Article Date: 14 Sep 2010 – 1:00 PDT

Patients with early-stage schizophrenia who receive a combination of medication and a psychosocial intervention appear less likely to discontinue treatment or relapse-and may have improved insight, quality of life and social functioning-than those taking medication alone, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

The combined treatment group also exhibited greater improvements in insight, social functioning, activities of daily living and on four domains of quality of life, and a significantly higher proportion of them were employed or received education. There were no significant differences in either frequency or type of adverse events between the groups.

Read in Full:  http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/200886.php

 

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By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on September 14, 2010 

Is it hard for you to make decisions? Perhaps you should play video games. A new study reveals the training helps people to make the right decisions faster.

Cognitive scientists from the University of Rochester found that video game players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them.

Critically, this benefit doesn’t just make them better at playing video games, but improves a wide variety of general skills that can help with everyday activities like multitasking, driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and navigating around town.

In an upcoming study in the journal Current Biology, authors Daphne Bavelier, Alexandre Pouget, and C. Shawn Green report that video games could provide a potent training regimen for speeding up reactions in many types of real-life situations.

Video games have grown in popularity to the point where 68 percent of American households have members that play them, according to a 2009 report by the Entertainment Software Association.

The researchers tested dozens of 18- to 25-year-olds who were not ordinarily video game players. They split the subjects into two groups. One group played 50 hours of the fast-paced action video games “Call of Duty 2″ and “Unreal Tournament,” and the other group played 50 hours of the slow-moving strategy game “The Sims 2.”

After this training period, all of the subjects were asked to make quick decisions in several tasks designed by the researchers.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/09/14/video-games-help-improve-decision-making/18122.html

 

Emerging research improves the understanding of brain mechanisms that allow us to make choices — a finding that will advance treatments for the millions of people who suffer from the effects of anxiety disorders.

In the study, University of Colorado at Boulder psychology Professor Yuko Munakata and her research colleagues found that “neural inhibition,” a process that occurs when one nerve cell suppresses activity in another, is a critical aspect in our ability to make choices.

“The breakthrough here is that this helps us clarify the question of what is happening in the brain when we make choices, like when we choose our words,” Munakata said.

“Understanding more about how we make choices, how the brain is doing this and what the mechanisms are, could allow scientists to develop new treatments for things such as anxiety disorders.”

Researchers have long struggled to determine why people with anxiety can be paralyzed when it comes to decision-making involving many potential options. Munakata believes the reason is that people with anxiety have decreased neural inhibition in their brain, which leads to difficulty making choices.

“A lot of the pieces have been there,” she said.

“What’s new in this work is bringing all of this together to say here’s how we can fit all of these pieces of information together in a coherent framework explaining why it’s especially hard for people with anxiety to make decisions and why it links to neural inhibitors.”

A paper on the findings titled “Neural inhibition enables selection during language processing” appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the study, researchers tested the idea that neural inhibition in the brain plays a big role in decision-making by creating a computer model of the brain called a neural network simulation.

“We found that if we increased the amount of inhibition in this simulated brain then our system got much better at making hard choices,” said Hannah Snyder, a psychology graduate student who worked with Munakata on the study.

“If we decreased inhibition in the brain, then the simulation had much more trouble making choices.”

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/09/14/better-treatment-of-anxiety-disorder/18126.html

 

We trawl the world’s journals so you don’t have to:

Reviews on child brain development (Neuron). Open access until October 8. Includes a review paper on the impact of technology on children. 

Source:  http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/09/special-issue-spotter.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BpsResearchDigest+(BPS+Research+Digest)

 

By Traci Pedersen
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on September 10, 2010 

Inflammation is associated with lower intelligence and premature death, according to Swedish researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

“Those with low-grade inflammation performed more poorly on standardized intelligence tests, even after excluding those with signs of current illness. Inflammation also predicted an increased risk of premature death,” said lead researcher Dr. Hakan Karlsson.

When the body is healthy, chemicals from white blood cells are released in order to protect the body from any foreign substances.  This process goes into action when a person is sick or sprains an ankle.

However, when this normal bodily function is sprung into overdrive—whether from exposure to toxins, allergens, stress, lack of exercise, or unhealthy eating habits—the white blood cells and their inflammatory chemicals run amok and damage the body’s tissues, causing chronic inflammation.

