The study is one of the few to examine this association by gender in an urban clinic for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

Results show that binge drinking among women attending the clinic was linked to unsafe sexual practices – such as multiple partners and anal sex – and high rates of gonorrhea.

Results will be published in the November issue of Alcoholism: Clinical & Experimental Research and are currently available at Early View.

“The link between binge drinking and risky sexual behavior is complex,” said Heidi E. Hutton, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as corresponding author for the study.

“We wanted to examine one component of that relationship, whether binge drinking increased the risk of engaging in sexual behaviors and having STDs.

We found gender differences in binge drinking among patients at an STD clinic, and also that binge drinking increased STD risk for women.”

“Binge drinking results in a decreased ability to make clear decisions,” noted Geetanjali Chander, assistant professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, “and can enable individuals to engage in behaviors that they would not if sober.

Initially, some individuals may drink with the expectation of decreasing inhibitions, or some may drink because they are anxious, or depressed, and they expect alcohol to alleviate their symptoms. Regardless of why they choose to drink, many people do not perceive the potential risk or harm that may result from binge drinking.

Between July 2000 and August 2001, researchers approached 795 STD-clinic patients being evaluated/ treated for STDs. Of those approached, 671 (322 males, 349 females; 95% African American, 83% heterosexual) agreed to answer questions about their recent alcohol/drug use and risky sexual behaviors using audio computer-assisted-self interview technology.

The association between binge drinking and sexual behaviors/STDs was then analyzed, adjusting for age, employment, and drug use.

“We found that binge drinking among women STD-clinic patients is associated with certain risky sexual behaviors,” said Hutton.

“Across gender, women binge drinkers are more likely to have anal sex than men binge drinkers. Within gender, women binge drinkers are three times as likely to have anal sex, and twice as likely to have multiple sex partners compared to women who do not drink alcohol. Compared to non-drinking women, women binge drinkers are also five times as likely to have gonorrhea.”

“Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease which reflects unsafe sexual practices,” added Chander. “This association between binge drinking and high-risk sexual behaviors is especially important as risky behaviors are associated with HIV acquisition and transmission.”

Hutton said that both binge drinking and risky sexual behaviors are more hazardous to women than men.

“If women and men consume the same dose of alcohol, women will have a higher concentration of alcohol in their system, and substantially greater alcohol-caused impairment than men,” she said.

“Furthermore, anatomical differences place women at greater risk than men of contracting some sexually transmitted infections. As a result, men transmit some infections to women more efficiently than women do to men.

For example, men are eight to 10 times more likely to transmit HIV to a female partner through repeated, unprotected sexual intercourse than women are to transmit the virus to men.”

“While other studies have demonstrated that alcohol use is associated with high-risk behaviors, this study demonstrates a gender-specific association between binge drinking and risky behaviors which merits further exploration,” said Chander.

“Linking binge drinking to an actual biological marker that reflects high-risk sexual behaviors strengthens the argument that alcohol use is associated with high-risk behaviors.”

Hutton and her colleagues recommend that clinicians at STD clinics routinely screen for binge drinking.

“While it is standard practice in most STD clinics to discuss behavioral factors for STD risk,” said Hutton, “binge drinkers may be harder to identify than alcohol-dependent individuals because the latter have more obvious impairment of function.”

Source: Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

New studies show that a sense of rejection or isolation disrupts not only will power and perseverance, but also key cellular processes deep within the human body.

Chronic loneliness belongs among health risk factors such as smoking, obesity or lack of exercise.

Feeling connected to others is vital to a person’s mental well-being, as well as physical health, research at the University of Chicago shows.

The studies, reported in a new book, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, show that a sense of rejection or isolation disrupts not only abilities, will power and perseverance, but also key cellular processes deep within the human body.

The findings suggest that chronic loneliness belongs among health risk factors such as smoking, obesity or lack of exercise, according to lead author John Cacioppo, the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology at the University.

“Loneliness not only alters behavior, but loneliness is related to greater resistance to blood flow through your cardiovascular system,” Cacioppo said.

“Loneliness leads to higher rises in morning levels of the stress hormone cortisol, altered gene expression in immune cells, poorer immune function, higher blood pressure and an increased level of depression.

Loneliness also is related to difficulty getting a deep sleep and a faster progression of Alzheimer’s disease, said Cacioppo.

One of the founders of a new discipline called social neuroscience, Cacioppo used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain scans and advanced scientific techniques to document the roles of loneliness and social connection as central regulatory mechanisms in human physiology and behavior.

The authors traced the need for connection to its evolutionary roots. In order to survive, humans needed to bond to rear their children. In order to flourish, they needed to extend their altruistic and cooperative impulses beyond narrow self-interest and immediate kin. But in the environment of evolutionary adaptation, the only real safety was in numbers.

Just as physical pain is a prompt to change behavior (such as moving a finger away from the fire), loneliness evolved as a prompt to action, signaling an ancestral need to repair the social bonds. Feelings of loneliness take a variety of forms, Cacioppo said.

“There are three core dimensions to feeling lonely—intimate isolation, which comes from not having anyone in your life you feel affirms who you are; relational isolation, which comes from not having face-to-face contacts that are rewarding; and collective isolation, which comes from not feeling that you’re part of a group or collective beyond individual existence,” he said.

It is not solitude or physical isolation itself, but rather the subjective sense of isolation that Cacioppo’s work shows to be so profoundly disruptive. Yet, outward circumstances such as moving to a new community or losing an intimate partner can trigger loneliness. And as the authors make clear, today’s culture is not always conducive to promoting strong social bonds.

