April 1st, 2011 by Glenn Laffel, M.D., Ph.D. in News, Research
Tags: Cutting, LA Times, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Social Media, Suicide, teens, Videos, YouTube
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Millions of people watch YouTube videos depicting teens injuring and cutting themselves, according to a new study. The authors conclude that the videos may serve to legitimize the behaviors as acceptable, even normal.
To assess the scope and accessibility of self-injury videos on the Internet, Stephen Lewis of the University of Guelph, and colleagues searched YouTube for keywords like “self-harm,” and “self-injury.”
They found that the top 100 most frequently viewed videos were watched more than 2.3 million times. Ninety-five percent of the viewers were female. Their average age was 25, although Lewis’ group suspects their actual average age was lower, since some YouTube viewers provide restricted content only to older viewers. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*
March 31st, 2011 by admin in Health Policy, Health Tips, Research
Tags: Brain Injury, CDC, Concussion, CT, Guidelines, MRI, Neurology, Physical Medicine And Rehabilitation, Radiology, TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury
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By Richard C. Hunt, MD, FACEP
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
A 17 year-old athlete arrives on the sideline, at your office, or in the emergency department after hitting her head during a collision on the sports field and is complaining that she has a headache and “just doesn’t feel right.”
Can she return to play? If not, when can she safely return to school, sports, and to her normal daily activities? Does she need immediate care, a Head CT or MRI, or just some time to rest?
Do those questions sound familiar?
Each year thousands of young athletes present at emergency departments and in the primary care setting with a suspected sports- and recreation-related concussion. And every day, health care professionals, like us, are challenged with identifying and appropriately managing patients who may be at risk for short- or long-term problems.
As you know, concussion symptoms may appear mild, but this injury can lead to significant, life-long impairment affecting an individual’s ability to function physically, cognitively, and psychologically. Thus, appropriate diagnosis, referral, and education are critical for helping young athletes with concussion achieve optimal recovery and to reduce or avoid significant sequelae.
And that’s where you come in. Health care professionals play a key role in helping to prevent concussion and in appropriately identifying, diagnosing, and managing it when it does occur. Health care professionals can also improve patient outcomes by implementing early management and appropriate referral.
As part of my work at CDC, and as a health care professional, I am committed to informing others about CDC’s resources to help with diagnosing and managing concussion. CDC collaborated with several organizations and leading experts to develop a clinical guideline and tools for the diagnosis and management of patients with concussion, including:
For more information about the diagnosis and management of concussion, please visit www.cdc.gov/Concussion/clinician.html.
Also, learn more about CDC’s TBI activities and join the conversation at: www.facebook.com/cdcheadsup.
March 29th, 2011 by AnneHansonMD in Opinion, Research
Tags: Collaborative Care, Death, Healthcare Costs, medicaid, Medicare, Mental Health, Mortality, Psychiatry
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I briefly scanned the Robert Wood Johnson synthesis report on mental and medical co-morbidity so I thought I’d summarize the highlights for the blog. If you’d rather watch the recorded web seminar you can hear it here.
The report relied on systemic literature review to look at the relative risk and mortality associated with co-morbid medical and mental health conditions. The looked at studies using structure clinical interviews, self-report, screening instruments and health care utilization data (diagnostic codes reported to Medicaid).
This is what they found:
- 68 percent of adults with a mental disorder had at least one general medical condition, and 29 percent of those with a medical disorder had a comorbid mental health condition
- These findings support the conclusion that there should be strong integration of medical and mental health care Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
March 27th, 2011 by Glenn Laffel, M.D., Ph.D. in Quackery Exposed, Research
Tags: Injection, Platelet-Rich Plasma, PRP, Sports, Tendonopathy
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Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy became a hot topic among professional and recreational athletes after some studies suggested it could hasten wound healing and several high-profile athletes reported using it as they rehabbed from various injuries. But recently, the news hasn’t been quite so good. For those not in the know, let’s do a quick review of the subject.
PRP therapy involves extracting and centrifuging a person’s blood to create a concentrated broth of growth factors and white cells, and then then injecting the stew directly into injured tissue. The growth factors supposedly promote healing.
PRP therapy has been used for numerous conditions including tennis elbow and pulls, sprains and strains of dozens of different muscles, tendons and whatnot.
The treatment became buzzworthy after animal studies showed that it fostered collagen and new blood vessel formation in the tendons of animals that had been surgically injured by scientists. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Pizaazz*
March 26th, 2011 by David Kroll, Ph.D. in News, Research
Tags: Anit-inflammatory, Cancer, epoxide, Herbal Supplement, Lei Gong Teng, Leukemia, Oncology, Thunder God Vine, Tripterygium Wilfordii Hook F, Triptolide, Tumor
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Thunder god vine may not be a useful herbal medicine but the compounds isolated from it are fascinating – if not as medicines, then most certainly as laboratory tools. Nature Chemical Biology recently published an article where a research team from Johns Hopkins, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Drew University in New Jersey, has determined the molecular mechanism of action of triptolide, an unusual triepoxide compound from the plant.
Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F, or thunder god vine, is known as lei gong teng in Chinese traditional medicine and has a history of use as an anti-inflammatory herb. As with many traditional medicines, usage patterns do not necessarily indicate scientific validity. In fact, a Cochrane review published just last month on herbal therapies for rheumatoid arthritis indicated that the efficacy of thunder god vine was mixed. More concerning is that the herb had significant adverse effects in some trials, from hair loss to one case of aplastic anemia.
Nevertheless, the herb’s components have been studied since the 1970s for since they also appears to kill tumor cells in culture with nanomolar potency and have immunosuppresant activity in animal models. The group of the late natural products chemist at the University of Virginia, S. Morris Kupchan, first identified the unusual structures of triptolide and tripdiolide from Tripterygium wilfordii as described in this 1972 paper from the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Cytotoxic activity toward tumor cells in culture was used to guide the chemical fractionation of extracts. The unusual presence of three consecutive epoxides in the structures of both compounds led Kupchan to hypothesize later in Science that they target leukemia cells by covalent binding to cellular targets involved in cellular growth. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
To assess the scope and accessibility of self-injury videos on the Internet, Stephen Lewis of the University of Guelph, and colleagues searched YouTube for keywords like “self-harm,” and “self-injury.”
