By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Compared with the rest of the population, people with mental illness may be at sharply increased risk of dying by homicide, a new study has found. Researchers used Swedish government registries to determine psychiatric diagnoses and causes of death among the entire adult population of 7.2 million from 2001 to 2008. There were 615 murders in the period, 141 of them of people with mental disorders. (The homicide rate in Sweden is about one-fifth that of the United States.) After controlling for age, education level, income and other factors, they found that people with mental illness were almost five times as likely to be a victim of murder as a person without a psychiatric diagnosis. The study appeared online last week in the journal BMJ. The risk was highest among those with substance use disorders — nine times that of the general population. Those with personality disorders had three times the risk, people with depression two and a half times, and those with anxiety or schizophrenia about twice the risk of being murdered, compared with people without mental illness. The lead author, Dr. Casey Crump, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford, said the findings were consistent with those from smaller studies done in the United States. Interestingly, he said, “these results extended to all the most common mental disorders.” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 17902 - Posted: 03.15.2013

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Some studies have suggested that the risk factors for violence by people with mental illness are the same as those in the general population. But a new study finds that anger, coupled with psychotic delusions, may be the most significant factor in violence committed by people with mental illness. British researchers, writing online last week in JAMA Psychiatry, studied 458 patients ages 18 to 64 who had had a first episode of psychosis. Most patients were nonviolent, 26.4 percent were involved in minor violence, and 11.8 percent in violent acts using weapons or resulting in injury. Those who were violent were more likely to be younger men and to use illicit drugs, but they did not differ from the nonviolent in social class, unemployment or alcohol use. The researchers found no difference between violent and nonviolent patients with regard to feelings of elation, fear or anxiety. People with depression were less violent. But after adjusting for other health and socioeconomic variables, the researchers found that delusions accompanied by anger were present far more often among the violent patients. “If patients are not angry, the delusions themselves don’t cause a problem,” said the lead author, Dr. Jeremy W. Coid, a professor of psychiatry at Queen Mary University of London. “An area for future research is, ‘What do you need to do to make your patient safe again? Do you treat the delusions, the anger or both?’ ” Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 17892 - Posted: 03.12.2013

By GINA KOLATA The psychiatric illnesses seem very different — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, major depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Yet they share several genetic glitches that can nudge the brain along a path to mental illness, researchers report. Which disease, if any, develops is thought to depend on other genetic or environmental factors. Their study, published online Wednesday in the Lancet, was based on an examination of genetic data from more than 60,000 people worldwide. Its authors say it is the largest genetic study yet of psychiatric disorders. The findings strengthen an emerging view of mental illness that aims to make diagnoses based on the genetic aberrations underlying diseases instead of on the disease symptoms. Two of the aberrations discovered in the new study were in genes used in a major signaling system in the brain, giving clues to processes that might go awry and suggestions of how to treat the diseases. “What we identified here is probably just the tip of an iceberg,” said Dr. Jordan Smoller, lead author of the paper and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. “As these studies grow we expect to find additional genes that might overlap.” The new study does not mean that the genetics of psychiatric disorders are simple. Researchers say there seem to be hundreds of genes involved and the gene variations discovered in the new study confer only a small risk of psychiatric disease. Steven McCarroll, director of genetics for the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., said it was significant that the researchers had found common genetic factors that pointed to a specific signaling system. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 17866 - Posted: 03.04.2013

by Emily Underwood No single cause has yet been discovered for schizophrenia, the devastating neuropsychiatric syndrome characterized by hallucinations, disordered thoughts, and other cognitive and emotional problems, typically beginning in early adulthood. Although schizophrenia runs in families, in many cases no genetic risk is apparent, leading many researchers to look for environmental explanations. Now, research in mice provides support for a long-held hypothesis: that the syndrome, and other neurological disorders, can emerge when multiple environmental insults such as prenatal infection and adolescent trauma combine. Environmental stressors such as infection and abuse were long ago shown to be risk factors for schizophrenia. Large studies of children whose mothers were infected with influenza during the last months of their pregnancy, for example, have a roughly twofold increase in risk of developing the syndrome compared with the general population. That doesn't explain why a few people who are exposed to an infection in the womb go on to develop schizophrenia while most don't, however, says Urs Meyer, a behavioral neurobiologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and co-author of the study reported online today in Science. One long-held hypothesis, he says, is that early infection creates a latent vulnerability to schizophrenia that is only "unmasked" by later insults, such as physical injury or psychological trauma. Such stressors are thought to be particularly damaging during critical periods of brain development such as early puberty, he says. Although the "multiple-hit" hypothesis has been prominent in the literature for some time, it is difficult to test the idea with human epidemiology studies, he says. "You need huge, huge data sets to see anything." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 17864 - Posted: 03.02.2013

