Publications on Mental Health Topics

Parents' spirituality or religion tied to lower suicide risk in kids, by Linda Carroll, Reuters, Aug 9 2018.

“Kids are less likely to think about suicide or attempt to kill themselves if religion or spirituality is important to their parents, a small study suggests. And that is true even if the kids themselves didn’t think religion was important, according to the results published in JAMA Psychiatry...More parents than children reported that religion/spirituality was of high importance to them, 45 percent versus 25 percent. More children than parents reported that it was of no importance, 15 percent versus 4 percent...For both girls and boys...higher importance of religion/spirituality in parents was associated with a 39 percent lower risk of suicidal thoughts and attempts. The same was not true when it came to parents’ attendance at spiritual services. ”

Which Drugs Work Best for ADHD? Large Study Zeroes in on Two, by Robert Preidt, US News , Aug 8 2018.

“-- Researchers have identified what they describe as the safest, most effective short-term drug treatments for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It's methylphenidate for kids and amphetamines for adults, according to a new study. ”

Pot smoking by parents tied to risk of psychotic episodes in kids, by Lisa Rapaport, Reuters, Aug 2 2018.

“Cannabis use by mothers or fathers during pregnancy, or even only before pregnancy, is associated with an increased risk of psychotic-like episodes in their children, a Dutch study suggests. Because pot use by mothers and fathers carried similar risk, and a mother’s use before pregnancy had the same effect as use during pregnancy, the study team speculates that parental pot use is likely a marker for genetic and environmental vulnerability to psychotic experiences rather than a cause, and could be useful for screening kids at risk for psychosis later in life. ”

New Group Aims to Advance Artificial Intelligence in Telehealth, by Eric Wicklund, mHealthIntelligence , Aug 1 2018.

“The Partnership for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automation in Healthcare (PATH) aims to promote AI in several facets of the healthcare industry, including telehealth and telementalhealth. PATH has set out five goals to champion AI in healthcare: improve patient outcomes and productivity; reduce government and professional regulatory barriers; align payment policies and incentives; promote partnership in developing ethical applications; and advance public understanding. ”

Protect Your Children from Health Risks by Building Family Resilience, by Benjamin Samuel Telsey, Military One Source, Jul 30 2018.

“Research has shown that childhood experiences, both positive and negative, have a significant impact on lifelong health and well-being. A major study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente surveyed more than 17,000 Americans to gain a better understanding of how adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, such as divorce, child abuse, neglect, or household dysfunction, might impact individuals as adults. The researchers found that adverse childhood experiences are very common in the general population. Fortunately, a positive figure in a child’s life can help to provide stability and security while also reducing the destructive effects of toxic stress. One of the critical roles of the military community is to raise healthy, resilient children despite the stressors and challenges they face. Service members and their families can take advantage of several support systems in place for parents and children alike. ”

Service Dog Registries To Streamline Travel For Veterans With 'Invisible Injuries', by Adelina Lancianese, NPR, Jul 28 2018.

“Many veterans and active-duty service members use psychiatric service dogs to help alleviate the everyday challenges of PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury and Military Sexual Trauma — conditions that service dog advocates call "invisible injuries." Now, the service dog community is eyeing a dog certification system to streamline travel and leisure for veterans who, like Crowell, are frustrated with the arduous process and stigmas attached to taking trips. ”

Mind-Body Therapies May Reduce Anxiety in Teens, by Traci Pedersen, Psych Central, Jul 27 2018.

“Anxiety affects approximately one in three American teens, with more than eight percent experiencing severe impairment in daily functioning. But according to a new review published in The Nurse Practitioner, mind-body therapies, such as mindfulness, yoga and hypnosis, can play a vital role in reducing the very common problem of adolescent anxiety...The researchers also emphasize the role of pediatric nurse practitioners (NPs) in integrating screening and treatment for adolescents with anxiety. NPs can screen young patients for anxiety at every health visit and help create a personalized plan to treat it. ”

Experimental Alzheimer's drug stirs hope after early trials, by Sandee LaMotte, CNN, Jul 26 2018.

“After a series of prominent failures, there's reason to be hopeful in the search for a drug to slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Results of an early trial of an experimental drug showed that it improved cognition and reduced clinical signs of Alzheimer's in the brains of study participants, and experts are "cautiously optimistic" that the results will be duplicated in future clinical trials. The drug, an antibody called BAN2401, not only reduced the formulation of new beta amyloid clusters in the brain, it reduced existing clusters by 70% on average, American biotechnology company Biogen and Japanese drugmaker Eisai announced Wednesday. The buildup of beta amyloid in the brain is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. ”

Sharp Increase In Gun Suicides Signals Growing Public Health Crisis, by Brian Mann, NPR, Jul 26 2018.

