Raising Pain Tolerance Using Guided Imagery (Part 2)
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Adolescents diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses appear to show greater decreases in gray matter volume and increases in cerebrospinal fluid in the frontal lobe compared to healthy adolescents without a diagnosis of psychosis, according to a report in the January issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. The research was carried out by Celso Arango, M.D., Ph.D., of the Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón, Madrid, Spain, and colleagues.
Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how severe the future illness course of a patient with psychosis will be, according to research funded by the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust. The findings could allow doctors to make more accurate decisions about how best to treat patients. Psychosis is a condition that affects people’s minds, altering the way they think, feel and behave. It can be accompanied by hallucinations and delusions. The most common forms are part of mental health conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but symptoms of psychosis can also occur in conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and alcohol or drug abuse.
In the first worldwide study of its kind, scientists from Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) found evidence that heavy methamphetamine users might have a higher risk of developing schizophrenia. This finding was based on a large study comparing the risk among methamphetamine users not only to a group that did not use drugs, but also to heavy users of other drugs. Methamphetamine and other amphetamine-type stimulants are the second most common type of illicit drug used worldwide.
In the first study to systematically investigate genome-wide epigenetic differences in a large number of psychosis discordant twin-pairs, research at the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) at King’s College London provides further evidence that epigenetic processes play an important role in neuropsychiatric disease. Published in Human Molecular Genetics, the findings may offer potential new avenues for treatment. Included in this report is a link to download the full-text, original research article.
A study using a procedure called the rubber hand illusion has found striking new evidence that people experiencing schizophrenia have a weakened sense of body ownership and has produced the first case of a spontaneous, out-of-body experience in the laboratory. These findings suggest that movement therapy, which trains people to be focused and centered on their own bodies, including some forms of yoga and dance, could be helpful for many of the 2.2 million people in the United States who suffer from this mental disorder.
Cognitive therapy has dynamically improved the most neurologically impaired, poorly functioning schizophrenic patients. For the first time, researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have shown that a psychosocial treatment can significantly improve daily functioning and quality of life in the lowest-functioning cases of schizophrenia. The study appears in the October 3 edition of Archives of General Psychiatry.
A review of previous studies suggests that even though atypical antipsychotic medications are commonly used for off-label conditions such as behavioral symptoms of dementia, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, these medications are effective for only a few off-label conditions, and that the benefits and harms of these medications for these uses vary, according to an article in the September 28 issue of JAMA.
How the brain controls impulsive behavior may be significantly different than psychologists have thought for the last 40 years. That is the unexpected conclusion of a study by an international team of neuroscientists published in the Aug. 31 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Yoga is commonly seen as a practice beneficial to body and mind. Increasingly, yoga is being taken a step further and applied as a form of complementary and alternative medicine in treating psychiatric disorders. Can this ancient lifestyle practice for spiritual awareness stand up to testing standards required by modern science to prove that it is an effective treatment? Included in this report is a link to download the full text study.
Researchers from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and Beaumont Hospital have conducted a study which has found striking brain similarities in bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The research has also pinpointed for the first time that a process which controls how information is transmitted from neuron to neuron in the brain is altered in both conditions and may potentially contribute to the developments of improved treatments in the future.
