“There is a serious gap between the idealized basis upon which assisted dying for patients with psychiatric conditions is advocated and the reality of its practice, as reflected in evidence from Belgium and the Netherlands. A policy for access to assisted dying by nonterminally ill patients with psychiatric conditions will put many vulnerable and stigmatized people at risk,” writes Dr. Scott Kim, a physician and bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, United States, with Dr. Trudo Lemmens, a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law & the Dalla Lana School of Public Health.
Canada has been grappling recently with conflicting recommendations over legalizing assisted dying. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that competent adults suffering from a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” should be able to access assisted dying. It invited Parliament to develop a strict regulatory regime to enable this. A Special Joint Parliamentary Committee recommended that people with psychiatric illness should be eligible. Bill C14, now adopted by both the House of Commons and the Senate, restricts assisted dying to persons near the end of their natural lives (whether or not they have psychiatric disorders). This would generally rule out assisted dying for psychiatric conditions. But the government will be studying this issue further in the coming years.
]]>Researchers in the School of Medicine at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio now report a biological mechanism that might explain why these individuals are less able to extinguish the fear of past dangers.
The Health Science Center has filed for patent protection on the finding because it may eventually lead to a drug to treat PTSD, which affects an estimated 8 percent of the civilian population and up to 15 percent of U.S. active-duty and retired service personnel.
]]>This discussion is urgently needed with teen patients, who are either uninformed or misinformed about the dangers and risks associated with electronic cigarettes, says Nancy Campbell-Heider, PhD, a University at Buffalo addictions and high-risk adolescent behavior expert.
In the review, “Teen Use of Electronic Cigarettes,” published in the Journal of Addictions Nursing, Campbell-Heider calls on health care professionals to place this form of nicotine delivery on their radar when seeing young patients.
]]>A single-center study from The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) found that as many as one in five adult patients had PTSD symptoms, with about one in 10 patients having symptoms directly related to their heart condition. The researchers suggest that clinicians and caregivers need to be aware of possible PTSD symptoms, such as anxiety and depression, in their patients.
“Although the life expectancy of adults living with CHD has improved, ongoing care may include multiple surgeries and procedures,” said the study’s senior author, Yuli Kim, M.D., a cardiologist at CHOP. “These patients remain at risk for both cardiac and non-cardiac effects of their chronic condition, and face unique life stressors that may place them at elevated risk for psychological stress.”
]]>“This is an important step in understanding a medication class, that is used with increasing frequency, and its effect on children who are at a critical time for building their bones,” said senior study author Jessica Rivera, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon with the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research.
ADHD is a common neurobehavioral condition often diagnosed in childhood. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate 6.4 million children were diagnosed with ADHD through 2011. In addition, the CDC says that parents reported 3.5 million children and teenagers taking medications to treat ADHD, a 28 percent increase from 2007—2011.
]]>The researchers note that many patients with HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders may already be benefiting cognitively by taking SSRIs in the dosages used in their study to treat depression, but the new study lends more rigorous scientific support to the drug’s value.
The Johns Hopkins researchers are expected to present their findings Feb. 25 at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston.
]]>A research team led by Nicole Cameron, assistant professor of psychology at Binghamton University, was the first to investigate the effects of alcohol consumption during pregnancy on alcohol-related behavior (consumption and sensitivity to the effect of alcohol) on generations that were not directly exposed to alcohol in the uterus during the pregnancy.
Pregnant rats received the equivalent of one glass of wine, four days in a row, at gestational days 17-20, the equivalent of the second trimester in humans. Juvenile male and female offspring were then tested for water or alcohol consumption. Adolescent males were tested for sensitivity to alcohol by injecting them with a high-alcohol dose, which made them unresponsive (drunk on their back), and measuring the time it took them to recover their senses (back on their four paws). The results suggest that if a mother drinks during pregnancy, even just a little bit, she increases the risk that her progeny will become alcoholic.
]]>Stressful life events - job loss, accident, death of a loved one - can trigger major depression in one person, but not in another. A deciding factor is resilience, a biological mechanism that determines an individual’s capacity to rebound from stressful or traumatic events. Researchers are still learning how resilience works.
“We know that a small cerebral structure, known as the ventral tegmental area, contains dopaminergic neurons that play a key role in vulnerability to depression,” explains Bruno Giros, whose team is part of the CIUSSS de l’Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal research network. By mimicking stressful life events in animal models, the researchers confirmed that increased dopaminergic neuron activity corresponds to depression.
]]>It is the first time researchers have been able to identify the particular cell types that malfunction in a wide range of brain diseases.
Scientists say the findings offer a roadmap for the development of new therapies to target the conditions.
The researchers from the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences used advanced gene analysis techniques to investigate which genes were switched on in specific types of brain cells.
]]>In the study, the researchers found distinctive brain differences in children known to be at high risk because of family history of depression. The finding suggests that this type of scan could be used to identify children whose risk was previously unknown, allowing them to undergo treatment before developing depression, says John Gabrieli, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.
“We’d like to develop the tools to be able to identify people at true risk, independent of why they got there, with the ultimate goal of maybe intervening early and not waiting for depression to strike the person,” says Gabrieli, an author of the study, which appears in the journal Biological Psychiatry.
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