By Kali Tal A few weeks ago an article in the Scientific American Twitter stream caught my eye. EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) once again debuted as a “promising new treatment” for PTSD. EMDR, which has been repeatedly called “promising” over the last two decades, works only about as well for PTSD as other psychological treatment modalities with which it competes, primarily cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and exposure therapy. These so-called trauma focused treatments (TFT) all garner similar results. TFT have large effects in clinical trials, with two important caveats: 1) the enthusiasm of their various advocates bias the study results towards the treatment the researchers prefer; and, 2) they are effective for a significant number of carefully selected PTSD patients. The sad truth, however, is that current short-term treatments are not the solution for most patients with PTSD. Trial criteria often exclude those with comorbid disorders, multiple traumas, complex PTSD, and suicidal ideation, among others. Even when they are included, comorbid patients drop out of treatment studies at a much higher rate than those with simple PTSD, a problem that has implications for clinical practice. The large majority of those with PTSD also have other psychological disorders (commonly, substance abuse, depression, and anxiety disorders) and many of these patients have complex PTSD, which is both harder to treat, and more prone to relapse (see Fig. 1). Those who suffer from both PTSD and substance abuse (64%-84% of veterans, for example) often perceive the disorders as “functionally correlated.” Similarly, depression and PTSD are mutually reinforcing; each compounds the symptoms of the other. Both substance abuse and depression are notoriously difficult to treat, and harder to treat when comorbid with PTSD. Multiple studies document the long-term failure of PTSD treatment for veterans, but there are fewer on the effectiveness of therapies in treating comorbid PTSD in civilian populations. Existing studies challenge the assumption that PTSD treatments effective for simple PTSD, are also effective for combined PTSD and substance abuse, or PTSD and depression. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 17857 - Posted: 02.27.2013

By Ferris Jabr If you had opened the front door of Lee Shuer's apartment in the early 2000s, you would have encountered a narrow hallway made even narrower by all kinds of random stuff: unnervingly tall stacks of books and papers, cardboard boxes full of assorted knickknacks, and two hot pink salon hair dryer chairs with glass domes suspended from their arched necks. Sidling down the hallway to the right, you would have reached Shuer's bedroom. The door would have opened just wide enough for you to squeeze inside, where you would have seen mounds of stuff three to four feet high on the floor, bed and every available surface. A typical heap might have contained clothes, a violin case, a big box of Magic Markers, record albums, a trumpet, a framed picture, a package of socks, three dictionaries, two thesauruses and a pillow. Traveling a little farther down the hallway would have brought you to the common space that Shuer shared with his two roommates—a space that they had come to call "the museum room." In addition to Shuer's extensive collection of vintage Atari video games and related paraphernalia—Pac-Man board games and action figures—the room contained numerous bobble heads and kitsch from 1970s and '80s; nine milk crates stuffed with hundreds of eight-track tapes; furniture that he planned to refurbish; pile of newspapers, magazines and his artwork; and an assemblage of curious salt and pepper shakers—a mouse and slice of cheese, a dog and fire hydrant. Like many people, Shuer collected things in his youth—baseball cards, coins, cool rocks—but his childhood collections never became unusually large or disorderly. After college he bounced from place to place with few possessions. But when he settled down in an apartment in Northampton, Mass., in 2000 he began collecting much more avidly than in the past. He spent his weekends and spare time visiting Goodwill, the Salvation Army and tag sales in search of his next acquisition—the more intriguing and unusual, the better. Sometimes he would visit a thrift shop on his lunch break rather than eat. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 17851 - Posted: 02.26.2013