The problem of social isolation will likely grow as conventional societal structures fade. The average household size is decreasing, and by 2010, 31 million Americans—roughly 10 percent of the population—will live alone. Sociologists also have found that people report significantly fewer close friends and confidants than those a generation ago.

Cacioppo and Patrick also demonstrate how loneliness creates a feedback loop that reinforces social anxiety, fear and other negative feelings. By learning more about what underlies this experience, then learning to reframe their response, lonely individuals can reverse the feedback loop, overcome fear and find ways to reconnect.

“We try to offer some help for those who’ve become stuck,” said Patrick. “The process begins in rediscovering those positive, physiological sensations that come during the simplest moments of human contact. But that means overcoming the fear and reaching out.”

“Lonely people feel a hunger,” Cacioppo added. “The key is to realize that the solution lies not in being fed, but in cooking for and enjoying a meal with others.”

Source: University of Chicago

The new report suggests that women who stay active and are more positive about their changing shapes might protect themselves from depression both during and after pregnancy.

“Our study supports the psychological benefits of exercise to improve body image and lessen depressive symptoms,” said lead study author Danielle Symons Downs, Ph.D., associate professor of kinesiology and obstetrics and gynecology at Penn State University.

Downs and colleagues surveyed 230 Pennsylvania women throughout pregnancy and the postpartum period about their symptoms of depression, exercise habits and feelings about weight, appearance and other aspects of body image.

Their findings appear in the August issue of the journal Annals of Behavioral Medicine.

As expected and consistent with previous research, women who experienced depressive symptoms early in pregnancy tended to report later pregnancy and postpartum depression, the authors found.

What is new, though, are the findings about the role of body image and exercise behavior in relation to pregnancy and postpartum depressive symptoms. Women who experienced higher levels of depression symptoms also reported less satisfaction with their appearance throughout the trimesters of pregnancy.

“If someone is depressed and not very happy with how their body looks, especially with regard to the physical changes that occur during pregnancy, it can influence depression later on,” Downs said.

Women who reported more depressive symptoms during the first trimester tended to engage in less exercise behavior in early pregnancy. In addition, women who exercised more prior to their pregnancy had greater body satisfaction during the second and third trimesters and less depressive symptoms in the second trimester, which suggests that avid pre-pregnancy exercise might protect women from negative depressive symptoms and body dissatisfaction during mid-to-late pregnancy, Downs said.

“There is no question that pregnant women, in consultation with their health care providers, should try to maintain a regular and moderate exercise regimen,” said Michael O’Hara, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Iowa.

However, O’Hara said that the study design — especially the classification of exercise frequency and intensity and the arbitrary cut-offs used to classify women — “did not give a strong endorsement for the protective effects of exercise during pregnancy, at least with regard to depression.”

Beginners should take it easy when exercising, he advises: Women could keep up with what they were doing beforehand physically, but they should not go all-out during pregnancy if they were sedentary before.

“There is increasing evidence that anxiety and stress during pregnancy are bad for the mother and for the fetus. The take-home message is that pregnancy is a time when women need to be given permission to slow down their pace and focus on taking care of themselves with good nutrition, moderate exercise and plenty of rest and relaxation when possible,” O’Hara said.

The American College of Sports Medicine recommends that healthy pregnant women without obstetric complications engage in 30 minutes of moderate exercise most, if not all, days of the week.

Source: Health Behavior News Service

Previous research has shown that teens that are active in religious services are depressed less often because it provides these adolescents with social support and a sense of belonging.

But new research has found that this does not hold true for all adolescents, particularly for minorities and some females. The study found that white and African-American adolescents generally had fewer symptoms of depressive at high levels of religious participation.

But for some Latino and Asian-American adolescents, attending church more often was actually affecting their mood in a negative way. Asian-American adolescents who reported high levels of participation in their church had the highest number of depressive symptoms among teens of their race.

Likewise, Latino adolescents who were highly active in their church were more depressed than their peers who went to church less often.

Females of all races and ethnic groups were also more likely to have symptoms of depression than males overall.

Setting all other factors aside, the results suggest that participating in religion at high levels may be detrimental to some teens because of the tensions they face in balancing the conflicting ideals and customs of their religion with those of mainstream culture, said Richard Petts, co-author of the study, who did the work as a doctoral student in sociology at Ohio State University.

“Most research has shown that religious participation, for the most part, is good and can be very helpful for battling depression. But our research has shown that this relationship does not hold true in all instances,” he said.

While the study shows that females and males from certain groups may be more inclined to become depressed, involvement in religious services still had an overall positive affect for many youth in the study. The results do provide important insight into the impact of religious participation on teenage depression, but race and gender may only be part of the reason certain youth were more depressed, Petts said.

“The study shows that we need to consider the broader social aspects of institutions such as religion on an individual’s well being, both good and bad. We focus specifically on race and gender, but these are not the only two factors that may be contributing to higher and lower depression among youth,” he said.

Petts, who is now an assistant professor of sociology at Ball State University, conducted the study with Anne Jolliff when they were both doctoral students at Ohio State. Jolliff is now a research coordinator at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. The pair based the study on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a study surveying middle and high school students throughout the United States.

Adolescents in grades 7 through 12 were initially interviewed in school and a random number of students were again interviewed at home. Students were asked to identify the positive and negative feelings they had experienced in the preceding week such as depression, loneliness, isolation, happiness, or excitement.

They were also asked about their behavior in the last year and asked to identify their race, religious preference, and how often they attended services during the same period of time.

