PARIS, FRANCE -- June 23, 2004 -- Results of a small pilot study suggest that adjunctive use of topiramate may benefit patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that is resistant to treatment with a serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI).
The new data on topiramate, an anticonvulsant agent that is thought to have glutamatergic properties, were reported here on June 23rd at the XXIV Collegium Internationale Neuro-psychopharmacologicum Congress.
Michael Van Ameringen, MD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, presented results on 16 patients in whom topiramate was gradually added in titrated dose increments to a maximum of 400 mg/day over a period of 14 to 26 weeks.
What is irritable bowel syndrome?
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a problem with the intestines. In people with IBS, the intestines squeeze too hard or not hard enough and cause food to move too quickly or too slowly through the intestines.
IBS is also called functional bowel syndrome, irritable colon (the large intestine is also called the colon), spastic bowel and spastic colon. It's not the same as inflammatory bowel diseases like ulcerative colitis.
Community leaders are more worried about the status of the mental health system than the general public, according to a new nationwide survey by Campaign for the Mind of America.
Nov 13, 2003 (SHFW) WASHINGTON - Community leaders are more worried about the status of the mental health system than the general public, according to a new nationwide survey released Monday by the Campaign for the Mind of America.
"Americans are rightly concerned about the inadequacy of health care in our country, but one part of the health care that is dramatically worse than the rest" is the mental health care system, said Richard C. Birkel, executive director of NAMI - the Nation's Voice on Mental Illness. "We're still in the free fall. The situation is a national, even international, disgrace and increasingly dangerous."
The Campaign for the Mind of America is a multi-year national and state initiative to increase access to mental health treatment services by changing federal and state public policies and priorities.
RESEARCH IN BRIEF: SEROTONIN
Aggression, suicide again linked to reduced serotonin activity
A recent report adds to the growing body of evidence linking low serotonin levels to aggression and suicidal behavior.
G. P. Placidi and colleagues studied 93 individuals suffering from depression, measuring their cerebrospinal fluid levels of metabolites of the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine. They found that higher lifetime levels of aggression were strongly correlated with lower cerebrospinal fluid levels of 5-hydroxyindolacetic acid (5- HIAA), the major metabolite of serotonin. In addition, their data showed...
Delay on Cymbalta, seen as a potential gold mine, isn't tied to suicide, firm says.
The Food and Drug Administration has extended by three months its deadline to decide on Eli Lilly and Co.'s application to sell the potential blockbuster antidepressant Cymbalta.
The drug gained attention after the suicide of Traci Johnson, a healthy 19-year-old woman who took the drug during a Lilly clinical trial.
Lilly spokesman David Shaffer said the extension is not related to the Feb. 7 suicide at Lilly's Indianapolis clinic.
"It absolutely is not related to that (suicide)," Shaffer said. "We'd know what the subject is they're looking at right now, and that's not it."
Lilly is counting on Cymbalta, which analysts say could generate sales of more than $1 billion a year, to step into the gap left by its former No. 1 Prozac, an antidepressant that lost U.S. patent protection in 2001.
PARIS, FRANCE -- June 21, 2004 -- Tiagabine may provide effective augmentation therapy in patients with generalized anxiety disorder who are partial responders to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) therapy, researchers reported here on June 21st at the at the XXIV Collegium Internationale Neuro-psychopharmacologicum Congress.
Tiagabine selectively inhibits gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) reuptake and the GAT-1 GABA transporter, thus increasing its synaptic GABA availability.
Anxiety and panic can interfere with normal life and certain nutrients may help the body and mind to cope. The B vitamins (niacin, thiamin, riboflavin, B6, biotin, pantothenic acid, B12, folic acid) are all important for the healthy functioning of the nervous system, especially the production of the key chemical messengers in the brain called neurotransmitters. Thiamin is particularly beneficial...
NEW YORK (AP) — GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which has been sued by the New York attorney general for fraud for withholding critical clinical information, announced Friday it will post the results of all of its drug trials on the Web.
Glaxo's announcement comes two weeks after the lawsuit was filed, and three days after the an American Medical Association resolution called on the government to create a public registry for all drug study results.