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's best data, from 2006 through 2016, show that roughly 218,000 Americans ended their lives using a firearm over that period.  'I believe we have a major public health crisis that we're not doing nearly enough about,' said Jennifer Stuber, policy director of Forefront Suicide Prevention at the University of Washington, which works to educate people in gun culture about the risks of firearm suicide.  'The public is really misinformed about this issue,' she said. 'They think it's homicide. But 60 to 80 percent of gun deaths are suicides, depending on what state you're in. So we have to start raising awareness about this.' ”

Autistic children prone to food, skin and respiratory allergies, by HANNAH FURFARO , Spectrum, Jul 26 2018.

“Autistic children prone to food, skin and respiratory allergies   Food allergies are more than twice as common among autistic children as they are among their typical peers, according to a new study1. Boys with autism are also more likely than typical boys to have respiratory or skin allergies, the study suggests. The findings jibe with a large body of research linking autism to an abnormal immune response. For example, women with autoimmune and immune conditions such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis are more likely than women without these conditions to have an autistic child. But few studies have directly probed the connection between autism and allergies. The new work, based on survey responses from the parents of nearly 200,000 children, is the first large study to find an association. “It is one of the first to identify a connection suggesting there may be something related to autism that we may not have looked at before — and that food may play a crucial role,” says Linda Snetselaar, professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. However, the research does not suggest that autism causes food allergies, she says. Some researchers caution against drawing strong conclusions from survey data from parents, who may not be relying on professional diagnoses. “It is not necessarily what you would call 100 percent reliable as opposed to, say, a clinical panel where they do the full allergy testing,” says Brian Lee, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, who was not involved in the work. Lee says the study is “still pretty important” as a clue to a relationship between autism and allergies. Taste test: The researchers examined responses from parents who completed the National Health Interview Survey from 1997 to 2016. The survey is a federally sponsored study of health among children and adults in the United States. Parents of 199,520 children aged 3 to 17 years answered questions about whether their child had experienced a food, skin or respiratory allergy in the past year. Of these children, 1,868 (1,478 boys and 390 girls) have autism. Of the autistic children, 11.25 percent have a food allergy, compared with 4.25 percent of the typical children. And about 19 percent have a respiratory allergy, compared with 12 percent of their typical peers. About 17 percent of children with autism have eczema or some type of skin allergy, compared with roughly 10 percent of typical children. The boys in the study accounted for the differences in skin and respiratory allergies. The researchers did not find an association between autism and these allergies in girls, perhaps because the study contained relatively few autistic girls, Lee says. Though the findings hint at a relationship between allergies and autism, they do not suggest allergies increase autism risk or vice versa. “It’s very important not to focus on causality but rather to see this as a path toward additional research in the future,” Snetselaar says. The work appeared in June in JAMA Pediatrics. One possibility is that allergies and autism share common roots: “For example, some kind of common genetics that underlies both the immune irregularities at birth and the neurodevelopmental, behavioral disorder,” says Lisa Croen, director of the Autism Research Program at Kaiser Permanente, a managed healthcare provider based in California. Croen was not involved in the study. The study has other limitations, such as relying on parents’ memories of their children’s allergies, which may be inaccurate. And some of the difference in allergy diagnoses may be due to the fact that autistic children are likely to see doctors more often than typical children do. REFERENCES: Xu G. et al. JAMA Pediatr. 1, e180279 (2018) Full text ”

Neural Link Between Depression and Bad Sleep Identified, University of Warwick., Jul 25 2018.