Adolescents were then interviewed a second time one year later at home about the same topics. Parents of these adolescents were also asked about their child’s moods and behaviors. Only the 12,155 adolescents who participated in both parts of the study and had information from their parents were included in this study.

The results were recently published in the journal Review of Religious Research.

Among adolescents who never attended church, Asian-American adolescents reported 4 percent fewer symptoms of depression in the preceding week than did their African-American peers.

In comparison, Asian-American youth who attended church at least once a week reported 20 to 27 percent more symptoms of depression than their white and African-American peers who attended at the same level.

Latino adolescents fared about the same as Asian Americans, reporting 6 to 14 percent higher rates of depression symptoms than did African-American and white teens when attending church at least once a week.

The results showed that in stark contrast to the findings for white and African-American adolescents, Asian-American adolescents who never attended services and Latinos attending at intermediate levels were the least likely to be depressed within their groups.

The results suggest that something unique was affecting adolescents within these two groups when they went to church often. Petts believes that the traditional nature of religion for these two groups may be conflicting with the ideals and customs of mainstream American society. This conflict may be putting additional stress on these youth as they try to balance competing principles and traditions, he said.

“Asian and Latino youth who are highly involved in a culturally distinct church may have a more difficult time balancing the beliefs of their family and their traditional culture with mainstream society. Their religious institution is telling them what should be important in their lives and how to behave, and mainstream society is saying something else,” he said.

At higher levels of participation, Asian-American and Latino adolescents had a harder time juggling which set of ideals to adopt because they were more involved and committed to their religion.

Meanwhile, Asian-American adolescents who had lower levels of involvement in church were able to focus more on life without worrying about conflicting ideals, resulting in lower depression. At lower levels of involvement, adolescents still gained the social support of their religious community while also feeling in touch with mainstream society, Petts said.

The results also showed that the problem for Latino adolescents may be two-fold. At high levels of involvement in their religious community, Latino teens experienced the same tension between culture and society as some Asian-American teens. This led to higher reports of depression symptoms among these youth.

But Latino teens who never attended church reported high levels of depression as well, reporting 26 to 28 percent higher rate of depression symptoms than did white and African-American American youth. Religion is often an important part of social support for these adolescents and no involvement in their religion may leave these teens without a sense of connection to their community and culture, he said.

“Participating to a certain extent may enable these youth to balance their lives better. They have a connection with a religious community and all the benefits it offers, but they are not so immersed that they’re out of touch with mainstream society. So they’re sort of getting the best of both worlds,” Petts said.

The tension between society and religion may also help explain why females who were sexually active report higher levels of depression than do sexually active males. The disconnect between how their religion told them to act and what they chose to do may cause these females to have higher emotional distress and increased depression, he said.

In addition, Latina females who participated heavily in their religion were more likely to become depressed then Latino males. Not only were these young women more at risk for feeling depressed than were their male counterparts, but they were also more depressed then Latina females who attended church at intermittent levels.

“Females in these religious institutions often have subordinate status and if females feel that they don’t have equal say in that religious institution, that may contribute to higher levels of depression,” Petts said.

This may also explain why attending church at intermediate levels resulted in lower depression for these females. Latina females who attend at moderate levels may benefit from the social support of the religious community, while avoiding the patriarchal tensions experienced by those who attend services weekly.

Source: Ohio State University

“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.

At the beginning of middle school, 30 percent of the early smokers had recently used cigarettes, 14 percent were smoking regularly and 21 percent had multiple school problems, the authors wrote.

Ellickson and her colleagues found that having peers who smoke was a strong risk factor for becoming a regular smoker. At-risk teens were two or more times likely than low-risk teens — those who hadn’t tried smoking by seventh grade — to have peers who smoke and five times more likely to have had two or more problems in school.

“At grade seven, problems in school included being sent out of the classroom more than once, skipping school multiple times and absenteeism,” Ellickson said.

By the end of high school, 36 percent of early smokers were smoking regularly and 58 percent had engaged in two or more problem behaviors, including binge drinking, abusing and selling drugs and dropping out of school, according to the study.

The researchers found that teens who had not tried smoking by seventh grade were 1.5 times more likely to be those who had good grades and lived in an intact family.

In other words, good grades — B or higher — and living in an intact nuclear family helped protect early smokers against these negative outcomes.

The RAND researchers concluded that teens whose parents disapproved of smoking and drug use had lower risks of problem behavior. They suggested that universal prevention programs that target peer resistance and parental involvement could help reverse the trends found in the study.

Jeanie Alter, program manager and lead evaluator of the Indiana Prevention Resource Center at Indiana University’s School or Health, Physical Education and Recreation, agreed that prevention programs can benefit teens at risk and stressed that the parents’ role is key.

“Clearly, peers are an influential factor in the lives of young people, particularly as they progress through adolescence,” she said.

“However, it is critical to acknowledge the significant and sustained influence of parents. Though difficult to implement, program planners simply must involve parents and increase their disapproval of drug use.”

Source: Health Behavior News Service

Yerkes scientists developed the model to better understand the neurohormonal causes of such stress and how the body reacts to the insult. Investigators believe the approach will aid the development of more effective treatment options for humans.

The study is available in the current online edition of Molecular Psychiatry.

According to lead researcher Mark Wilson, PhD, chief of the Division of Psychobiology at Yerkes, “Chronic stress can lead to a number of behavioral changes and physical health problems, including anxiety, depression and infertility.”

Via the animal model, the researchers found corticotropin releasing factor (CRF) is a key neurohormone involved in stress response.