Problems with both hyper vigilance (or hyper arousal) and hypo arousal are seen in many persons with fragile X syndrome. In early development, parents often notice the infant's hypersensitivity to sounds, light, touch, and textures. Many infants and young children with fragile X show difficulties in sleeping, with hypersensitivity to sounds or light. Difficulties in falling asleep or in staying asleep may persist long past when other children are sleeping through the night. Sleep disturbances may be related to a reduction in rapid eye movement sleep and abnormal EEG patterns.
Sugar is one of the most overused foods in the Western world. It's in desserts, cereals, salad dressings, ketchup, relishes, gum, and certainly in candy. If you eat foods made with white flour, what you get is the action of simple sugars in your body. And if you consume great quantities of sugar products, you may trigger a hypoglycemic episode. Sometimes that feels like a full-blown anxiety attack—trembling, disorientation, light-headedness, palpitations, and even migraine headaches.
Here's the sequence of physical events that occurs when you put large amounts of sugar into your body in a short period of time:
ANAHEIM, CA -- May 14, 2004 -- Depression commonly accompanies menopause and in fact is more common in the perimenopausal years. Treatment is challenging given the new take on hormonal treatments following the early halt to the Women's Health Initiative study.
In a presentation here May 13th at the Annual Pri-Med West Conference and Exhibition, Karen J. Carlson, MD, assistant professor of medicine and deputy director of the Center of Excellence in Women's Health, Harvard Medical School, and director, Women's Health Associates, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, said that women who are at risk for depression in their menopausal years are those...
When Cathy posted her message on the Panic/Anxiety Disorders Support Forum, many people responded to her, urging her to let go of the guilt. How quickly most of us feel compassion for someone like Cathy, but many of us are slow to let go of our own guilt.
Guilt may make recovery from anxiety disorders difficult. It may lead to self-hatred, like it has for Cathy. If you find yourself feeling guilty on a regular basis, you may want to face it and learn what you can do about it.
What Is Guilt?
Guilt is the inability to forgive oneself for a perceived wrongdoing. Perceived wrongdoing means...
(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Scientists have noted that many people with the eating disorders anorexia nervosa and bulimia also have obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, a condition that cause people to repeat thoughts or acts for no apparent reason. Given this association, some have speculated that eating disorders may be genetically linked in some way to OCD. A new study from Italian researchers seems to confirm those speculations.
In this study, investigators measured the incidence of OCD among first-degree relatives of female subjects with eating disorders and compared it to the incidence among relatives of women without eating disorders.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Boys who have trouble sleeping between the ages of 3 and 5 may be at higher risk of drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes and using drugs as young teenagers, new research suggests.
Kids who often struggled to fall asleep or were overtired were also more likely to show symptoms of anxiety or depression and have attention problems later in life.
Study author Dr. Maria Wong of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor cautioned that many children have sleeping problems...
You deserve a competent counselor, someone who can really help you, and not hurt you, or waste your time. You probably agree. But do you know how to find one? Do you know how to tell a good therapist from a bad therapist? I found that people put up with unsound and even dangerous and abusive behavior from their therapists and counselors, simply because they don’t know that they don’t have to.
In the course of my cyberspace travels, I have met many readers who gave up on psychotherapy, because of a bad experience. If they had known just a little about how psychotherapy works, and what they should have expected, they might have been able to avoid a bad therapist, and find the help they deserved.
So in this article, I will try to equip you, as a consumer, with one method you can use to judge whether you are getting the help you need.
When you do find the right therapist, you will be truly amazed at the dramatic difference good counseling can make in your life -- you can at last begin your journey toward the inner wholeness you long for.
A challenge for many with anxiety disorders is explaining them to others. Whether it's a spouse or a co-worker, you can make the task easier by planning ahead.
Difficulty: Average
Time Required: Varies
Here's How:
1. To begin your preparations, consider writing your thoughts regarding each of the steps listed here. Writing can help you clarify your thoughts and reasons for each decision you make.