“Summary: Researchers have identified a neural link between depression and sleep problems. The study reports brain regions associated with short term memory, self and negative emotions are strongly connected in those with depression, and this may lead to bad sleep quality. Source: University of Warwick. The neural link between depression and sleep problems has been identified for the first time in a new study by researchers at the University of Warwick (UK) and Fudan University (China). Professor Jianfeng Feng and Professor Edmund Rolls from Warwick’s Department of Computer Science, with Dr. Wei Cheng from Fudan University, found functional connectivity between the areas of the brain associated with short-term memory, self, and negative emotions – causing sufferers to dwell on bad thoughts and leading to a poor quality of sleep. This research could lead to better sleep quality for people with depression, and opens up the possibility of new targeted treatments. Analysing data from around 10,000 people, the researchers examined the neural mechanisms underlying the relation between depression and quality of sleep. In the brains of those living with depressive problems, they discovered a strong connection between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (associated with short-term memory), the precuneus (associated with the self) and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (associated with negative emotion).   The analysis showed that these functional connectivities underlie the relation between depressive problems and sleep quality. The researchers conclude that increased functional connectivity between these brain regions provides a neural basis for how depression is related to poor sleep quality. Professor Jianfeng Feng, from the University of Warwick’s Department of Computer Science, said: “The understanding that we develop here is consistent with areas of the brain involved in short-term memory (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), the self (precuneus), and negative emotion (the lateral orbitofrontal cortex) being highly connected in depression, and that this results in increased ruminating thoughts which are at least part of the mechanism that impairs sleep quality.” Professor Edmund Rolls also commented: “This study may also have implications for a deeper understanding of depression. This important cross-validation with participants from the USA provides support for the theory that the lateral orbitofrontal cortex is a key brain area that might be targeted in the search for treatments for depression.” Professor Jianfeng Feng comments that these findings could have important public health implications, as both sleep problems and depression affect a large number of people. He commented: “In today’s world, poor sleep and sleep deprivation have become common problem affecting more than a third of the world’s population due to the longer work hours and commuting times, later night activity, and increased dependency on electronics. The disorder of insomnia has become the second most prevalent mental disorder.” “And major depressive disorder is also ranked by the World Health Organization as the leading cause of years-of-life lived with disability. According to a recent statistic, it affects approximately 216 million people (3% of the world’s population). So almost everyone in the world is related to these two problems, as a sufferer or a relative of a sufferer.” Professor Jianfeng Feng further commented: “The relation between depression and sleep has been observed more than one hundred years, and now we have identified the neural mechanisms of how they are connected for the first time. These findings provide a neural basis for understanding how depression relates to poor sleep quality, and this in turn has implications for treatment of depression and improvement of sleep quality because of the brain areas identified.”   Depression and sleep problems often go hand-in-hand. About 75% of depressed patients report significant levels of sleep disturbance, such as difficulty of falling asleep and short duration of sleep (insomnia). People with insomnia also have a higher risk of developing depression and anxiety than those who sleep normally. ”

Skepticism surrounds autism drug given ‘fast track’ for approval, by HANNAH FURFARO , Spectrum, Jul 25 2018.

