Thursday, April 21, 2005

Schizophrenia's Suicide Risk May Be Less Than Thought  Psychiatric News story - "A new meta-analysis estimates that 5.6 percent of people with schizophrenia will commit suicide—half the rate usually reported in the psychiatric literature. The lifetime risk of suicide among persons diagnosed with schizophrenia is about half of the rate routinely quoted in the psychiatric literature, according to a meta-analysis of 61 studies. Rather than the conventional estimate that 10 percent of those with schizophrenia will die by suicide, the new study estimates that 5.6 percent will commit suicide during their lifetime, with most deaths occurring shortly after the onset of illness..."  
  

Remember the Endocrine System When Using Psychoactive Drugs  Psychiatric News story - "Commonly prescribed psychopharmacological agents can cause a range of side effects in the endocrine system, but they can be managed by aware clinicians. The endocrine complications of psychopharmacological agents in children demand particular attention because the patients are still developing. One of the oldest psychotropic drugs has well-known effects on the thyroid gland, said Harold Carlson, M.D., head of the division of endocrinology at Stony Brook University in New York..."  
  

Electroshock therapy speeds improvement in schizophrenia patients Center for the Advancement of Health press release - "Shock therapy, a controversial practice conjuring frightening images of behavior control, still has a place in schizophrenia treatment, a newly updated research review shows. Although the data confirmed that antipsychotic drugs are still the first choice for schizophrenia treatment, they also showed that electroconvulsive, or shock, therapy clearly works, and combining both treatments can accelerate benefits to some patients, the review finds. Dr. Prathap Tharyan, head of psychiatry at Christian Medical College in Tamil Nadu, India, and colleagues analyzed 26 randomized controlled trials, involving 1,485 adult patients, 798 of whom were treated with shock therapy. Trials were conducted in India, the United States, Thailand, Canada, Hungary and Nigeria. The review appears in the most recent issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research."  
  

Brain Scans Reveal How Gene May Boost Schizophrenia Risk Science Daily story - "Clues about how a suspect version of a gene may slightly increase risk for schizophrenia* are emerging from a brain imaging study by the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The gene variant produced a telltale pattern of activity linked to production of a key brain messenger chemical. The study found that increased activity in the front of the brain predicted increases in the neurotransmitter dopamine in the middle of the brain in subjects with the suspected schizophrenia-related version of the gene. Yet, the opposite relationship held for subjects with the other of two common versions of the gene."