by Andy Coghlan Deep brain stimulation helps some people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), but no one was quite sure why it is effective. A new study offers an explanation: the stimulation has surprisingly pervasive effects, fixing abnormal signalling between different parts of the brain. A small number of people with difficult-to-treat OCD have had electrodes permanently implanted deep within their brain. Stimulating these electrodes reduces their symptoms. To work out why stimulation has this effect, Damiaan Denys and Martijn Figee at the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues recorded neural activity in people with electrodes implanted into a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. This region is vital for conveying motivational and emotional information to the frontal cortex to guide decisions on what actions to take next. In some people with OCD, feedback loops between the two get jammed, leading them to do the same task repeatedly to reduce anxiety. Surplus signalling The researchers took fMRI scans as participants rested. In 13 people with OCD and implanted electrodes, there was continuous and excessive exchange of signals between the nucleus accumbens and the frontal cortex that was not seen in 11 control subjects. When the electrodes were activated, though, the neural activity of both brain regions in the people with OCD became virtually identical to that in the controls. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 17842 - Posted: 02.25.2013

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Depression may lower the effectiveness of the shingles vaccine, a new study found. The research showed that adults with untreated depression who received the vaccine mounted a relatively weak immune response. But those who were taking antidepressants showed a normal response to the vaccine, even when symptoms of depression persist. Shingles, an acute and painful rash, strikes a million Americans each year, mostly older adults. Health officials recommend that those over 60 get vaccinated against the condition, which is caused by reactivation of the same virus that causes chickenpox, varicella-zoster. In the new study, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, researchers followed a group of 92 older men and women for two years. Forty of the subjects had a major depressive disorder; they were matched with 52 control subjects of similar age. The researchers measured their immune responses to the shingles vaccine and a placebo shot. Compared with the control patients, those with depression were poorly protected by the vaccine. But the patients who were being treated for their depression showed a boost in immunity — what the researchers called a “normalization” of the immune response. It is unclear why that was the case. The authors of the study speculated that treatment of older people with depression might increase the effectiveness of the flu shot and other vaccines as well. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Aggression
Link ID: 17836 - Posted: 02.23.2013

By Hristio Boytchev, Believing that brains can be trained through the use of specialized computer programs, researchers are focusing on helping people with schizophrenia, which can cause them to hear imagined voices or believe that others are controlling or plotting against them. There are medications for the often-disabling disorder, but they have severe side effects and don’t get rid of all symptoms; many people will not stick with the drugs. A California company, Posit Science, is developing a computer game that it hopes will become the first to earn approval from the Food and Drug Administration for treating schizophrenia. The idea comes from Michael Merzenich, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at the University of California at San Francisco and a co-founder of Posit Science. Merzenich is something of a living legend in neuroscience, a co-inventor of cochlear implants and one of the pioneers of the theory of neuroplasticity, which asserts that the brain continues to develop throughout a lifetime. Treating schizophrenia with brain training is based on the theo­ry that the confusion and fear the disease creates may occur because the brain’s expectations about what will happen do not match up with what actually happens. That disconnect might be traced to a problem with verbal and auditory processing of information, something that brain training targets. © 1996-2013 The Washington Post

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 17826 - Posted: 02.19.2013

by Emily Underwood BOSTON—Dude, check out these European perch. After swimming in water laced with a common antianxiety medication, the red-finned fish lose their inhibitions and gobble up prey at a much faster rate, according to a new study presented here today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (publisher of ScienceNOW). The animals act strangely even after being exposed to low concentrations of the medication found in rivers worldwide, suggesting that the drug and others like it could affect fish behavior and ecology even in small doses. Hundreds of different pharmaceuticals are able to slip past conventional wastewater treatment plants and into our waterways, says Jerker Fick, a toxicologist at Umeå University in Sweden and co-author of the new study. "They don't mysteriously go away after we excrete them." Scientists have known for a long time that many pharmaceuticals can persist in rivers and streams, and have behavioral effects on aquatic species in high doses, he says; however, determining whether more dilute concentrations have an effect is harder to establish. Several years ago, Fick and his colleagues discovered a common psychoactive medication called oxazepam in water samples from the River Fyris, which flows through Uppsala, the fourth largest city in Sweden. Oxazepam belongs to a class of drugs that make neurons less excitable and slower to transmit signals throughout the brain and is an "essential" treatment for panic attacks and other severe anxiety disorders, Fick says. Although the authors describe the concentration of the drug—0.58 micrograms per liter-1—as "unusually high," they also say it is comparable to levels found in rivers in other countries; however, there isn't enough research to know for sure how widespread the drug is. "This is not a particularly Swedish problem," says lead author Tomas Brodin of Umeå University. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Aggression
Link ID: 17811 - Posted: 02.16.2013

