Archives for August 2009

Almost 15 per cent of preschoolers have abnormally high levels of depression and anxiety, and a difficult temperament at five months of age is the most important early warning sign, a study has found. Highly strung or tense four and five-year-olds are also more likely to have mothers with a history of depression than children who are not anxious or depressed.

The study, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, was based on annual interviews with 1759 mothers about their children's behaviour from five months to five years of age. The team of Canadian, French, US and British researchers from the International Laboratory for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Development said depression and anxiety symptoms could be identified in infants who were fearful or anxious, worried, not as happy as other children or who had difficulty having fun.

Difficulties in sleep, changes in appetite or concentration, lack of interest in things they used to find pleasurable and suddenly aggressive behaviour are also early warning signs. The lead author, Sylvana Cote, a professor at the University of Montreal's department of social and preventive medicine, said: ''As early as the first year of life, there are indications that some children have more risks than others to develop high levels of depression and anxiety.''

A new study suggests consumption of a moderate amount of alcohol is associated with lower levels of depression and anxiety. In the study, researchers from Norway and Britain found heavy drinkers and teetotalers have higher levels of depression and anxiety than those who drink moderately.

The findings are published in the most recent issue of Addiction, a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the Society for the Study of Addiction.  According to background information in the article researchers have struggled with a counterintuitive psychological mystery: While it’s believable that heavy drinkers might be depressed, study after study shows that people who don’t drink at all also have high levels of depression and anxiety.

But why?  One hypothesis has been that the depression recorded in groups that include teetotalers – people who don’t drink at all — may be due to the fact that these groups can include people who quit drinking because of alcoholism. If abstainers who quit drinking because it was a problem could be excluded from the larger group of nondrinkers, the results might be different.

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Medicare's new prescription drug program is known for its complexity, which can be confusing even for perfectly healthy people not distracted by medical or mental health issues. However, a new study shows that people with depression or impaired thinking had no more difficulty signing up for the program than individuals without depression or other mental difficulties. The jury's still out, however, on how these individuals fared once they enrolled in Medicare Part D, which allows seniors to get prescription drug coverage through private health care plans.

The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 added the prescription drug benefit to Medicare for the first time, Dr. Kira Zivin of the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor and her colleagues explain in their report. But concerns had been raised about whether or not mentally ill or cognitively impaired people might have trouble dealing with the complexities of the new system, Zivin, also of the Ann Arbor VA Medical System, noted in an interview.

Adding to the potential for problems, Medicaid dropped its prescription drug coverage for all enrollees who were also receiving Medicare coverage to as of January 2006, when Medicare Part D became available. Almost a third of the 6.4 million people who are eligible for both Medicaid and Medicare are mentally ill.

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Depression seems to pose an evolutionary paradox. Research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare — why isn’t depression?

This paradox could be resolved if depression were a problem of growing old. The functioning of all body systems and organs, including the brain, tends to deteriorate with age. This is not a satisfactory explanation for depression, however, as people are most likely to experience their first bout in adolescence and young adulthood.

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Depression is known to be common during pregnancy. Approximately 14 to 23 percent of pregnant women may perhaps experience depressive symptoms while pregnant. It was estimated that during the year 2003, nearly 13 percent of women consumed an antidepressant at some time during their pregnancy.

“Depression in pregnant women often goes unrecognized and untreated in part because of concerns about the safety of treating women during pregnancy. It is our hope that this will be a resource to clinicians who care for pregnant women who have or are at risk of developing major depressive disorder,” says lead researcher Kimberly Ann Yonkers, MD, Yale University associate professor of psychiatry and obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences.

Apparently, symptoms of depression as well as the use of antidepressant medications during pregnancy have been associated with negative consequences for the newborn. In addition, infants born to women with depression seem to have high risk for irritability, less activity and attentiveness, and fewer facial expressions in contrast to those born to mothers without depression.

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Teenagers’ sleep patterns can help predict if they might be at higher risk of developing depression, a new US study by researchers at UT (University of Texas) Southwestern has found. A five-year study of 96 adolescents with a family risk for depression but without a diagnosis of depression, showed that teens with shorter periods of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep were at higher risk of depression.

Previous research has shown that depressed adults experience REM sleep earlier in their sleep cycles than non-depressed people, but prior to the current study, it was not known if the same was true of adolescents.

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Pregnant women can be assured that safe treatments are available to treat depression during their maternity malaise, such as “talk therapy” and certain antidepressants, according to updated professional guidelines released last week.

"Depression in pregnant women often goes unrecognized and untreated in part because of concerns about the safety of treating women during pregnancy," lead author of the guidelines, said Dr. Kimberly Ann Yonkers of Yale University in a statement.

The American Psychiatric Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued the new guidelines on depression during pregnancy, which are founded on a thorough examination of previous research.

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To investigate the relationship between asthma and depression, researchers in Japan studied the breathing patterns of 90 asthmatic boys and girls before and after they watched scenes from the movie ET: The Extraterrestrial. Half of the kids had symptoms of depression, in addition to asthma, while the other half did not. They were aged between 7 and 17 years.

It was found that the children with both asthma and symptoms of depression were more likely to show greater airway resistance after watching troubling scenes from the movie. They consistently showed breathing patterns indicative of worsening asthma after watching distressing scenes and distressed breathing was most pronounced during scenes of family distress, loss, and death.

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We say that in the spirit of mischief as well as elucidation. Of course, the world won’t stay in a depression forever. And even depression ain’t so bad, once you get used to it. The world economy will probably drag around a bit on the bottom... with low, or negative, growth rates in most places... until it finds a new model. The old model is dead. The authorities can put on as much rouge and powder as they want. They could even give the corpse jolts of electricity to make it sit up. But they can’t revive it. It’s finished. Over. Kaput.

The old model involved lots of players playing lots of different roles. But the main protagonists were the USA and China. Not to put too fine a point on it, but China was the maker; the US was the taker. It was a relationship that seemed to serve both parties well... but one that actually enabled foolish and, ultimately, destructive behaviour – especially on the part of the US.

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Depression, like anxiety, causes some release of cortisone from the adrenal glands. Cortisone will cause insulin resistance at the cellular level, making the delivery into the cells difficult. This in turn causes hunger and weight gain.

What’s interesting is that depression causes an increase in abdominal fat instead of increasing fat over the entire body. The abdominal fat gain is not subcutaneous (just below the skin) but within the abdominal cavity.

This is called visceral fat. Visceral fat accumulation is the worst. It releases several chemicals and hormones. It causes elevated cholesterol and blood pressure and increases the risk of diabetes. All of these things cause cardiovascular disease.

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