research suggests that help-seeking behavior may explain the pattern of outcomes. People with depression may not seek help or may fail to receive help when they do seek it, whereas the opposite may be true for people with anxiety.

Dr. Stewart comments: ‘It would certainly not surprise me at all to find that doctors are less likely to investigate physical symptoms in people with depression because they think that depression is the explanation, but may be more likely to investigate if someone is anxious because they think it will reassure them. These are conjectures but they would fit with the data.’

The researchers point out that the results should be considered in conjunction with other evidence suggesting a variety of adverse physical health outcomes and poor health associated with mental disorders such as depression and psychotic disorders.

In light of the findings, Dr. Stewart makes suggestions on the focus of future developments in the treatment of depression and anxiety: ‘The physical health of people with current or previous mental disorder needs a lot more attention than it gets at the moment.

‘This applies to primary care, secondary mental health care and general hospital care in the sense that there should be more active screening for physical disorders and risk factors, such as blood pressure, cholesterol, adverse diet, smoking, lack of exercise, in people with mental disorders. This should be done in addition to more active treatment of disorders when present, and more effective general health promotion.’

Source: King’s College London