Thursday, January 13, 2005

Prestigious Research Journal Gets New Parents   Psychiatry News story - "As of this month, the Schizophrenia Bulletin has a new publisher. It will retain some of the characteristics that have been its strong suit and will add some new ones. One of the world's premier schizophrenia journals—the Schizophrenia Bulletin—has changed hands. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has turned its publication over to the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center and Oxford University Press. NIMH announced last spring that it intended to stop publishing the Bulletin and that it was looking for a new publisher for it. The principal reason, NIMH Director Thomas Insel, M.D., indicated in a prepared statement, was to ease the journal's transition to an electronic format..." See also About the NIMH Schizophrenia Bulletin at the NIMH web site.  
  

Adding Risperidone May Benefit Patients With Schizophrenia Refractory to Clozapine  Medscape Medical News story - "Patients with schizophrenia not adequately responding to clozapine gain benefit with the addition of risperidone, according to the results of a randomized, preliminary study published in the January issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry." "med"  
  

Columbia study shows depression intensifies from one generation to the next  Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons press release at EurekAlert - "Nearly 60 percent of children whose parents and grandparents suffered from depression have a psychiatric disorder before they reach their early teens, according to a new study by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI). This is more than double the number of children (approx. 28 percent) who develop such disorders with no family history of depression. The study, published in the January issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry, is the first to follow three generations of high-risk families and has taken more than two decades to complete. The CUMC/NYSPI research team began studying 47 first generation family members in 1982; then interviewed 86 of their children several times as they grew into adulthood. The team has collected data from 161 members of the third generation, whose average age is 12."  
  

New Health Affairs Focuses on Evidence-Based MedicineItem in the Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, summarizing articles in the latest issue of Health Affairs. Abstracts of all the studies outlined are available online at the Health Affairs web site at no cost, while full text of the articles is only available for a fee. Readers may be especially interested in "Evidence-Based Practice as Mental Health Policy: Three Controversies and a Caveat,""Evidence-Based Decision-Making: Global Evidence, Local Decisions" and "A Clinical Research Strategy To Support Shared Decision-Making."