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Younger Smokers on Fast Track to Behavior Problems Later
Adolescents who have tried cigarettes by seventh grade are much more likely to become regular smokers and have behavior problems as teens, a new study finds. “We were struck by the degree to which early smoking appeared to indicate that kids were on the fast track toward a troubled adolescence,? said Phyllis Ellickson, Ph.D., who led the team of researchers at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif. ?We wanted to find out what factors in early and later adolescence might help these high-risk kids avoid negative consequences.? The study appears in the October issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health. The researchers collected data at seventh, 10th and 12th grade from 2,000 students in California and Oregon who were early smokers in middle school. They tested the students? saliva samples for tobacco and marijuana to ensure accuracy.
Hurricane Katrina increased mental and physical health problems in New Orlean...
Half the residents of New Orleans were suffering from poor mental and physical health more than a year after their homes and community were devastated by Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, according to research published in the September issue of the UK-based Journal of Clinical Nursing. Researchers from Point Loma Nazarene University, San Diego, California, spoke to 222 local residents 15 months after they survived one of the worst natural disasters to hit the USA. They discovered that some health problems tripled in the post-Katrina period, compared to a survey of Louisiana residents carried out before the hurricane. 
Children of Older Fathers More Likely to Have Bipolar Disorder
Older age among fathers may be associated with an increased risk for bipolar disorder in their offspring, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. Bipolar disorder is a common, severe mood disorder involving episodes of mania and depression, according to background information in the article. Other than a family history of psychotic disorders, few risk factors for the condition have been identified. Older paternal age has previously been associated with a higher risk of complex neurodevelopmental disorders, including schizophrenia and autism. Emma M. Frans, M.Med.Sc., of the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, and colleagues identified 13,428 patients in Swedish registers with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. For each one, they randomly selected from the registers five controls who were the same sex and born the same year but did not have bipolar disorder.
Genetic predisposition may play a role in anxiety disorders
Finnish scientists have identified genes that may predispose to anxiety disorders. Research conducted under the supervision of Academy Research Fellow Iiris Hovatta have focused on genes that influence human behaviour, and some of the studied genes show a statistical association with specific anxiety disorders. The work is carried out as part of the Academy of Finland Research Programme on Neuroscience (NEURO). Previously Hovatta’s team have explored the genetic background of anxiety in experimental models. The current study follows up on these findings in humans using data collected as part of national Health 2000 Survey consisting of 321 individuals who had been diagnosed with anxiety disorder and 653 healthy controls. Hovatta says it was interesting that different genes showed evidence for association to specific types of anxiety disorders, such as panic disorder, social phobias or generalised anxiety disorder. The results will be published in Biological Psychiatry in October. ?Environmental factors, such as stressful life events, may trigger an anxiety disorder more easily in people who have a genetic predisposition to the illness,? Iiris Hovatta says. The focus in the team?s further studies will be to understand the molecular and cellular processes that link these genes to the regulation of anxiety behaviour. 
Alcohol consumption can cause too much cell death, fetal abnormalities
The initial signs of fetal alcohol syndrome are slight but classic: facial malformations such as a flat and high upper lip, small eye openings and a short nose. Researchers want to know if those facial clues can help them figure out how much alcohol it takes during what point in development to cause these and other lifelong problems. They have good evidence that just a few glasses of wine over an hour in the first few weeks of fetal life, typically before a woman knows she?s pregnant, increases cell death. Too few cells are then left to properly form the face and possibly the brain and spinal cord.
New joint Israeli-American study sheds light on impact of terrorism on adoles...
In a study on adolescent depression following terror attacks, Professor Golan Shahar of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel, and Professor Christopher Henrich of Georgia State University, report that social support experienced by these adolescents seems to protect against depression. The research paper will be published in the upcoming issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 47:9, September 2008, also known as ?The Orange Journal.? The Journal article is titled ?Social Support Buffers the Effects of Terrorism on Adolescent Depression: Findings from Sderot, Israel.” The study followed middle school students in the Israeli city of Sderot who have experienced seven years of ongoing terror attacks by Qassam rockets launched from the nearby Gaza Strip. Researchers examined whether higher levels of baseline social support protected the adolescents from adverse psychological effects of exposure to repeated trauma. Twenty-nine participants were evaluated before and after a five-month period from May to September 2007, when daily rocket attacks from Gaza increased significantly. Both evaluations measured adolescent self-reported depression, social support from family, friends and school in the context of the ongoing rocket attacks. According to Shahar, ?This provided an exceptional and unique opportunity to examine risk and resilience processes in such a heavily burdened population.?
Stress of war may help cause schizophrenia -study
Pregnant women who live through wars are more likely to give birth to a child who develops schizophrenia, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday in a study linking prenatal stress with the mental illness. Babies born to women who were in their second month of pregnancy during the height of the 1967 Arab-Israeli ?Six-Day? War were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia as adults, they found. Similar patterns are likely among many stressed women, said Dr. Dolores Malaspina of the New York University School of Medicine, who led the study.
Brian surgery many help people with severe OCD
People suffering from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) that doesn?t respond to drug treatment may find relief with brain surgery, according to a Swedish study. However, there are considerable risks with the procedure, called capsulotomy. As a ?treatment of last resort,? capsulotomy involves creating lesions in the internal capsules of the brain to cut connections to the prefrontal cortex, which is hyperactive in OCD. ?Capsulotomy was reasonably effective,? Dr. Christian Ruck told Reuters Health, but ?it had more frequent side effects than we anticipated.?
