Transcendental Meditation Helps Patients With Heart Disease Lower Cardiac Disease Risks By 50 percent
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The world’s first ever analysis of data from a full scale clinical trial in adults shows that training Health Visitors to assess and psychologically support mothers after childbirth can prevent the development of depression over the following year. But the substantial reduction in the number of NHS health visitors was identified by researchers as a key issue for the health and well-being of moms.
Two powerful new tests developed by psychologists at Harvard University show great promise in predicting patients’ risk of attempting suicide. The work may help clinicians overcome their reliance on self-reporting by at-risk individuals, information that often proves misleading when suicidal patients wish to hide their intentions. Both new tests are easily administered within minutes on a computer, giving quick insight into how patients are thinking about suicide, as well as their propensity to attempt suicide in the near future.
The LENA™ (Language Environment Analysis) system automatically labeled infant and child vocalizations from recordings and thereafter an automatic acoustic analysis designed by the researchers showed that pre-verbal vocalizations of very young children with autism are distinctly different from those of typically developing children with 86 percent accuracy. The system also differentiated typically developing children and children with autism from children with language delay based on the automated vocal analysis.
The Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) is a brief psychological screening instrument designed to measure symptoms of depression in primary care settings. Like the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Inventory, Big Five Inventory, and Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale previously reviewed, the PHQ-9 is available to healthcare providers completely free of charge. Pfizer Inc., the legal copyright holder, explicitly states that “no permission [is] required to reproduce, translate, display or distribute [the PHQ-9].” Check the end of this report to download the PHQ-9.
On June 3, a six-man international crew will enter an isolation chamber in Moscow for a simulated 520-day Mars mission conducted by the State Scientific Center of the Russian Federation – Institute for Biomedical Problems (IBMP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The crew has a mission schedule full of more than 90 experiments and [...]
Patients recovering from stroke sometimes behave as if completely unaware of one half of the world: colliding with obstacles on their left, eating food only from the right side of their plate, or failing to dress their left side. This puzzling phenomenon is termed “spatial neglect” and it affects roughly 45% of patients suffering from [...]
PsychTests AIM Inc., one of the web’s foremost source of personality assessments, released their Gender Roles Test in February 2010, with a separate version for men and women. According to their statistical results, while people are slowly adopting more modern views as to men and women’s place in the world, there are still some traditions [...]
A self-administered test to screen for early dementia could help speed the diagnosis and subsequent treatment of memory disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease. It could also provide health care providers and caregivers an earlier indication of life-changing events that could lie ahead. The handwritten self-assessment, which can take less than 15 minutes to complete, is a [...]
A researcher from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has defined a new, integrated interpretation of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), which makes it easier to understand both the commonalities and differences between ASD and other conditions. In an article published in the December 2009 issue of The Neuroscientist titled: “The Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Integration in [...]
Part 1 of this 2 part series provided a general overview of psychologists’ roles in pre-implant evaluations, as well as explained the goals, objectives, and common issues encountered in these biopsychosocial assessments. Part 2 details the results from a follow-up study of patients who completed a pre-implant psychological evaluation and subsequently received a surgically implanted [...]
Pain patients who are candidates for surgical implants – whether a spinal cord stimulator or intrathecal pump – suffer chronic moderate to severe pain and have not benefited from conservative or less-invasive treatment methods which include, but are not limited to, oral medications including opioids, physical therapy, injections, psychological therapy, holistic treatments acupuncture, massage, cranial [...]
The Center for Epidemiologic Studies publishes an excellent free psychological screening instrument for major depression called the The Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D). The CES-D serves a similar purpose as the ever popular Beck Depression Inventory-II, but with greater emphasis on the affective components of depression. The cost of this instrument ($0) makes it an attractive option to costly copyrighted depression scales. The CES-D is available in the public domain so check the end of this review to download the Stanford edition of the CES-D.
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