Mo Costandi Prions are best known as the infectious agents that cause ‘mad cow’ disease and the human versions of it, such as variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease. But the proteins also have at least one known useful function, in the cells that insulate nerves, and are suspected to have more. Now researchers have provided the first direct evidence that the proteins play an important role in neurons themselves. The team reports in the Journal of Neuroscience1 that prions are involved in developmental plasticity, the process by which the structure and function of neurons in the growing brain is shaped by experience. Prions come in two main forms: the normal version and the misfolded, infectious version. The normal version, known as cellular prion protein (or PrPC), is present in every cell of the body and helps to maintain the myelin sheath in the cells that protect the nerves2. But the molecule is abundant in neurons themselves, especially during development. Because it is tethered to the membrane, it is widely assumed to be involved in signalling between nerve cells, but little direct evidence has been found for this. Neurobiologist Enrico Cherubini of the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and his colleagues therefore decided to look at the effects of electrical stimulation on slices of tissue from the hippocampus of healthy 3–7-day-old mice and of animals genetically engineered to lack the gene that encodes the prion protein. They used electrodes to stimulate individual cells at the same time as the networks of young neurons showed bursts of spontaneous electrical activity, or to simultaneously stimulate pairs of cells that are connected to each other. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Prions; Aggression
Link ID: 17809 - Posted: 02.16.2013

By PAM BELLUCK A type of brain stimulation caused by a mild electric current that appears to have minimal negative side effects is showing promise as a potential treatment for major depression, according to several studies. The experimental therapy, known as transcranial direct current stimulation, or tDCS, involves a low-level charge about one-400th of that used in electroshock treatment. Unlike electroshock (also called electroconvulsive therapy or ECT), which is administered for a few seconds to patients under anesthesia, tDCS is given for 20 to 30 minutes continuously while patients are conscious. While doctors do not see it replacing electroshock, considered the most effective approach for major depression that has been treatment-resistant and requires urgent attention, tDCS does not appear to cause memory loss as electroshock can. Because it is inexpensive and easily administered, scientists say it might become an alternative or additional treatment for people whose depression is not completely helped by medication. “I think tDCS could be tried before ECT,” said Dr. Andre R. Brunoni, a psychiatrist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and an author of a study published last week in The Journal of the American Medical Association-Psychiatry. Or, he said, it could be used “for avoiding drug treatment in patients that cannot use drugs.” Researchers said Dr. Brunoni’s study is the largest to date of about half a dozen studies in recent years. It is the first comparing tDCS with another treatment — in this case, sertraline, or Zoloft. The study, involving 120 patients, found that tDCS appeared to work about as well as a low dose of Zoloft, and that combined with Zoloft, it worked better than the drug or the stimulation alone. Zoloft and tDCS were equally safe. A few patients became manic, and some developed redness where electrodes were applied. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 17789 - Posted: 02.12.2013

By Laura Sanders Psychiatry seemed poised on the edge of a breakthrough. In early 2011, after decades of no radically new drugs, a fundamentally different schizophrenia treatment promised relief from the psychotic hallucinations and delusions plaguing people with the disease. The new compound, devised by chemists at Eli Lilly and Co., hit a target in the brain that older medicines had ignored. All signs pointed to success. In mice, a similar molecule could block the schizophrenia-like effects of PCP. In people the new drug, LY2140023, appeared to curb psychotic behavior with few side effects, small pilot studies showed. In March 2011, Lilly began enrolling 1,100 people in a definitive Phase III clinical trial, the final test designed to show conclusively that the new compound worked. A year and a half later, the drug was dead. After years of work and millions of dollars of investment, the failure was crushing. People with schizophrenia were no better on the new drug than similar people taking a placebo, early results indicated. “I’m disappointed in what these results mean for patients with schizophrenia who still are searching for options to treat this terrible illness,” Jan Lundberg, president of Lilly Research Laboratories, said in a press release. Although the results were devastating, many in the field weren’t surprised. For new drugs designed to treat complex brain disorders such as schizophrenia, depression and anxiety, the odds of success are exceedingly slim. Given the current state of affairs in the drug discovery world, some would argue those odds are close to zero. Not a single drug designed to treat a psychiatric illness in a novel way has reached patients in more than 30 years, argues psychiatrist Christian Fibiger of the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, who described the problem in a 2012 Schizophrenia Bulletin editorial. “For me, the data are in,” says Fibiger, who has developed drugs at several major pharmaceutical companies. “We’ve got to change. This isn’t working.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 17782 - Posted: 02.11.2013