“Skepticism surrounds autism drug given ‘fast track’ for approval For more than a decade, pediatrician Peter Halas has overseen the treatment of a young autistic woman, Mary Anne, who consistently resisted his attempts to examine her. Mary Anne’s parents have brought her to his New Jersey clinic at least once a year since she was 10, but at each visit, she would push him away and say just one word: “No.” (Halas did not disclose Mary Anne’s last name, to protect her privacy.) Halas prescribed Mary Anne anxiety medication, he says, but her mood and behaviors did not improve. So, when Yamo Pharmaceuticals, a small biotechnology company based in New York City, asked Halas to lead a study on its candidate autism drug, he jumped at the opportunity. “This patient, who had been my patient for a long time and was severely autistic, immediately came to mind,” Halas says. Halas convinced Mary Anne’s parents to enroll her as one of the study’s eight participants. Shortly after Mary Anne, then 24, began taking the drug, Halas says he witnessed a transformation. “Within a week she became more comfortable, happier, and started to speak more,” he says. “The second week, she was starting to use sentences, asking questions and making eye contact.” She began to blow kisses to her family members, recalling minute details about nursery school teachers from 20 years earlier, and even attended a rock concert. And she allowed Halas to examine her. As in the young woman’s case, results from the study — and a subsequent 41-person trial — hint that the drug, L1-79, improves social behaviors in adolescents and young adults with autism, according to J. Thomas Megerian, chief medical officer at Yamo. The company has yet to publish its results or post them on Clinicaltrials.gov — a federal repository of clinical trial results — so they are difficult to confirm, however. Despite the dearth of data, in May the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted the drug ‘fast track’ status, according to Megerian. (FDA officials declined to confirm this, citing agency rules.) Fast-track status is not an endorsement of a drug’s potential: A candidate drug can gain fast-track status if it has the potential to fulfill an unmet need for a serious medical condition; the agency can grant this status at any point during a drug’s review. The drug’s makers can also meet frequently with FDA officials about their study design. Many scientists say they are surprised by the FDA’s decision because of the lack of published data on the drug’s effectiveness. “[The decision] blows me away,” says Joseph Coyle, director of McLean Hospital’s Laboratory for Psychiatric and Molecular Neuroscience in Belmont, Massachusetts. The drug affects several distinct neuronal systems, he says, “most of which have nothing to do with autism.” Guerilla pharmacology: Yamo’s candidate is chemically similar to an approved cancer drug, Demser, whose mechanism is well understood. It inhibits an enzyme called tyrosine hydroxylase, which is critical for the production of chemical messengers called catecholamines. This category includes the chemical messengers dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine; abnormal dopamine signaling has been linked to autism in several ways. Demser is used to treat tumors that release high levels of catecholamines. Yamo’s drug mixes Demser with a mirror image of its chemical structure — and the participants in both of Yamo’s studies took it at much lower doses than Demser’s typical dose, according to the company’s officials. The Yamo drug would be expected to act similarly to Demser, although no animal studies exist to support that idea. “We just treated patients; we didn’t do a lot of the kind of antecedent work that might be done in terms of investigating mechanisms,” says John Rothman, Yamo’s chief scientific advisor. The process was “a little bit of guerilla pharmacology,” he says, because Yamo operated on a shoestring budget in its early days. Broad claims: It’s unclear how blocking signaling by dopamine or other catecholamines would improve social behavior in people with autism — the claim the company makes in the white paper it made available to Spectrum. In its description of the drug’s proposed mechanism, Yamo “was not only selective, but it was also to the point of being less than scholarly,” says George Anderson, senior research scientist at the Yale Child Study Center. “To think this is in any way improving a fundamental alteration of systems in autism is, I think, misguided.” In Yamo’s phase II clinical trial, launched in 2016, 31 young men with autism, aged 13 to 21 years, took the drug for 28 days; another 10 took a placebo. “Nobody thought this was going to show anything,” says Megerian. But to his surprise, he says, most participants taking the drug improved on several scales that assess social behavior. Parents of children in the trials have given video testimonials that the company shared with the FDA about the drug’s benefits. In one video, a mother tells a story about her teenage son, who sometimes bangs his head on walls and head-butts his brothers. While taking the drug, she says, her son went for weeks without hurting himself; his sleep improved and he accepted his parents’ affection. However, poignant anecdotes are no replacement for well-designed clinical trials, scientists note. Given the lack of published data, they are concerned about raising families’ hopes of a treatment. “Parents are desperate for treatment for their kids,” Coyle says. “I can tell you, in terms of the autism community, there are a number of unfortunately fringe, charismatic people offering treatments that have no biomedical validity.” Yamo officials say they intend to enroll 250 people with autism in a second phase II trial in early 2019. ”

Women bear Alzheimer's burden; researchers are trying to discover why, by Sandee LaMotte, CNN, Jul 23 2018.

“At the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Chicago this week, researchers are exploring biological and social differences that might explain why more women than men develop Alzheimer's and other types of dementia. A study to be presented at the conference found a link between a lower risk for dementia and the number of births a woman has. Women with three or more children had a 12% lower risk of developing cognitive issues than a woman with only one child, according to initial results of the study of nearly 15,000 women. Pregnancy failures, however, increased a woman's risk, according to the Kaiser Permanente study. Compared with women who never lost a pregnancy, women with three or more miscarriages had a 47% higher risk for dementia. ”

New dads need depression screening, too, by Lisa Rapaport, Reuters, Jul 23 2018.

“Fathers of young children may be almost as likely as new mothers to experience symptoms of depression, a U.S. study suggests. Researchers examined results from depression screenings done for parents during more than 9,500 visits to pediatrics clinics with their children. Overall, 4.4 percent of fathers and five percent of mothers screened positive for depression...Because parental depression can have lasting physical and mental health affects for young children, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that all parents - both mothers and fathers - get screened for depression during well-baby and well-child checkups. ”

America's Drinking Habits Are Killing More Young People, Study Suggests, by Jamie Ducharme, TIME, Jul 21 2018.

“Liver disease deaths are growing more common in the U.S. and disproportionately affecting younger Americans, according to a recent study. The paper, published in The BMJ just a day after a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report on rising liver cancer death rates, paints a troubling picture of how Americans’ drinking habits may be affecting their health. While the new study couldn’t prove causation, the researchers say drinking is likely to blame for the growing number of adults aged 24 to 35 who are dying from cirrhosis, or scarring of the liver. ”