Wilson explains, “CRF is located in several different brain regions, serving different functions. Its release is important for our ability to adapt to every day stressors and to maintain our physical and emotional health.”

In response to stress, CRF levels rise; CRF levels decrease when the stressor no longer is present.

Chronic stress, however, increases the length and volume of expression of CRF in areas of the brain associated with fear and emotion, including the amygdala.

Such chronic stress changes the body’s response, and the resulting increased expression of CRF is thought to be the cause of such health-related stress problems including anxiety, depression and infertility.

To study the importance of CRF, the research team used a viral vector to increase the production of CRF in the amygdala of female rats.

“In our study, rats that continuously were exposed to CRF from this area of the brain experienced anxious and depressive behavior, decreased libido and disrupted ovarian cycles suggesting that persistent release of CRF such as occurs in chronic stress clearly affects multiple body systems,” says Wilson.

“These behavioral changes are similar to what we see in human females who are exposed to stressors on a daily basis.”

Dr. Wilson and his research team next will attempt to learn more about the negative effects of increased CRF by examining actual molecular and cellular changes in specific brain areas targeted by the neurohormone.

Knowing how CRF affects the brain positions the researchers to develop better treatment options.

Source: Emory University

“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.

At the beginning of middle school, 30 percent of the early smokers had recently used cigarettes, 14 percent were smoking regularly and 21 percent had multiple school problems, the authors wrote.

Ellickson and her colleagues found that having peers who smoke was a strong risk factor for becoming a regular smoker. At-risk teens were two or more times likely than low-risk teens — those who hadn’t tried smoking by seventh grade — to have peers who smoke and five times more likely to have had two or more problems in school.

“At grade seven, problems in school included being sent out of the classroom more than once, skipping school multiple times and absenteeism,” Ellickson said.

By the end of high school, 36 percent of early smokers were smoking regularly and 58 percent had engaged in two or more problem behaviors, including binge drinking, abusing and selling drugs and dropping out of school, according to the study.

The researchers found that teens who had not tried smoking by seventh grade were 1.5 times more likely to be those who had good grades and lived in an intact family.

In other words, good grades — B or higher — and living in an intact nuclear family helped protect early smokers against these negative outcomes.

The RAND researchers concluded that teens whose parents disapproved of smoking and drug use had lower risks of problem behavior. They suggested that universal prevention programs that target peer resistance and parental involvement could help reverse the trends found in the study.

Jeanie Alter, program manager and lead evaluator of the Indiana Prevention Resource Center at Indiana University’s School or Health, Physical Education and Recreation, agreed that prevention programs can benefit teens at risk and stressed that the parents’ role is key.

“Clearly, peers are an influential factor in the lives of young people, particularly as they progress through adolescence,” she said.

“However, it is critical to acknowledge the significant and sustained influence of parents. Though difficult to implement, program planners simply must involve parents and increase their disapproval of drug use.”

Source: Health Behavior News Service

The findings are reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

“This is very exciting because until now the many known genetic factors implicated in this condition were not connected in any way,” says Akira Sawa, M.D., Ph.D., director of the program in molecular psychiatry and associate professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Hopkins.

“Now, through a cross-disciplinary and cross-departmental collaboration, we not only have figured out how these three proteins interact with each other, we also have found patients who carry mutations. These results give us a really good foundation to dig deeper into such an elusive condition.”

Sawa’s team previously had characterized the DISC1 gene and protein which are required for proper nervous system development, and when disrupted, significantly contribute to schizophrenia. His team also had shown that DISC1 protein binds to PCM1 protein at the centrosome, which coordinates the structure and movement of cells.

Separately, Hopkins geneticist and associate professor of ophthalmology Nicholas Katsanis, Ph.D., and his team were studying an unrelated family of proteins had discovered that one of them, BBS4, also is found near the centrosome and also binds to PCM1.

“But we weren’t thinking schizophrenia at the time because BBS4 is involved in Bardet-Biedl Syndrome, which is a wide-ranging condition mainly known for its associated eye and and kidney problems but also does cause behavioral defects in some patients,” says Katsanis.

It was Hopkins psychiatrist Nicola Cascella, M.D., co-director of the program in molecular psychiatry and assistant professor of psychiatry who, according to Sawa, “brought it all together” by realizing that the behavioral defects seen in Bardet-Biedl Syndrome patients and the molecular interaction of BBS4 and PCM1 could be related and relevant to schizophrenia.

“Serendipity brought us together from the far corners of campus and allowed us to see the links between these three proteins, centrosomes, and schizophrenia,” says Katsanis. So they embarked on a collaboration to see if these coincidental observations would lead to a better understanding of schizophrenia.

First, to show that the three proteins do in fact physically interact with each other in a cell, the research teams attached different tags to each protein and followed the proteins in cells grown in the lab. They found that all three proteins do end up together, at the centrosome. When the researchers removed either DISC1 or BBS4 from cells, PCM1 would not make it to the centrosome, leading the researchers to conclude that DISC1 and BBS4 act together to recruit PCM1.

The researchers then asked if the failure of PCM1 recruitment to the centrosome in mice lacking either DISC1 or BBS4 affects brain development. To do this they reduced the amount of each of the three factors in the brains of developing mice.

As a result, nerve cells in the cerebral cortex-the part of the brain responsible for memory and thought-failed to grow properly, suggesting that these three proteins act together synergistically during normal brain development.

The teams’ next question was whether PCM1 could contribute to schizophrenia. By examining DNA from families with schizophrenia, the researchers discovered a mutation in PCM1 in one family, but only carried by family members who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

“This connection is exactly the sort of daisy chain from gene to disease that psychiatrists pray for,” says Cascella.