By JAMES DAO Over the past decade, about half a million veterans have received diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder or traumatic brain injury. Thousands have received both. Yet underlying the growing numbers lies a disconcerting question: How many of those diagnoses are definitive? And how many more have been missed? A series of articles and videos chronicling the experiences of military veterans who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan but continue to confront the medical and psychological scars of battle. No one can say. Though PTSD is hardly new, diagnoses still largely rely on self-reported symptoms. And while severe brain injuries are often clearly diagnosable, finding evidence of mild T.B.I.’s, particularly older ones, can be all but impossible. It means that for a soldier who, five years after duty in Iraq, still feels “not right,” with symptoms from headaches to sleeping problems to irritability, doctors can only guess at the cause. Maybe PTSD. Maybe T.B.I. Maybe both. Now, in one of the largest studies of its kind, a team of researchers based out of New York University’s medical school have begun a five-year study to find biological signals, known as biomarkers, that could provide reliable, objective evidence of those so-called invisible injuries of war. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Aggression
Link ID: 17777 - Posted: 02.09.2013

By PAM BELLUCK People with mental illness are 70 percent more likely to smoke cigarettes than people without mental illness, two federal health agencies reported Tuesday. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration show that one of every three adults with mental illness smokes, compared with one in five adults without mental illness. Adults with mental illness smoke about a third of all the cigarettes in the United States, and they smoke more cigarettes per month and are significantly less likely to quit than people without mental illness, the report said. There are nearly 46 million adults with mental illness in the United States, about a fifth of the population. “Many people with mental illness are at greater risk of dying early from smoking than of dying from their mental health conditions,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control, during a press briefing. The report is based on information from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which interviewed 138,000 adults in their homes from 2009 to 2011. People were asked 14 questions to assess psychological distress and disability, and were deemed to have mental illness if their responses indicated they had a mental, behavior or emotional disorder in the past 12 months. Those with substance abuse or developmental disorders were not considered people with mental illness. The report did not include patients in psychiatric hospitals or individuals serving in the military. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Aggression
Link ID: 17769 - Posted: 02.06.2013

A telltale boost of activity at the back of the brain while processing emotional information predicted whether depressed patients would respond to an experimental rapid-acting antidepressant, a National Institutes of Health study has found. “We have discovered a potential neuroimaging biomarker that may eventually help to personalize treatment selection by revealing brain-based differences between patients,” explained Maura Furey, Ph.D., of NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Furey, NIMH’s Carlos Zarate, M.D., and colleagues, reported on their functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of a pre-treatment biomarker for the antidepressant response to scopolamine, Jan. 30, 2013, online in JAMA Psychiatry. Scopolamine, better known as a treatment for motion sickness, has been under study since Furey and colleagues discovered its fast-acting antidepressant properties in 2006. Unlike ketamine, scopolamine works through the brain’s acetylcholine chemical messenger system. The NIMH team’s research has demonstrated that by blocking receptors for acetylcholine on neurons, scopolamine can lift depression in many patients within a few days; conventional antidepressants typically take weeks to work. But not all patients respond, spurring interest in a predictive biomarker. The acetylcholine system plays a pivotal role in working memory, holding information in mind temporarily, but appears to act by influencing the processing of information rather than through memory. Imaging studies suggest that visual working memory performance can be enhanced by modulating acetylcholine-induced activity in the brain’s visual processing area, called the visual cortex, when processing information that is important to the task.