One abortion no threat to mental health
Women who have a single abortion do not have a higher risk of mental health problems, such as depression, than women who have not undergone this procedure, the American Psychological Association reported on Wednesday. A panel appointed by the group representing psychologists found no credible evidence that having one elective abortion of an unwanted pregnancy causes mental health problems for adult women. ?The best scientific evidence published indicates that among adult women who have an unplanned pregnancy, the relative risk of mental health problems is no greater if they have a single elective first-trimester abortion or deliver that pregnancy,” said Brenda Major, a psychologist specializing in stress at the University of California Santa Barbara, who chaired the task force.
Gene variations linked to anxiety susceptibility
Variations in a gene that regulates the brain chemical dopamine may help explain why some people are more prone to anxiety than others, a new study suggests. The gene in question, known as COMT, controls an enzyme that helps break down dopamine in the body. German researchers found that people with a particular, common variant of the gene tend to have an exaggerated ?startle? response?a trait that could make them more vulnerable to anxiety disorders. The findings, reported in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience, mesh with past studies that have found a link between the gene variant and a higher risk of anxiety disorders.
Likely cause of postpartum blues and depression identified
Unique biochemical crosstalk that enables a fetus to get nutrition and oxygen from its mother?s blood just may cause common postpartum blues, researchers say. That crosstalk allows the mother?s blood to flow out of the uterine artery and get just a single cell layer away from the fetus? blood, says Dr. Puttur D. Prasad, biochemist in the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine. That controlled exchange between the blood of mother and fetus is courtesy of the placenta regulating levels of serotonin, a neurotransmitter commonly associated with depression.  But platelets that enable blood clotting also secrete serotonin which prompts platelets to aggregate and the placenta to want to get rid of it.
PTSD causes early death from heart disease: study
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) significantly raises the risk of premature death from heart disease, according to results of a long-term study of Vietnam veterans. In the study, veterans who experienced PTSD were roughly twice as likely to die from heart disease during follow up as veterans without PTSD. Until now, the evidence linking PTSD with cardiovascular disease was inconclusive, ?but this study confirms that PTSD is a major cause of heart disease,? Dr. Joseph Boscarino told Reuters Health. He equates PTSD to smoking two to three packs of cigarettes per day for more than 20 years. 
Voluntary Exercise Does Not Appear to Ease Anxiety and Depression
Voluntary physical activity does not appear to cause a reduction in anxiety and depression, but exercise and mood may be associated through a common genetic factor, according to a report in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. In the general population, regular exercise is associated with reduced anxious and depressive symptoms, according to background information in the article. Experiments involving specific clinical populations have suggested that exercise causes this reduction in anxiety and depression. However, it is unclear whether this causal effect also occurs in the larger population or whether there is a third underlying factor influencing both physical activity and the risk for mood disorders. Marleen H. M. De Moor, M.Sc., of VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and colleagues studied 5,952 twins from the Netherlands Twin Register, along with 1,357 additional siblings and 1,249 parents. Participants, all aged 18 to 50, filled out surveys about leisure-time exercise and completed four scales measuring anxious and depressive symptoms.
Study identifies changes to DNA in major depression and suicide
Autopsies usually point to a cause of death but now a study of brain tissue collected during these procedures, may explain an underlying cause of major depression and suicide. The international research group, led by Dr. Michael O. Poulter of Robarts Research Institute at The University of Western Ontario and Dr. Hymie Anisman of the Neuroscience Research Institute at Carleton University, is the first to show that proteins that modify DNA directly are more highly expressed in the brains of people who commit suicide. These proteins are involved in chemically modifying DNA in a process called epigenomic regulation. The paper is published in Biological Psychiatry. The researchers compared the brains of people who committed suicide with those of a control group who died suddenly, from heart attacks and other causes. They found that the genome in depressed people who had committed suicide was chemically modified by a process that is normally involved in regulating the essential characteristics of all cells in the body. As Poulter explains, ?We have about 40,000 genes in every cell and the main reason a brain cell is a brain cell is because only a small fraction of the genes are turned on. The remaining genes that are not expressed are shut down by an epigenetic process called DNA methylation.? The rate of methylation in the suicide brains was found to be much greater than that of the control group. Importantly, one of the genes they studied was shown to be heavily chemically modified and its expression was reduced.
Energy Drinks Linked to Risk-taking Behaviors Among College Students
Over the last decade, energy drinks - such as Red Bull, Monster and Rockstar- have become nearly ubiquitous on college campuses. The global market for these types of drinks currently exceeds $3 billion a year and new products are introduced annually. Although few researchers have examined energy drink consumption, a researcher at the University at Buffalo?s Research Institute on Addictions (RIA) has been investigating links between energy drinks and public health concerns like substance abuse and risky behaviors. Two new research reports by RIA Research Scientist Kathleen E. Miller, Ph.D., examine the relationships between energy drink consumption and risk-taking in college students as well as ?toxic jock identity? - characterized by hyper-masculinity and risk-taking behaviors among college-age athletes.

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