“This is a molecular pathway that we can potentially target for drug therapy.”

“We are beginning to sub-stratify psychiatric illness into discrete molecular causes,” adds Katsanis.

“Now that we know that that a subset of schizophrenia is related to centrosomes and these associated proteins, we can start looking at broader questions of how people get psychiatric illness. We have a hook, now we can start fishing.”

Source: Johns Hopkins Medicine

Only a third of participants ages 12 to 17 who pledged to avoid having sex until marriage proceeded to break their pledge over the next three years, according to a survey.

By contrast, 42 percent of adolescents who had similar values and backgrounds began having intercourse during that period.

“Our data suggest that it is a good idea for teens who are inclined to delay sex to make a pledge, because they’re more likely to delay sex if they do so,” said lead study author Steven Martino, a behavioral scientist at RAND in Pittsburgh.

“A public statement or commitment to do — or not do — something makes it more likely that you will follow through on your stated intention.”

To determine if pledgers postponed sex longer than comparable non-pledgers did, the researchers interviewed 1,461 adolescents in 2001 and followed up with them one year and three years later. Researcher chose the children randomly from across the nation and received permission from their parents before interviewing them.

The researchers focused on children who had not yet had sex to see how taking a virginity pledge — or not — affected their future behavior.

The study results appear in the October issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.

The study results do not prove definitively that virginity pledges make teens less likely to have sex, Martino said. He added that the pledges are not a panacea: “You also need a comprehensive program of sexual education for young people who are not inclined to delay sex and for virginity pledgers who eventually break their pledge.”

Douglas Kirby, a senior research scientist at ETR Associates who studies sex and education, said the study findings are consistent with previous research, but far from conclusive. For one thing, the researchers did not evaluate how many of the pledges were big productions, perhaps with parents being involved, versus pledges made without much forethought, he said.

“If it’s a big deal, it’s more likely to have an impact.”

According to Kirby, the only way researchers accurately can gauge if virginity pledges work is to launch a study in which some randomly selected adolescents would take the pledges and others would not. “Only then can you know,” he said.

Source: Health Behavior News Service

After a one year spike in the number of suicides, doctors were hoping to see more normal numbers in the latest study, but they didn’t. The number of kids committing suicide in the U.S. remains higher than expected, and that has doctors and parents looking for answers.

The findings are reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

According to the authors, for more than a decade the suicide rate among kids in this country had steadily and consistently declined, but that trend ended abruptly.

“Suddenly in 2004 we see the sharpest increase in the past 15 years and it appears that it’s persisting into 2005,” says Jeff Bridge, PhD, Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

2005 is the most recent year that the numbers are available, and they don’t look promising. Jeff Bridge is a researcher at Nationwide Children’s Hospital who conducted the study. He says while the numbers dipped slightly between ‘04 and ‘05 overall they are still up significantly.

That’s disturbing news to Rick Baumann. After his son, Gabe, first attempted suicide as a teenager, Rick devoted his life to suicide prevention and educating others. Like many parents, Rick knew little about warning signs.

“He just withdrew, wasn’t answering phone calls to his friends and all of that, but I have four other children and he was a teenager, and I just assumed it was teenage behavior,” says Rick.

But often it’s much more than that, and now that researchers have identified what may be an emerging crisis, the next step is to figure out what’s causing it. One answer may lie in the prescription of antidepressant medication.

Because of concerns over side effects, the number of kids prescribed anti-depressants has dropped by as much as 20 percent —with some believing that may be having a dire impact.

“The vast majority of young people who complete suicide have some sort of psychiatric disorder. Most commonly depression or some mood disorder,” says John Campo, MD, Nationwide Children’s Hospital.

So the kids who need the medicine most may not be getting it. Campo says there is no proven link between the drop in prescriptions and the rise in suicides, but the fact that they happened at the same time is worth looking into.

Experts say they also want to look into the Internet and how that may be playing a role in the number of kids committing suicide.

Source: Nationwide Children’s Hospital

Experts believe the regular practice of meditation may enhance the capacity to limit the influence of distracting thoughts. The skill could provide relief for disorders ranging from attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder and major depression.

In the study, Emory University School of Medicine researchers found experienced Zen meditators can clear their minds of distractions more quickly than novices. In the experiment, scientists discovered that after being interrupted by a word-recognition task, experienced meditators’ brains returned faster to their pre-interruption condition.

The results will be published online by the journal Public Library of Science One (PLoS ONE).

Giuseppe Pagnoni, PhD, Emory assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and co-workers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine changes in blood flow in the brain when people meditating were interrupted by stimuli designed to mimic the appearance of spontaneous thoughts.

The study compared 12 people from the Atlanta area with more than three years of daily practice in Zen meditation with 12 others who had never practiced meditation.

While having their brains scanned, the subjects were asked to focus on their breathing. Every once in a while, they had to distinguish a real word from a nonsense word presented at random intervals on a computer screen and, having done that, promptly “let go” of the just processed stimulus by refocusing on their breath.

The authors found that differences in brain activity between experienced meditators and novices after interruption could be seen in a set of areas often referred to as the “default mode network.” Previous studies have linked the default mode network with the occurrence of spontaneous thoughts and mind-wandering during wakeful rest.

After interruption, experienced meditators were able to bring activity in most regions of the default network back to baseline faster than non-meditators. This effect was especially prominent in the angular gyrus, a region important for processing language.

“This suggests that the regular practice of meditation may enhance the capacity to limit the influence of distracting thoughts. This skill could be important in conditions such as attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder and major depression, characterized by excessive rumination or an abnormal production of task-unrelated thoughts,” Pagnoni says.