Keyword: Depression; Aggression
Link ID: 17754 - Posted: 02.05.2013

Some but not all antidepressant drugs known as SSRIs pose a very small but serious heart risk, say researchers. Citalopram and escitalopram, which fall into this drug group, can trigger a heart rhythm disturbance, a new study in the British Medical Journal shows. UK and US regulators have already warned doctors to be extra careful about which patients they prescribe these medicines to. And they have lowered the maximum recommended dose. The UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) says people with pre-existing heart conditions should have a heart trace before going on these drugs, to check for a rhythm disturbance known as long QT interval. Experts reassure that complications are very rare and that in most cases the benefits for the patient taking the drug will outweigh the risks. Long QT QT interval is measured with an electrocardiogram (ECG) and varies with the heart rate - it gets longer when the heart beats slower and is shorter when the heart beats faster. Some variation is normal, but if it gets too long it can upset the timing of heartbeat with potentially dire consequences - dizziness, faints and, rarely, sudden death. To assess how common a problem long QT linked to SSRI use might be, US researchers decided to look at the medical records of more than 38,00 patients from New England. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 17736 - Posted: 01.30.2013

By Rachel Ehrenberg A rare peek into drug company documents reveals troubling differences between publicly available information and materials the company holds close to its chest. In comparing public and private descriptions of drug trials conducted by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, researchers discovered discrepancies including changes in the number of study participants and inconsistent definitions of protocols and analyses. The researchers, led by Kay Dickersin, director of the Center for Clinical Trials at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, gained access to internal Pfizer reports after a lawsuit made them available. Dickersin and her colleagues compared the internal documents with 10 publications in peer-reviewed journals about randomized trials of Pfizer’s anti-epilepsy drug gabapentin (brand name Neurontin) that tested its effectiveness for treating other disorders. The results, the researchers say, suggest that the published trials were biased and misleading, even though they read as if standard protocols were followed. That lack of transparency could mean that clinicians prescribe drugs based on incomplete or incorrect information. We could see all of the biases right in front of us all at once,” says Dickersin, who was an expert witness in the suit, which was brought by a health insurer against Pfizer. Pfizer lost the case in 2010, and a judge ruled it should pay $142 million in damages for violating federal racketeering laws in promoting Neurontin for treating migraines and bipolar disorder. Pfizer had in 2004 settled a case and paid $430 million in civil fines and criminal penalties for promoting Neurontin for unapproved use. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Depression; Aggression
Link ID: 17735 - Posted: 01.30.2013

By Laura Sanders A massive effort to uncover genes involved in depression has largely failed. By combing through the DNA of 34,549 volunteers, an international team of 86 scientists hoped to uncover genetic influences that affect a person’s vulnerability to depression. But the analysis turned up nothing. The results are the latest in a string of large studies that have failed to pinpoint genetic culprits of depression. “I’m disappointed,” says study coauthor Henning Tiemeier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The negative finding, published online January 3 in Biological Psychiatry, “tells us that we have to be very modest,” he says. “Yet we think it’s doable to find some of the genes involved.” Depression seems to run in families, leading scientists to think that certain genes are partially behind the disorder. But so far, studies on people diagnosed with depression have failed to reveal these genes. Unlike earlier studies, the new study ignored depression diagnoses and instead focused solely on symptoms. Researchers combined the results of 17 studies that asked volunteers the same set of 20 questions about their emotional health at the time of the questionnaire. A person with many signs of depression scored high on the index (called CES-D), while a person with few signs scored low. The researchers hoped that capturing the continuum of symptoms — instead of a black-and-white depression diagnosis — would be a better way to ferret out the genes involved in depression. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Depression; Aggression
Link ID: 17689 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By BENEDICT CAREY Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist and writer whose work helped explain why women are twice as prone to depression as men and why such low moods can be so hard to shake, died on Jan. 2 in New Haven. She was 53. Her death followed heart surgery to correct a congenitally weak valve, said her husband, Richard Nolen-Hoeksema. Dr. Nolen-Hoeksema, a professor at Yale University, began studying depression in the 1980s, a time of great excitement in psychiatry and psychology. New drugs like Prozac were entering the market; novel talking therapies were proving effective, too, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, in which people learn to defuse upsetting thoughts by questioning their basis. Her studies, first in children and later in adults, exposed one of the most deceptively upsetting of these patterns: rumination, the natural instinct to dwell on the sources of problems rather than their possible solutions. Women were more prone to ruminate than men, the studies found, and in a landmark 1987 paper she argued that this difference accounted for the two-to-one ratio of depressed women to depressed men. She later linked rumination to a variety of mood and behavior problems, including anxiety, eating disorders and substance abuse. “The way I think she’d put it is that, when bad things happen, women brood — they’re cerebral, which can feed into the depression,” said Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who oversaw her doctoral work. “Men are more inclined to act, to do something, plan, beat someone up, play basketball.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Aggression
Link ID: 17679 - Posted: 01.14.2013