It is this ‘silent inflammation’ that is so dangerous, which creates chronic illness with no outward signs, and as shown in the results of this study, is even capable of lowering human intelligence.

In this study, scientists examined large population-based registers that featured data collected over many decades.  Measures of intelligence and inflammation were observed in nearly 50,000 young men between the ages of 18 and 20, and their deaths over next 35 years were also recorded.

“Although we knew that inflammation associated with infection or cardiovascular disease could impair brain function, this is the first time that similar associations have been shown in healthy young people,” said Dr Karlsson.  “This suggests that even low levels of inflammation can have detrimental consequences for health and brain function.”

“Since low-grade inflammation appears to be hazardous, it is also important to determine its causes,” added Dr. Karlsson.  “One interesting possibility is the role of environmental factors during childhood.”

In the featured study, childhood socioeconomic status predicted the level of inflammation seen in young adulthood.  For example, children of farmers had higher levels of inflammation than those whose fathers were non-manual workers.

“It’s possible that these boys were exposed to more toxins, allergens or infectious agents in childhood, leading to greater inflammation and its negative effects later in life,” said Dr. Karlsson.

Dr. Michelle Luciano, from the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said “This is an important finding because it is the largest study to date to show that low-grade inflammation in young adulthood is associated with intelligence and mortality. An interesting question now is whether the effects of a less healthy childhood environment on inflammation persist into middle age and beyond,” she added.

There are many simple things people can do to reduce low-grade chronic inflammation in the body.  Eating lots of fruits, vegetables, and wild seafood and getting plenty of exercise and rest are just a few easy steps toward reducing inflammation and fostering better brain health.

This study was recently published recently in Brain, Behavior and Immunity (August,24:868–873).

Source:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/09/11/lower-intelligence-linked-to-inflammation/17950.html

 

 

By Tracy Sherlock, Postmedia News September 13, 2010

One in five children identified as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may be misdiagnosed simply because they are the youngest in their kindergarten class, a recent study suggests.

Younger children are also more likely to be prescribed stimulants such as Ritalin, said Todd Elder, a researcher at Michigan State University.

“If a child is behaving poorly, if he’s inattentive, if he can’t sit still, it may simply be because he’s five and the other kids are six,” Elder, an assistant professor, said in a news release.

“There’s a big difference between a five-year-old and a six-year-old, and teachers and medical practitioners need to take that into account when evaluating whether children have ADHD.”

Vancouver’s Karen Elkins was surprised when her son’s Grade 1 teacher told her she suspected he had attention deficit disorder, which is similar to ADHD.

“He didn’t display any of those behaviours at home,” Elkins said in an interview.

Although a psychologist said Elkins’ son was gifted, she decided to try Ritalin to see if it helped.

“I saw that he was a zombie and it took his joy away,” Elkins said, adding that she believes many kids with vision or hearing problems are misdiagnosed with ADD and ADHD.

A B.C. educator who specializes in mentoring boys for success in school said he’s not surprised by the research.

“There is no blood test for ADHD — it’s very subjective and this study makes that very clear,” said Barry MacDonald, author of Boy Smarts. “I’ve long suspected that our attitude toward rambunctious behaviour influences whether we perceive that children have ADHD.”

The consensus is that four times as many boys as girls are diagnosed with ADHD, said MacDonald, who founded MentoringBoys.com.

The higher rate may be correlated with the fact that, generally speaking, boys are slower to develop than girls, MacDonald said.

Read in Full:  http://www.canada.com/health/five+hyperactive+kids+possibly+misdiagnosed+Study/3518724/story.html

 

By John M Grohol PsyD

In this day and age, we seem to increasingly medicalize mental disorders and their treatment, even in very young children. I believe this has significant repercussions in a child’s development, when parents turn to a psychiatric drug as the sole remedy for their child’s concerns. While no parents wants to see their child suffer needlessly, medications have become the “go to” treatment despite the efficacy and greater safety of other treatments.

I’m pleased to welcome you to Autism, Asperger’s and Beyond, a blog by Diane Yapko, MA. Diane is a speech-language pathologist who for the past 30 years has specialized in working with the pediatric population in the areas of autism spectrum disorders and other developmental and neurological disabilities.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/09/14/introducing-autism-aspergers-and-beyond/

 

Tuesday, 14th September, 2010.