Source: Emory University

In the new study, West Australian health experts discovered that just 20 minutes of activity each day can prevent memory deterioration among older people. The WA Centre for Health and Ageing (WACHA) trial results are published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

WACHA director Professor Leon Flicker said people over the age of 50 could pro-actively prevent memory deterioration by joining in simple and easy exercises each day.

“What our trial tells us is that older people who take up some form of aerobic exercise for as little as 20 minutes a day will be more likely to remember things like shopping lists, family birthdays and friend’s names,” he said.

“People don’t have to run a marathon to get the benefits – it’s as simple as doing some forms of simple activity like walking or dancing, every day for around 20 minutes.

“The results of this trial are very encouraging and a great step forward in helping older people improve their memory and potentially delay the progression of dementia which can eventually lead to Alzheimer’s disease.”

Today, almost 190,000 Australians live with dementia*, a number that is expected to increase with an ageing population, and one in four for people over the age of 85 have moderate to severe dementia.

“What’s interesting about this study is that physical activity doesn’t just have benefits for memory and preventing Alzheimer’s disease, it highlights the importance of exercise to boost overall wellbeing and mental health,” Professor Flicker said.

“We all know that exercise can help ward off physical conditions like heart disease and obesity and assist in overall wellbeing and fitness but this study adds another compelling reason to that list.”

During the trial, 170 volunteers aged 50 years and over were divided into two groups, a control and a group which undertook to achieve a 150 minutes of activity each week, ranging from walking, ballroom dancing to swimming, for a six month period.

Participant cognition was tested during intervals over an 18 month period – those who took part in physical activity continually out-scored the control group, which actually reported an overall decline in cognition.

WAIMR director Professor Peter Klinken praised Professor Flicker’s team and said the trial was a great example of how medical research could have a positive effect in the community.

“This trial really shows us how medical research can offer benefits to the WA community right now as well as future generations, and I’d urge all older West Australians to take note of these important findings.” he said.

Source: Research Australila

The study, which appears in the September issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, discovered finding meaning in the immediate aftermath of the attacks was an important coping response that helped many Americans adjust by reducing their fears of future terrorism.

John Updegraff, a Kent State University professor of psychology, used a large national sample to examine Americans’ responses to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, beginning immediately after the event and continuing for the following two years.

Two months following the attacks, respondents were asked about whether they were able to make sense of the attacks.

“Most Americans were trying to find a way to explain why the attacks occurred, but less than half were successful in doing so”, says Updegraff.

Explanations ranged from blaming the events on either the terrorists or on American foreign policy, focusing on positive consequences of the attacks such as patriotism or greater appreciation of social ties, or interpreting the events in a historical or religious context.

“Regardless of how people explained the events, those who came to some personal understanding of why the attacks occurred fared better over time than those who were unable to”, Updegraff says.

“They were less plagued by fears of future terrorism and less distressed by the attacks over the following two years.”

These findings support the idea that being able to make sense of traumatic events helps people adjust. However, most previous studies have focused on direct personal trauma such as bereavement.

This is the first study to find that meaning facilitates adjustment for individuals indirectly exposed to large-scale collective traumas such as terrorist attacks, school shootings, or natural disasters.

Source: Kent State

In addition, low-birth-weight children from urban communities may be more likely to have attention problems than suburban low-birth-weight children.

The report is found in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

“Advances in neonatal medicine have raised the survivorship of low-birth-weight infants (2,500 grams [about 5.5 pounds] or less), especially very low-birth-weight infants (1,500 grams [about 3.3 pounds] or less) and extremely low-birth-weight infants (1,000 grams [2.2 pounds] or less),” according to background information in the article.

Previous studies have reported that low-birth-weight children appear to have an increased risk of internalizing, externalizing and attention problems.

Kipling M. Bohnert, B.A., and Naomi Breslau, Ph.D., of Michigan State University, East Lansing, examined the long-term association between low-birth-weight and psychiatric problems among 413 children from a socially disadvantaged community in Detroit and 410 children from a middle-class Detroit suburb.

Children’s psychiatric disturbances were rated by mothers and teachers at ages 6, 11 and 17. Psychiatric disturbances were separated into three categories: externalizing, including delinquent and aggressive behavior; internalizing, including withdrawn behavior and anxiety/depression; and attention, including characteristic symptoms of ADHD such as not being able to pay attention for long or difficulty following directions.

Low-birth-weight children were more likely to exhibit externalizing and internalizing problems than normal-birth-weight children in their community.

“An increased risk of attention problems was associated with low birth weight only in the urban community and was greater among very low-birth-weight children (weighing 1,500 grams or less) than heavier low-birth-weight children (weighing 1,501 grams to 2,500 grams),” the authors write.

“In the suburban community, there was no increased risk for attention problems associated with low birth weight. Psychiatric outcomes of low birth weight did not vary across ages of assessments.”

“Attention problems at the start of schooling predict lower academic achievement later, controlling for key factors that contribute to academic test scores, which in turn predicts termination of schooling and curtailed educational attainment,” the authors conclude.

“Attention problems influence academic performance by reducing the time that students devote to class learning and homework assignments and hinder organization and work habits.

“Early interventions to improve attention skills in urban low-birth-weight children might yield better outcomes later.”

Source: American Medical Association (AMA)

The scans were taken at different times of year with the fluctuations providing a possible explanation for seasonal affective disorder and related mood changes.

