Science Daily is fantastic research based website. The site is massive though with many, many daily updates. Keeping up with important mental health research on this site can be a daunting challenge for practitioners and the general public. Hence, I plan to provide weekly to semi-weekly updates on The Behavioral Medicine Report in a similar format as the NIH/NIMH Research News Update to help our readers sta ...

A recent meta-analysis* revealed that smokers who use a pharmacotherapy to aid in smoking cessation were twice as likely, on average, to maintain complete abstinence from cigarettes. Researchers analyzed 70 randomized controlled trials comprising 32,908 participants. Seven approved pharmacotherapies at 6 and 12 months of use were evaluated, including gum, inhaler, nasal spray, patch, and tablet nicotine the ...

The research arm of the University of Oxford* reports that even moderate levels of obesity can significantly reduce one's life span. In the largest ever study of the effects of obesity on mortality, researchers analyzed 57 studies that tracked approximately 900,000 participants for an average of 10-15 years. The results will appear in a future volume of The Lancet. Body mass index, or BMI, was used to asses ...

"Treating Tobacco Use and Dependence: 2008 Update" provides healthcare professionals a state of the art, evidenced based presentation of current nicotine/tobacco treatment options for their patients. This excellent free ebook (pdf) spans several hundred pages. ...

As if there were not already enough evidence and reasons to avoid tobacco products, a recent study* revealed that cigarette smoking increased the chance of Major Depression Disorder (MDD) in women.  Researchers compared cigarette use in 165 persons with MDD with over 800 persons without MDD in a case-controlled and retrospective design (uses accumulated data/records) that spanned 10 years.  Exposure to smok ...