A serious migraine can lead to nausea, sensitivity to light and even temporary paralysis of limbs, but for one woman it resulted in a foreign accent.

Kay Russell, 49, went to bed with a severe migraine and when she woke up found she was speaking with a French twang.

The grandmother, from Bishop’s Cleeve near Cheltenham, is thought to be one of only 60 people in the world known to suffer from foreign accent syndrome, a condition which damages the part of the brain that controls speech and word formation.

They believe it is triggered when tiny areas of the brain linked with language, pitch and speech patterns are damaged.

Speaking to the Gloucester Echo, Mrs Russell said: “As a sufferer of this syndrome, you are not trying to speak in an accent, it is a speech impediment.

“Whatever accent you hear, it is in the ears of the listener.”

Mrs Russell is most commonly mistaken for French or eastern European.

She continued: “It also affects my hands and makes me write with a foreign accent. For example, I say “peoples”, not “people”, and that is how I would write it.

“You lose your identity and an awful lot about yourself. I feel like I come across as a different person.”

She has suffered with migraines for 20 years.

Source:  http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20100914/thl-migraine-gives-woman-french-accent-d831572.html

 

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on September 13, 2010 

Physicians may have a new tool to assess and diagnose psychological and developmental disorders as researchers believe a new MRI scanner protocol can show the maturity of a child’s brain.

Washington University School of Medicine researchers believe their study proves brain imaging data that can offer extensive help in tracking aberrant brain development.

“Pediatricians regularly plot where their patients are in terms of height, weight and other measures, and then match these up to standardized curves that track typical developmental pathways,” says senior author Bradley Schlaggar, MD, PhD.

“When the patient deviates too strongly from the standardized ranges or veers suddenly from one developmental path to another, the physician knows there’s a need to start asking why.”

Schlaggar and his colleagues say a new way of looking at brain scanning data may be able to provide similar guidance for monitoring and treating of patients with psychiatric and developmental disorders.

Schlaggar says he has sent children with obvious, profound psychiatric conditions for MRI scans and received results marked “no abnormalities noted.”

“That’s typically looking at the data from a structural point of view—what’s different about the shapes of various brain regions,” he says.

“But MRI also offers ways to analyze how different parts of the brain work together functionally.”

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/09/13/how-mature-is-your-childs-brain/18075.html

 

Tuesday 14th September, 2010.

Widespread weaknesses exist in the quality of provision for children with special educational needs in England, with many pupils put into the category because of poor teaching, a report has said.

Good quality provision coupled with effective identification of children with special educational needs is “not common”, according to a review carried out by education watchdog Ofsted.

As many as half of all pupils identified for School Action, the lowest SEN category, would not be identified as having these needs if schools focused on improving teaching and learning for all with individual goals for improvement, the report said.

Teachers unions warned it was “unacceptable to scapegoat teachers” and spoke of the need for trained psychologists in schools.

Ofsted inspectors examined provision to the age of 19, carrying out 345 case studies and visiting 22 local authorities, 228 nurseries, schools and colleges.

Too often agencies focused simply on whether a service was being provided rather than whether it was effective, they said.

They added that parents’ fears about inconsistencies in identifying special educational needs across the country were “well-founded”.

Currently 1.7 million school-age children, or just over one in five pupils in England, are identified as having special educational needs.

The percentage identified as needing less intensive additional support, known as School Action and School Action Plus, has increased from 14 per cent in 2003 to 18.2 per cent in 2010.

Ofsted chief inspector Christine Gilbert said: “With over one in five children of school age in England identified as having special educational needs, it is vitally important that both the way they are identified, and the support they receive, work in the best interests of the children involved.

“Higher expectations of all children, and better teaching and learning, would lead to fewer children being identified as having special educational needs.

“For those children with complex and severe special needs, schools often need the help of health and social care services.

“All these services should be focused on the quality of what they are doing, and how well young people are doing as a result. At the moment too much effort is going into simply checking that extra services are being provided.”

Source:  http://uk.news.yahoo.com/4/20100914/tuk-half-of-special-needs-children-misdi-dba1618.html