The report is found in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

“It is a common experience in temperate zones that individuals feel happier and more energetic on bright and sunny days and many experience a decline in mood and energy during the dark winter season,” the authors write as background information in the article.

This is thought to be related to variations in brain levels of serotonin, which is involved in the regulation of functions such as mating, feeding, energy balance and sleep.

The serotonin transporter, a protein that binds to serotonin and clears it from the spaces between brain cells, “is a key element in regulating intensity and spread of the serotonin signal.”

Nicole Praschak-Rieder, M.D., and Matthaeus Willeit, M.D., of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues studied 88 healthy individuals (average age 33) between 1999 and 2003.

Participants underwent one positron emission tomography (PET) scan to assess serotonin transporter binding potential value, an index of serotonin transporter density.

The higher the binding potential value, the less serotonin circulates in the brain. For the analysis, individual scans were grouped according to the season of the scan—fall and winter or spring and summer.

“Serotonin transporter binding potential values were significantly higher in all investigated brain regions in individuals investigated in the fall and winter compared with those investigated in the spring and summer,” the authors write.

When they matched binding potential values to meteorological data, the researchers found that higher values occurred during times when there were fewer hours of sunlight per day.

“An implication of greater serotonin transporter binding in winter is that this may facilitate extracellular serotonin loss during winter, leading to lower mood,” the authors write.

“Higher regional serotonin transporter binding potential values in fall and winter may explain hyposerotonergic [related to low serotonin levels] symptoms, such as lack of energy, fatigue, overeating and increased duration of sleep during the dark season.”

“These findings have important implications for understanding seasonal mood change in healthy individuals, vulnerability to seasonal affective disorder and the relationship of light exposure to mood,” they conclude.

“This offers a possible explanation for the regular reoccurrence of depressive episodes in fall and winter in some vulnerable individuals.”

Source: JAMA and Archives Journals

The report is found in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

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.

When comparing the two groups, the older an individual’s father, the more likely he or she was to have bipolar disorder.

After adjusting for the age of the mother, participants with fathers older than 29 years had an increased risk.

“After controlling for parity [number of children], maternal age, socioeconomic status and family history of psychotic disorders, the offspring of men 55 years and older were 1.37 times more likely to be diagnosed as having bipolar disorder than the offspring of men aged 20 to 24 years,” the authors write.

The offspring of older mothers also had an increased risk, but it was less pronounced than the paternal effect, the authors note. For early-onset bipolar disorder (diagnosed before age 20), the effect of the father’s age was much stronger and there was no association with the mother’s age.

“Personality of older fathers has been suggested to explain the association between mental disorders and advancing paternal age,” the authors write.

“However, the mental disorders associated with increasing paternal age are under considerable genetic influence.” Therefore, there may be a genetic link between advancing age of the father and bipolar and other disorders in offspring.

“As men age, successive germ cell replications occur, and de novo [new, not passed from parent to offspring] mutations accumulate monotonously as a result of DNA copy errors,” the authors continue.

“Women are born with their full supply of eggs that have gone through only 23 replications, a number that does not change as they age. Therefore, DNA copy errors should not increase in number with maternal age. Consistent with this notion, we found smaller effects of increased maternal age on the risk of bipolar disorder in the offspring.”

Source: JAMA and Archives Journals

Investigators believe the enhancements occur because parts of the brain usually involved in playing sports are instead used to understand sport language.

University of Chicago researchers studied hockey players, fans, and people who’d never seen or played the game.

Functional magnetic imaging of the brain showed that a region of the brain usually associated with planning and controlling actions is activated when players and fans listen to conversations about their sport.

The brain boost helps athletes and fans understanding of information about their sport, even though at the time when people are listening to this sport language they have no intention to act.

The study shows that the brain may be more flexible in adulthood than previously thought.

“We show that non-language related activities, such as playing or watching a sport, enhance one’s ability to understand language about their sport precisely because brain areas normally used to act become highly involved in language understanding,” said Sian Beilock, Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Chicago.

She is lead author of the paper, “Sports Experience Enhances the Neural Processing of Action Language,” published in the on-line issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Experience playing and watching sports has enduring effects on language understanding by changing the neural networks that support comprehension to incorporate areas active in performing sports skills,” she said.

The research could have greater implications for learning. It shows that engaging in an activity taps into brain networks not normally associated with language, which improves the understanding of language related to that activity, Beilock added.

For the study, researchers asked 12 professional and intercollegiate hockey players, eight fans and nine individuals who had never watched a game to listen to sentences about hockey players, such as shooting, making saves and being engaged in the game. They also listened to sentences about everyday activities, such as ringing doorbells and pushing brooms across the floor.

While the subjects listened to the sentences, their brains were scanned using functioning Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which allows one to infer the areas of the brain most active during language listening.

After hearing the sentences in the fMRI scanner, subjects performed a battery of tests designed to gauge their comprehension of those sentences.

Although most subjects understood the language about everyday activities, hockey players and fans were substantially better than novices at understanding hockey-related language.

Brain imaging revealed that when hockey players and fans listen to language about hockey, they show activity in the brain regions usually used to plan and select well-learned physical actions.

The increased activity in motor areas of the brain helps hockey players and fans to better understanding hockey language. The results show that playing sports, or even just watching, builds a stronger understanding of language, Beilock said.

Source: University of Chicago

The study is found in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Between one-half and two-thirds of patients with bipolar disorder develop the condition before age 18, according to background information in the article.

“Early onset of illness is associated with an unremitting course of illness, frequent switches of polarity, mixed episodes, psychosis, a high risk of suicide and poor functioning or quality of life,” the authors write.