While most anxiety disorders are characterized by fear of a situation or object that people generally do not find threatening, posttraumatic stress disorder develops in response to experiences that would be considered traumatic or terrifying to most people (e.g., a life-threatening situation, serious injury or threat to one's physical integrity). Individuals can respond to these experiences with intense fear, horror or a sense of helplessness. The DSM-IV characterizes PTSD in three clusters of symptoms:
New findings at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute demonstrate the potential of a substance found in yohimbe tree bark to accelerate recovery from anxiety disorders suffered by millions of Americans.
In the latest in a series of studies of how mice acquire, express and extinguish conditioned fear, the UCLA team finds yohimbine helps mice learn to overcome the fear faster by enhancing the effects of the natural release of adrenaline. Adrenaline prompts physiological changes such as increased heart and metabolism rates in response to physical and mental stress.
Writing in the March/April edition of the peer-reviewed journal Learning and Memory, the team reported that...
Mental illnesses including anxiety disorders and depression are common and under-treated in many developed and developing countries, with the highest rate found in the United States, according to a study of 14 countries.
Based on face-to-face diagnostic surveys in the homes of 60,463 adults, the study found that mental ailments affect more than 10 percent of people queried in more than half the countries surveyed.
Individuals exposed to horrifying, life-threatening events are at heightened risk for posttraumatic stress disorder. Given the substantial personal and societal costs of chronic PTSD, mental health care professionals have developed early intervention methods designed to mitigate acute emotional distress and prevent the emergence of posttraumatic psychopathology. The method most widely used throughout the world is psychological debriefing.
Psychological debriefing is a brief crisis intervention usually administered within days of a traumatic event (Raphael and Wilson, 2000). A debriefing session, especially if done with a group of individuals (e.g., firefighters), usually lasts...
A recent Consensus Statement formulated by four major medical associations encouraged physicians to screen and monitor their patients on atypical antipsychotics for signs of rapid weight gain or other problems leading to obesity, diabetes and dyslipidemia. Yet, that same Consensus Statement has potentially evoked disagreements among pharmaceutical companies.
The Consensus Statement, published in the February issues of Diabetes Care and Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, was issued by an eight-person panel representing the American Diabetes Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity. The panelists not only reviewed clinical studies examining the relationships between second-generation antipsychotics and diabetes, but they also heard presentations from experts in the fields of psychiatry, obesity and diabetes and from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and pharmaceutical company representatives.
At her most worried, Melissa Woyechowsky sometimes spent four hours a day on the Internet looking up her symptoms. There was the tingling, the numbness in her limbs, insomnia, fatigue. She fretted over them all.
"Multiple sclerosis was a big one,'' she said. "And HIV and cancer. I was doing these searches, and it had almost a magical aspect to it. I was on the Internet and an MS ad popped up. I thought, 'It's a sign.' "
It turns out that Woyechowsky, an artist in the Southern California desert town of Twentynine Palms who used to live in San Francisco, had none of those maladies. What she had, she learned later, was health anxiety, a fixation that affects an estimated 2 to 3 percent of adults in America, but which often goes undiagnosed -- though not undiscussed, at least on the Internet.
Doctors used to call it by a common name ...
tAPir Diet Discussed
Recently, we asked "Does the tAPir Need a Diet?"
The tAPir Staff has gotten messages expressing concern that the Bulletin Board has become too large, too difficult to navigate, and (because of that) too divisive. We have no immediate plans to change anything but are interested in getting a feel for the opinion of the tAPir Community.
The Results
Does the tAPir Need a Diet?
no, the tAPir would be cuter if plumper [ 3 ] [5.00%]
no, the tAPir is just right [ 30 ] [50.00%]
yes, the tAPir needs a bit of the no-carbs [ 16 ] [26.67%]
yes, the tAPir needs gastric bypass [ 11 ] [18.33%]
Total Votes: 60
Comments:
We have nearly a 50/50 split so our poll, while informative, didn't decide the issue for us. For now, we will leave things as they are but will likely combine a few forums in the future and eliminate subforums altogether.
Thanks for your input.
