The risk of suffering depression increases 41% in smokers, in comparison with non-smokers. This was the conclusion of a study undertaken with 8,556 participants by scientists of the University of Navarra, in collaboration with the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the Harvard School of Public Health (USA), and which demonstrates, in a pioneering way, the direct relationship between tobacco use and Read more…
Aerobic exercise combined with cognitive behavioral therapy may improve physical function, reduce depressive symptoms and enhance quality of life in depressed heart failure patients, researchers reported at the American Heart Association’s 9th Scientific Forum on Quality of Care and Outcomes Research in Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke.
In a new study, researchers divided 74 heart failure patients with depression into Read more…
Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, a division of Wyeth (NYSE: WYE), announced that PRISTIQTM (desvenlafaxine), a new serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor (SNRI) approved to treat adult patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), is now available in U.S. retail pharmacies nationwide. The recommended dose of PRISTIQ is 50 milligrams (mg) once daily. The Company begins full-scale selling and educational Read more…
AstraZeneca (NYSE:AZN) announced new study data on SEROQUEL XR™ (quetiapine fumarate) Extended-Release Tablets (quetiapine XR) for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) in adult patients. The results from the studies were presented today at the 161st Annual Meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in Washington, DC. In February Read more…
Older adults with low blood levels of vitamin D and high blood levels of a hormone secreted by the parathyroid glands may have a higher risk of depression, according to a report in the May issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
About 13 percent of older individuals have symptoms of depression, and other researchers have speculated that vitamin D may be linked to depression and other psychiatric illnesses, according to background Read more…
"Antidepressants may help body fight HIV and cancer" was the headline in The Independent recently. The newspaper article was on research that suggests that antidepressant drugs may help the immune system to fight off serious infection. The newspaper says the drugs could increase the activity of Natural Killer (NK) cells, a part of the immune system that targets Read more…
For many women, the lovely images of life with a new baby don’t jive with their reality. Instead of feeling happy, they feel overwhelmed.
University of New Hampshire researcher Kathleen Kendall-Tackett says there are a myriad of treatments available to new mothers experiencing postpartum depression. She is the Read more…
NeuroInvestment announced the release of its May issue, which reviews novel treatments being developed for depression. Even though depression can be argued to be the success story of psychopharmacology, the current array of largely similar monoamine-targeting drugs leave 30% of patients without adequate relief, and incur significantly aversive side effects for the majority. Read more…
"Depression may increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s", The Daily Telegraph says. It reports on a study that followed more than 900 Catholic clergy for up to 13 years. The study found that those who developed the disease had more symptoms of depression at the beginning of the study.
The main aim of the research was to look at changes in depressive symptoms in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. There Read more…
The Journal of Environmental and Occupational Medicine (JOEM) has published a series of new studies that suggest depression in the workplace may be a much bigger problem - with more serious social and economic impacts - than employers realize.
The peer-reviewed journal has devoted an entire special-edition, titled "Depression Read more…
Major depressive disorder is a common and complex condition that impacts about 15% of the population of the United States, yet very little is known about the mechanisms behind the psychiatric disorder. What is known is that there are clinical parallels between depressive symptoms and the symptoms of certain inflammatory disorders.
In findings published electronically in Molecular Psychiatry, researchers from University Read more…
Almost one in six cases of depression among working Victorians are caused by job stress. This means more than 21,000 cases of preventable depression are caused by job stress each year, a new University of Melbourne study shows.
Stressful working conditions in this study were defined as a combination of high job demands and low control over how the job gets Read more…
Infants and toddlers whose mothers are severely depressed are almost three times more likely to suffer accidental injuries than other children in the same age group, according to a new study. Buy lasix pills The study’s findings, published in the Advanced Access edition of the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, suggest that proper treatment for depression would improve not only the mothers’ health, Read more…
The children of parents who die suddenly - whether by suicide, accident or natural causes - are three times more likely to develop depression and are at higher risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than children who don’t face such a difficult life event, according to a University of Pittsburgh School Read more…
AstraZeneca announced that the company has submitted applications in the European Union (EU) for once-daily SEROQUEL XR™ (quetiapine fumarate) Extended-Release Tablets (quetiapine XR), seeking approval for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD) including maintenance therapy in adult patients using Mutual Recognition Procedure (MRP). This follows an sNDA submission for SEROQUEL XR in MDD in the U.S. in February this year.
Each Read more…
About 2.1 million teens aged 12 to 17 experienced a major depressive episode in the past year, according to a new nationwide report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. For almost half of the teens, depression drastically reduced their abilities to deal with aspects of their daily lives, the report said.
Overall, 8.5 percent of adolescents, the equivalent of one in Read more…
Employees who work overtime are at increased risk of anxiety and depression, suggests a study in the June Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM).
Elisabeth Kleppa and colleagues of the University of Bergen, Norway, analyzed data on work hours from a larger study of Norwegian men and women. Buy Read more…
Even after the age of 70, people prone to feelings of anxiety, worry, distress and insecurity face a risk for a first lifetime episode of clinically significant depression, according to a unique study led by a University of Rochester Medical Center researcher.
"We assume that because depression has not developed for people with these personality traits by the age of 70 that it won’t develop," said Paul R. Duberstein, Read more…
The Medical Defence Union, the UK’s largest medical defence organisation, has revealed it paid out nearly ??3m in compensation on behalf of GP members to settle 30 claims arising from the treatment of patients with depression during a recent ten-year-period.
In the latest edition of the MDU Journal1, Professor Femi Oyebode, consultant Read more…
Depression will affect up to 25% of the population at some point in their lives. It also has been shown to have a strong genetic component. For example, if one of your close family members has depression, your chance of also being a sufferer is three to four times the general population risk.
Now University of Aberdeen researchers have joined forces with the University of Liverpool and the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London to try Read more…
An article published in the May 28 issue of JAMA reports
that patients who took the drug escitalopram or participated in a
problem-solving therapy group during the year following a stroke were
found to have a lower risk of depression compared to patients who
received
placebo.
Of the over 700,000 incidences of stroke per year in the United States,
more than half lead to depression. "Post-stroke depression has been
shown in
numerous Read more…
While there is a correlation between individuals with depression and
the development of Alzheimer’s disease, it appears that the symptoms of
depression do not increase in the years before an Alzheimer’s
diagnosis, according to a report released on April 7, 2008 in the
JAMA/Archives journal Archives of General Psychiatry.
Previous Read more…
Leading mental health charity Mind publishes a shocking new report that shows that debt is a significant factor in worsening our mental health. As the credit crunch hits and the cost of living soars, this worrying new evidence shows the extent of debt’s impact, with over 50% of respondents going without food and heating.
‘In the red: debt and mental health’ (1) is the first ever report to specifically examine the links between Read more…
St. Jude Medical, Inc. (NYSE:STJ) announced it has been awarded a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for treating depression using neurostimulation therapy in an area of the brain known as Brodmann Area 25.
Brodmann Area 25 is a structure within the subcollosal gyrus region of the brain. It is the focus of the St. Jude Medical BROADEN(TM) (BROdmann Area 25 DEep brain Neuromodulation) study, which is Read more…
Chinese investigators from Hefei and Dutch researchers in Amsterdam have collaborated using for the first time a combination of new elegant methodology in Depression research. They used postmortem human brain tissue that was donated to the Netherlands Brain Bank for research purposes and investigated a region in the basal part of the brain, the hypothalamus, that is known to be of crucial importance for the development of symptoms of depression. This Read more…