Health News

Deep brain stimulation provides sustained relief for severe depression

Patients suffering from severe, treatment-resistant depression can benefit not only acutely but also the long-term from deep brain stimulation, as researchers from the Medical Center — University of Freiburg and their colleagues from the University Hospital Bonn demonstrate in a current study. The team used thin electrodes to stimulate a deep seated part of the […]

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It doesn’t take much for soldiers to feel cared for: Researchers conduct randomized controlled trial of caring texts

A soldier named Jerome Motto received caring letters from home in World War II. They helped boost his spirits and later led to one of the nation’s first successful suicide interventions. Today, with military personnel being more mobile, researchers tested out the effectiveness of caring texts sent to active-duty military. The study of 658 randomized […]

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New research will improve diagnosis of antenatal anxiety

A landmark study by experts at the University of Stirling will help health professionals improve the identification of severe and problematic anxiety in pregnant women. Antenatal anxiety can be difficult to identify and current guidance recommends that health professionals apply the same screening tool used to detect anxiety disorders in the general population. Such generic […]

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Personality and mood affect brain response to personal choice

Personality traits and mental health affect how people value personal control in decision making, according to a new study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. Our brain’s reward and motivation systems show higher activity when we feel personal control in a situation and when we receive rewards that we’ve earned, rather than been given […]

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Binary bias distorts how we integrate information

When we evaluate and compare a range of data points — whether that data is related to health outcomes, head counts, or menu prices — we tend to neglect the relative strength of the evidence and treat it as simply binary, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological […]

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Recognizing the uniqueness of different individuals with schizophrenia: Research reveals large differences between individual patients

Schizophrenia is an extremely variable psychiatric disorder which is diagnosed based on the presence of specific symptoms. Thomas Wolfers and André Marquand of Radboud university medical center investigated how much the brains of individual patients diagnosed with schizophrenia differ from the ‘average’ patient. For this purpose, they compared brain scans of 250 healthy individuals with […]

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Effective ketamine doses for treatment-resistant depression

A study led by Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators identifies two subanesthetic dosage levels of the anesthetic drug ketamine that appear to provide significant symptom relief to patients with treatment-resistant depression. In the October 2018 issue of Molecular Psychiatry they describe finding that single intravenous doses of 0.5 mg/kg and 1.0 mg/kg were more effective […]

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Rethinking lethality in youth suicide attempts: Firearms are a major factor in first suicide attempts in youth ages 10 to 24

First suicide attempts are more lethal than previously realized, reports a study of children and adolescents published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP). Seventy-one percent of youth dying by suicide did so on their first attempt, also known as the “index” attempt; the authors also found that firearms […]

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Study seeks former opioid users who avoided addiction

Individuals with a history of opioid misuse — but no history of opioid addiction — may help scientists identify genes that protect against opioid-use disorders. To that end, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are launching a large-scale study for which they plan to recruit 2,000 people who have used opioids […]