Archive for November, 2009
Innovative Therapy That Offers New Hope For Borderline Personality Disorder
MIND Reviews: Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals
BOOKS Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals [More]
Foreign Afflictions: Mental Disorders across Country Borders
Let us start with a little quiz. How many of these conditions have you heard of?
Taijin kyofusho , hikikomori , hwa-byung , or qi-gong psychotic reaction.
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Mental Health America Endorses Nomination Of Chai Feldblum As EEOC Commissioner
Mental Health America Endorses Nomination Of Chai Feldblum As EEOC Commissioner
Researchers Try to Solve the Mystery of HIV Carriers Who Don’t Contract AIDS
More than half a million people in the U.S. have died from HIV infection , and more than a million currently live with the virus, but a relative handful of people infected with HIV never get treatment for it and never get sick from it. The immune systems of this small population--perhaps 50,000 Americans--somehow control the virus for long periods of time. Of course, there is typically a bell curve of response to any disease, but figuring out how these people control the virus is one of the most vexing mysteries of the AIDS pandemic . Solving it might unlock new ways to prevent and treat HIV infection, and now several research teams are going after the answer. [More]
Government’s Social Care Green Paper Overlooks Mental Health, UK
Government panel recommends fewer and later mammograms, no self-exams
Most women would do fine to hold off until age 50 for their first mammograms and skip self-exams for breast lumps altogether, according to new government recommendations released Monday that came as a surprise to many in the medical community--and women in general. [More]
Putting Madness in Its Place: Can the Environment Explain Schizophrenia’s Hereditary Patterns?
Schizophrenia hides its heritability well. Although fewer than 1 percent of the general population will be diagnosed as schizophrenic based on symptoms such as hallucination and disorganized thought, for children of a schizophrenic parent, those odds jump to about one in 10. And yet the condition’s genetic underpinnings have stubbornly resisted discovery. In the latest attempt, three crack teams of investigators pooled genomic data from 8,000 schizophrenics of European ancestry but could lay claim to only a handful of weak genetic risk markers.
Analyses such as these, which appeared online July 1 in Nature ( Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group), have led researchers to question the value of brute-force genomics for analyzing schizophrenia. “I think we need to pause and think through the risk pathways to disease more clearly,” says Dolores Malaspina, director of the social and psychiatric initiatives program at New York University Langone Medical Center. In particular, devotees of genetics might want to cede a little ground to their colleagues in epidemiology, who over the past decade have amassed a provocative, interlocking set of studies implicating urban birthplace and migrant status as persistent risk factors.
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