February 6th, 2011 by Dinah Miller, M.D. in Health Tips, Humor
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So it’s Super Bowl Sunday and the fans are psychiatric patients waiting to happen — the beer and the beer and the beer, and maybe the fights will break out, and they’ll all end up in therapy. Oh, the angst and the panic, and the pre-game anxiety, and the post-game euphoria or depression.
New York Times reporter Benedict Carey talks about treatment options in his article, “A Home Treatment Kit for Super Bowl Suffering.” Mr. Carey suggests:
Breathing exercises are highly recommended and become increasingly important as the football contest nears the fourth quarter, when events on the field are likely to prompt strong physiological reactions, like a pounding heart, hyperventilation, even dizziness. These internal cues, as they’re called, can escalate the feeling of panic, a self-reinforcing cycle resulting in groans and cries that can be frightening to small children, pets and sometimes neighbors.
In the final minutes of the game, be forewarned: Many patients will move beyond the reach of therapy. Their faces may change, their breathing appear to stop. Researchers have not determined whether this state is closer to Buddhist meditation or to the experience of freefall from an airplane. All that is known is that, once in it, patients will fall back on primal coping methods, behaviors learned in childhood within the cultural context of their family.
Like emitting screams. Or leaping in an animated way, as if the floor were on fire. Or falling on their back and moving their arms and legs like an overturned beetle, in celebratory fashion.
This post is dedicated to my husband and son.
*This blog post was originally published at Shrink Rap*
January 29th, 2011 by Peggy Polaneczky, M.D. in Opinion, Research
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Here’s yet another study showing that abortion does NOT lead to future psychiatric problems. From The New York Times:
The New England Journal of Medicine has taken on one of the pillar arguments in the abortion debate, asking whether having the procedure increases a woman’s risk of mental-health problems and concluding that it doesn’t. In fact, researchers found, having a baby brings a far higher risk.
The study, by Danish scientists (and financed in part by the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which supports research on abortion rights), is the most extensive of its kind to date. It studied 365,550 Danish women who had an abortion or gave birth for the first time between 1995 and 2007. Of those, 84,620 terminated their pregnancies and 280,930 gave birth.
In the year after an abortion, 15.2 out of 1,000 sought psychiatric help (defined as admission to a hospital or clinic), which was essentially the same as the rate of that group (14.6 per 1,000) in the nine months before the abortion. In contrast, among women who went on to give birth, the rate at which they sought treatment increased to 6.7 per 1,000 after delivery from 3.9 per 1,000 before.
Why do first-time mothers have a lower overall rate of mental illness both before and after pregnancy than those who choose termination? The researchers suggest that those who have abortions are more likely to have emotional problems in the first place. Compared with the group who give birth, those who have abortions are also statistically more likely to be struggling economically, and to have a higher rate of unintended pregnancies.
And why do first-time mothers seem to nearly double their risk in the year after giving birth? That is likely to have something to do with the hormonal changes, decreased sleep, and increased stress of parenting, which women who terminate do not experience.
Can we please talk about something else? Like maybe how to help these young women with the issues and unmet contraceptive needs that led to unplanned pregnancy in the first place?
*This blog post was originally published at The Blog That Ate Manhattan*
January 28th, 2011 by DrCharles in Health Tips, Research
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“This job is killing me” is not a statement of jest. It is a desperate plea of outright sincerity.
Stress, anxiety, depression — all have been associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and mortality. But can interventions to help people cope with stress positively affect longevity and decrease risk of dying? The results of a new study in the Archives of Internal Medicine would imply the answer is an encouraging “yes.”
Constructively dealing with stress is easier said than done, but it would seem logical that if we can reduce our psychological and social stressors we might live longer and delay the inevitable wear and tear on our vessels. This study proved that one such intervention, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for patients who suffered a first heart attack, lowered the risk of fatal and nonfatal recurrent cardiovascular disease events by 41 percent over eight years. Nonfatal heart attacks were almost cut in half. Excitement may be dampened by the fact that all-cause mortality did not statistically differ between the intervention and control groups, but did trend towards an improvement in the eight years of follow up.
Definitely less suffering. Maybe less deaths.
The authors state that psychosocial stressors have been shown to account for an astounding 30 percent of the attributable risk of having a heart attack. Chronic stressors include low socioeconomic status, low social support, marital problems, and work distress. Emotional factors also correlated with cardiovascular disease include major depression, hostility, anger, and anxiety. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at The Examining Room of Dr. Charles*
January 27th, 2011 by AnnMacDonald in Better Health Network, Health Tips
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This picture shows the view from my office window in Boston: Dull, dreary, and depressing — at least on overcast days like today. Lack of light is one of the reasons that people feel mentally foggy.
One of the bloggers I follow, Rachel Zimmerman of WBUR’s CommonHealth blog, recently wrote that she’s been drinking three times as much coffee as usual. In addition to imbibing more caffeine, I’ve been trying to boost my spirits and alertness with mid-day runs to the snack machine (not the best strategy, in case you’re wondering).
At this time of year, many people aren’t just foggy and sad — they’ve got SAD, or seasonal affective disorder. About half a million Americans — women more often than men — are diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder each year. Many others experience at least some of the symptoms, which include loss of pleasure and energy, inability to concentrate, feelings of worthlessness, and an uncontrollable urge to eat sugar and high-carbohydrate foods (in my case, chocolate chip cookies).
Bright white light therapy remains a mainstay of treatment for seasonal affective disorder. That’s because the light acts on cells in the retina, the tissue located at the back of the eye that sends visual information to the brain. The hypothalamus, which helps control the sleep-wake cycle, is one part of the brain that receives this information. During the winter months, when people tend to stay indoors more, days are shorter, and the weather becomes overcast, our exposure to natural light diminishes. That disrupts the sleep-wake cycle, as well as other circadian rhythms. The result can be symptoms of seasonal affective disorder. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*
January 26th, 2011 by RamonaBatesMD in Better Health Network, Research
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The Science Daily article entitled Body dysmorphic disorder patients who loathe appearance often get better, but it could take years discusses the disorder as highlighted in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (JNMD).
The JNMD article reports the results of the longest-term study so far to track people with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). The study was conducted by researchers at Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital. The good news? The researchers “found high rates of recovery, although recovery can take more than five years.”
This is a small study with only 15 BDD patients who were followed over an eight-year span. An excerpt:
After statistical adjustments, the recovery rate for sufferers in the study over eight years was 76 percent and the recurrence rate was 14 percent. While a few sufferers recovered within two years, only about half had recovered after five years.
The subjects were a small group diagnosed with the disorder out of hundreds of people participating in the Harvard/Brown Anxiety Research Project (HARP). Study co-author Martin Keller, professor of psychiatry and human behavior and principal investigator of the HARP research program which has been ongoing for more than 20 years, said that because the BDD sufferers were identified through this broader anxiety study, rather than being recruited specifically because they had been diagnosed with BDD, they generally had more subtle cases of the disorder than people in other BDD studies. In comparing the HARP study with the prior longitudinal study of BDD, it is possible that the high recovery rate in the HARP study is due to participants having less severe BDD on average.
About body dysmorphic disorder:
— In its simplest definition, it is an obsessive preoccupation with a slight, imperceptible, or actually nonexistent anatomic irregularity to the degree that it interferes with normal adjustment within society. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Suture for a Living*