“The past decade has witnessed a remarkable increase in diagnoses of bipolar disorder in children and adolescents and, correspondingly, drug trials for patients with early-onset disorder. There has been comparatively little controlled examination of psychotherapy for pediatric patients.”

David J. Miklowitz, Ph.D., of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues conducted an outpatient randomized controlled trial among 58 adolescents (average age 14.5) with bipolar disorder who had experienced a mood episode in the prior three months.

Between 2002 and 2005, 30 teens were randomly assigned to receive pharmacotherapy plus family-focused treatment for adolescents. Over nine months, they participated in 21 50-minute sessions.

Therapy included the patient, parents and siblings and consisted of education about their disease, communication training and problem-solving skills training.

The other 28 teens were assigned to pharmacotherapy plus enhanced care, which involved three 50-minute family sessions that focused on preventing relapse. Independent evaluators, who did not know patient group assignments, assessed the teens every three to six months for two years.

A total of 60 percent of the family-focused therapy group and 64.3 percent of the enhanced care group completed the two-year follow-up; of those, 53 (91.4 percent) experienced a full recovery from their original mood episode.

There were no differences between the two groups in rates of recovery or in the amount of time that elapsed before a subsequent mood episode.

However, patients in the family-focused therapy group recovered from depressive symptoms more quickly, spent fewer weeks in depressive episodes over the two-year period and had an overall more favorable trajectory of depressive symptoms than those in the enhanced care group.

“To enhance full symptomatic and functional recovery among adolescents, family-focused treatment for adolescents may need to be supplemented with collaborative care interventions found effective in mania stabilization,” the authors conclude.

The program’s emphasis on “reducing conflict in family relationships, enhancing social supports and teaching interpersonal skills may underlie its stronger effects on bipolar depression.”

Source: JAMA and Archives Journals

The persistence of a gender difference in response to the drug — even after the researchers accounted for many complicating factors — suggests that there’s a real biological difference in the way the medication affects women compared with men.

The reasons for that difference are still unclear, but further studies are now examining hormonal variations that may play a role.

The study involved citalopram, a commonly used antidepressant that is available both as a generic drug and under the brand name Celexa.

Researchers from the University of Michigan Depression Center and their colleagues from around the country tested the drug’s ability to help depression patients achieve remission, or total relief from their symptoms, in a multi-year study called STAR*D.

The gender differences emerged from a detailed analysis of data from 2,876 men and women who had a clear diagnosis of major depression, and took citalopram over a number of weeks, with the doses increasing over time.

In the end, women were 33 percent more likely to achieve a full remission of their depression, despite the fact that women in the study were more severely depressed than the men when the study began.

The study showed no differences between men and women in side effects, the amount of time that patients stuck to taking the drug, or the amount of time it took for them to achieve remission of their symptoms.

The new findings, which represent the largest and most rigorous analysis ever of gender differences in response to an antidepressant, are published online in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

Elizabeth Young, M.D., a professor and associate chair of psychiatry at the U-M Medical School and member of the Depression Center, is the study’s lead author.

“Other studies have suggested that there are differences between men and women in response to different antidepressants, but the evidence has been conflicting,” she says.

“This study is large enough, and we were able to control for enough complicating factors, that we feel confident there is a true difference. These results have clear implications for the clinical treatment of depression.”

Young and her colleagues, including Susan Kornstein, M.D., of Virginia Commonwealth University, and John Rush, M.D., formerly of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, conducted the analysis of data from men and women between the ages of 18 and 75, many of whom were being treated by primary care physicians and not psychiatrists.

All of the patients had been experiencing depression for years, with the average length of experience around 12 years.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Source: University of Michigan

Brain changes occur in a complex, orchestrated manner related to the activation and inhibition of neural structures involved in sensory, motor, autonomic, cognitive and emotional processes.

Indeed, it is the brain which finally determines what in the world is threatening and might be stressful for us, and which regulates the stress responses that can be either adaptive or maladaptive.

Chronic stress can affect the brain and lead into depression: Environmental stressors (e.g. job and family situation, neighborhood) and especially stressful life events such as trauma or abuse are amongst the most potent factors to induce depression.

Since the development of novel approaches to antidepressant treatment is based upon an improved neurobiological understanding of this condition, new information about the cellular changes that take place in the brain is required.

New research has discovered the adult nervous system is capable of replacing its cells, a finding that reverses prior opinion that neural networks in adults were fixed and immutable, without the potential to regenerate.

Neurogenesis or nerve regeneration can be modified by positive modulators such as learning, physical exercise, and hormonal influence, as well as negative modulators such as acute and chronic stress.

There is increasing evidence that in addition to neurogenesis, stress and antidepressant treatment also induce changes in the formation of specific glial support cells (=gliogenesis) that are critical for the survival of the neurons in the brain.

There are about 100 times more glial cells than nerve cells, providing energy and nutrition to the neurons.

Besides their ´housekeeping´ functions, glial cells are instrumental to neural communication and regarded as dynamic regulators of synaptic strength and synapse formation.

They also possess receptors for neurotransmitters and steroid hormones that, similarly to receptors of neurons, can trigger electrical and biochemical events in the cell.

Therefore, structural changes of glial cells are likely to have an important functional significance for the communication between neurons and between neurons and glial cells.

Experiments show that stress and depression inhibit the growth of new nerve cells as well as glial support cells, and that this inhibitory effect can be counteracted by antidepressive therapy.

On the basis of this research it might be possible to develop new strategies for more effective therapies of depressive diseases.

Source: European College of Neuropsychopharmacology