Greater severity of depressive symptoms correlates with increased risk of stroke among whites, according to research presented at the American Academy of Neurology 56th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
Greater severity of depressive symptoms correlates with increased risk of stroke among whites, according to research presented at the American Academy of Neurology 56th Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
The same relationship was not found among blacks or Hispanics, although this may be due to limitations in the tool used to assess depression, according to lead study author Ji Chong, MD, clinical stroke fellow at the Neurological Institute, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City.
"Studies have found depressive symptoms to be a risk factor for stroke," said Chong, "but it is not clear if greater levels of depression confer greater risk." To answer this question, she and her colleagues...
Allyson Ollivier, a 51-year-old Provo resident, was once healthy and active. Employed by a local lasik-eye surgeon, Ollivier worked part-time assisting in eye surgeries and lasik eye procedures.
A little less than a year ago, Ollivier returned home to find that the carpet had been removed and the base of the floor sanded off as part of a remodeling project she and her husband were doing.
Immediately she felt her respiratory system begin to close off. As she struggled to breathe, she was unaware of the chemical hazard she had just encountered. An extremely high level of formaldehyde, a colorless, flammable gas, had triggered a condition she was not aware affected her-multiple chemical sensitivity.
"It was something I had never heard of," Ollivier said. "If I had heard about it before I learned what it actually was, I would have thought it sounded far-fetched, too."
About 35 million Americans suffer...
NEW YORK, NY -- May 5, 2004 -- Over the past 12 years there has been a significant increase in the rate of children and adolescents in the U.S. who are diagnosed with depression and in rate of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) being prescribed for children with depression, researchers reported here on May 4th at the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting.
"We found that antidepressant use has grown among children aged 5 to 18 years old," said lead investigator Linda Robinson, MSPH, Research Coordinator, Pharmacoeconomics Division, Pharmacoepidemiology Unit, School of Pharmacy, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington.
"In 1998 the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry suggested against...
It's often difficult to understand how such symptoms as ringing or buzzing in the ears, earaches, altered hearing, or even vertigo (dizziness) can be connected to a muscle-spasm problem originating with the teeth. The connection is a small muscle called the tensor veli palatini.
A SMALL MUSCLE
The Tensor veli palatini has a number of functions, including involvement in the closing of the eustachian tubes. This tube connects the throat to the middle ear and keeps the air pressure in the middle ear the same as that of the outside atmosphere. Normally this happens without our knowing it, but in certain cases, such as flying in an airplane, this change is noticeable.
The Tensor veli palatini is supplied with nerve signals from a branch of the same nerve that supplies the external pterygoid muscle. When the Lateral pterygoids are in spasm, the Tensor veli palatini also can go into spasm because the nerve stimuli go to both muscles.
When this tiny muscle goes into spasm, it closes off the eustachian tube and produces symptoms...
MIAMI, FL -- March 22, 2004 -- Low doses of risperidone might be useful as an additional medication in patients with generalised anxiety disorder who are treatment-resistant, researchers said here on March 13th at the Anxiety Disorders Association of America 24th Annual Conference.
"We realise that there are a number of patients with generalised anxiety disorder who do not respond to treatment. So we started looking at atypical antipsychotics to see if the properties of a drug like risperidone in very low doses (from.5 mg to 1.5 mg) could be beneficial. We used the lower doses to avoid potential side effects which could ...
NEW YORK, NY -- May 10, 2004 -- Escitalopram achieved a better risk/benefit profile than did venlafaxine XR in the treatment of depression, according to the findings of a randomized, head-to-head, double-blind study.
"The most significant finding in this study is the differences in tolerability of the two drugs. Escitalopram patients discontinued at a far lower rate due to side effects or adverse events than venlafaxine-treated patients, and this difference was statistically significant, " said lead researcher Robert Bielski, MD, clinical director at Summit Research Network Institute in Okemos, Michigan. Dr. Bielski reported the study's findings here on May 6 at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting.
Ray has not been to the West End theatre for about 25 years, despite his yearning to see a play. He finds it difficult to do most things people take for granted, like walking in the park or going shopping.
Ray has suffered from agoraphobia - a fear of open spaces and public places - for the best part of his adult life.
He is overcoming his condition and now wants to help others do the same with a new...