Hawaii, Vermont, Connecticut and Utah Round-Out Top Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, and West Virginia Bottom-Out List A year of surprises ended with one more bit of unexpected news: Massachusetts, not Hawaii, is the healthiest state in the country, according to the annual “America’s Heath Rankings” report. Massachusetts’ win may have knocked [...]
Taking folic acid and/or multivitamin supplements preceding and during pregnancy is associated with a lower risk of offspring developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD), an observational epidemiologic study published Jan. 3 showed. The findings could have important public health implications, reported Stephen Z. Levine, PhD, and his associates. The case-cohort study included [...]
Demographics Remain Relatively Unchanged – Middle Aged White Men at Greatest Risk The CDC recently released the most recent data related to suicide for the year 2016. According to these data, suicide is still the tenth leading cause of death and the rate of suicide in 2016 increased by 1.8 [...]
The prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in U.S. children and adolescents climbed to 2.41% from 2014 to 2016, Guifeng Xu, MD, and her associates, wrote in a research letter. However, the increased prevalence of ASD over the 3-year period was not statistically significant. Of the 30,502 children and adolescents [...]
Attention Bias, Threat/Anxiety Symptoms Linked A recent study indicates associations between threat bias and pediatric anxiety symptoms, and suggests that vigilance to external threats manifests more prominently in symptoms of social anxiety and school phobia, regardless of age and gender. These findings point to the role of attention bias to [...]
Cannabidiol linked to reduction in psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia Patients with schizophrenia showed signs of improvement in positive psychotic symptoms and clinician-rated improvement after treatment with cannabidiol, a component of cannabis thought to counteract the effects of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), an industry-funded phase 2 study reported. According to the authors, the [...]
CDC researchers find > 50% of people in 10 states who died of opioid overdoses during the second half of 2016 tested positive for fentanyl. Researchers examined 5,152 people who died due to opioid overdose in Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and [...]
A new study, published in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience shows that older people who routinely partake in physical exercise can reverse the signs of aging in the brain, and dancing has the most profound effects as we suffer a decline in mental and physical fitness, which can be [...]
Written by Dr. Bruce Kehr Psychiatrists are using genetic testing to determine which prescription medications work best for treating each patient’s particular addiction. For example, doctors can test patients who suffer from alcohol addiction for variants in a gene called the μ-Opioid Receptor (OPRM1), which has been linked to a [...]
The FDA plans to convene an expert panel to examine the population-level effects of treating opioid addiction with medication in hopes of gaining wider acceptance of and insurance coverage for those medications. During a late October hearing, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, MD, told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce [...]