By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News EditorReviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on November 8, 2010

A UK psychologist believes untreated ADHD is a significant underlying cause of crime.

Dr. Susan Young, at Broadmoor Hospital, shares her beliefs in a paper in which she explores the connection between ADHD and criminal activity.

Young believes early intervention can reduce crime and actually divert youths from a criminal path.

The paper, co-written by Emily Goodwin, King’s College London and Institute of Psychiatry, was published in the Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics, an international journal on drugs and medicines in clinical neurology and neuropsychiatry.

Young said, “Failure to recognize and treat ADHD offenders is likely to have serious consequences for mental health and social outcomes.

“The high rates of ADHD among this group, the consumption and costs of the resources they incur, mean that it is not a condition we can afford to ignore. Given that ADHD is a treatable condition with interventions available that are used to effectively treat ADHD symptoms and related behavioral problems in the general population, the enormity of this problem and its associated costs are too great to bear.”

Source: West London Mental Health NHS Trust

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News EditorReviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on January 7, 2011

A provocative new study finds that limiting television exposure in our children is not enough to stop its influence.

According to Harvard Medical School researchers, indirect media exposure — such as having friends who watch a lot of TV — might be even more damaging to a teenager’s body image.

Researchers examined the link between media consumption and eating disorders among adolescent girls in Fiji.

What they found was surprising. the study’s subjects did not even need to have a television at home to see raised risk levels of eating disorder symptoms.

In fact, by far the biggest factor for eating disorders was how many of a subject’s friends and schoolmates had access to TV. By contrast, researchers found that direct forms of exposure, like personal or parental viewing, did not have an independent impact, when factors like urban location, body shape and other influences were taken into account.

It appeared that changing attitudes within a group that had been exposed to television were a more powerful factor than actually watching the programs themselves. in fact, higher peer media exposure was linked to a 60 percent increase in a girl’s odds of having a high level of eating disorder symptoms, independently of her own viewing.

Lead author Anne Becker, M.D., Ph.D., vice chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, said this was the first study to attempt to quantify the role of social networks in spreading the negative consequences of media consumption on eating disorders.

“our findings suggest that social network exposure is not just a minor influence on eating pathology here, but rather, is the exposure of concern,” she said.

“If you are a parent and you are concerned about limiting cultural exposure, it simply isn’t going to be enough to switch off the TV. If you are going to think about interventions, it would have to be at a community or peer-based level.”

Becker hopes the paper will encourage debate about responsible programming and the regulation of media content to prevent children from secondhand exposure.

“up until now, it has been very difficult to get people who produce media as entertainment to come to the table and think about how they might ensure that their products are not harmful to children,” she said.

This is Becker’s second study of media’s impact in Fiji, an ideal location for broadcast media research because of the recent arrival of television, in the 1990s, and the significant regional variations in exposure to TV, the Internet and print media. some remote areas in the recent study still did not have electricity, cell phone reception, television or the Internet when the data were collected in 2007.

Her first study found a rise in eating disorder symptoms among adolescent girls following the introduction of broadcast television to the island nation in 1995.

What makes Fiji a particularly interesting case is that traditional culture prizes a robust body shape, in sharp contrast to the image presented by Western television shows such as “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Seinfeld” and “Melrose place,” which were quite popular in Fiji when television debuted there in the 1990s.

Girls would see actresses as role models, Becker said, and began noting how a slender body shape was often accompanied by success in those shows. This perception appears to have been one of the factors leading to a rise in eating pathology among the Fijian teenagers.

But until now, it was not known how much of this effect came from an individual’s social network.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis, professor of medical sociology in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, has studied the spread of health problems through social networks.

“it shouldn’t be that surprising to us, even though it is intriguing, that the indirect effects of media are greater,” Christakis said.

“most people aren’t paying attention to the media, but they are paying attention to what their friends say about what’s in the media. It’s a kind of filtration process that takes place by virtue of our social networks.”

Becker said that although the study focused on Fijian schoolgirls, remote from the US, it warrants concern and further investigation of the health impact on other populations.

Source: Harvard Medical School

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News EditorReviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on December 25, 2010

A new study suggests brain scans could be used to predict the onset of schizophrenia in young people with a family history of the disease.

University of Edinburgh researchers discovered the brains of people who later develop schizophrenia shrink at an accelerated rate before they first become ill.

Schizophrenia is a condition characterized by delusions and hallucinations that affects 1 in every 100 people – it is associated with a reduction in brain tissue but the timing of these changes has, until now, been unclear.

The study examined people at high risk of schizophrenia who had two close relatives with the disorder and were between 16 and 25 at the beginning of the study.

This is the first time that such changes in brain size have been found in people at high risk of schizophrenia before they develop any symptoms. unlike previous studies, these changes cannot be due to medication as all of the people in the study were un-medicated when they took part.

In healthy people, the brain begins to slowly shrink from early adulthood onwards.

It is known that accelerated brain shrinkage occurs in people with bipolar disorder (or manic-depression) and schizophrenia, but until now it was not known whether these changes occurred before people became unwell.

Researchers say that scans could be used to identify shrinkage of the brain in people at high risk of schizophrenia and may help doctors to diagnose the condition and start treatment at an earlier stage or even before illness first appears.

The study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, shows that the loss of brain tissue is concentrated in areas of the brain associated with personality, decision-making and social behavior.

Lead author Dr. Andrew McIntosh, of the Division of Psychiatry at the University of Edinburgh, said: “this study represents the culmination of more than 10-years of work and is a significant step to understanding the origins of schizophrenia years before the onset of disability and medical treatment.”

The team analyzed brain scans of 146 people with a family history of schizophrenia – but who had not yet experienced any symptoms – and compared them to scans of 36 people with no such risk.

The scans were taken every 18 months over a 10-year period.

Source: University of Edinburgh