Lifestyle « Weekly Gravy

Patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder tend to see their conditions ease after four months on the ketogenic (“keto”) diet, a small pilot study finds. While no one is saying the diet should replace standard medications, the researchers believe it could provide additional help for some. “It’s very promising and very encouraging that you can take back control of your illness in some way, aside from the usual standard of care,” said study first author Dr. Shebani Sethi. She’s an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. The findings were published March 27 in the journal Psychiatric Research. Sethi said she first noticed there might be a connection between the keto diet and psychiatric health when she was working as a student in a clinic focused on obesity and weight loss. Many people with psychiatric conditions gain excess weight due to medication side effects. Sethi was helping to treat one such patient, who had schizophrenia. The patient’s auditory hallucinations (“hearing voices” can be a common symptom of schizophrenia) quieted down after being on the keto diet, she said. A search of the literature turned up little regarding using the diet to counter schizophrenia, but there was evidence it could ease epileptic seizures. Apparently the diet did so “by reducing the excitability of neurons in the brain,” Sethi explained in a Stanford news… read on > read on >

Expecting or new mothers are much more likely these days to be diagnosed with anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, new research shows. However, more women are also getting treated for these problems rather than roughing it out, researchers report in April 1 issue of the journal Health Affairs. “Taken together, these studies show a lot of movement in maternal mental health,” said researcher Stephanie Hall, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Medical School. “The landscape is different, at least as far as our health care system’s ability to pick up on conditions and help people get treatment for them.” For the research, investigators analyzed claims data for people with private insurance between 2008 and 2020. They specifically looked for depressive and anxiety disorders occurring during pregnancy or in the first year of motherhood. By 2020, more than one in four (28%) women received a diagnosis of a mood disorder during either pregnancy or the first year of parenthood – a rate nearly double that seen in 2008. Further, the rate of PTSD diagnosis among expecting or new moms quadrupled, rising to nearly 2% of all those pregnant or postpartum in 2020. Fortunately, treatment also appeared to increase alongside diagnoses, researchers said. The rate at which new or expecting moms received talk therapy more than doubled, rising 16% for women diagnosed with anxiety,… read on > read on >

The seeds of high blood pressure in adulthood might be sown in youth, a new study suggests. Children and teenagers with excess weight were more likely to have high blood pressure in middle age, researchers report. In fact, there’s a linear relationship between adult high blood pressure and childhood overweight and obesity, researchers found. The heavier a child is, or the more pounds they put on during puberty, the more likely they are to have high blood pressure as an adult, results show. “Our results suggest that preventing overweight and obesity beginning in childhood matters when it comes to achieving a healthy blood pressure in later life,” said lead researcher Lina Lilja, a doctoral student with the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 1.3 billion adults 30 to 79 have high blood pressure, increasing their risk of strokes, heart attacks and kidney disease. High body-mass index in adults is strongly tied to elevated blood pressure, but it’s not clear whether excess weight in childhood contributes to this risk. To learn more, researcher analyzed data on nearly 1,700 Swedish people born between 1948 and 1968. For these people, BMI readings were taken at age 7 to 8 and again at 18 to 20. Researchers compared this to blood pressure readings, systolic and diastolic, taken among the group at ages 50… read on > read on >

A monthly long-acting injection of buprenorphine can be an easier and more effective therapy for people struggling with opioid addiction, but treatment centers aren’t much interested in using it, a new study discovers. Only one-third of treatment facilities (33%) offer long-acting buprenorphine injections to patients, according to findings published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Researchers suspect this is because substance use treatment centers face administrative obstacles that make it more difficult to offer buprenorphine injections, compared to the daily pill form of the drug. “This paper highlights gaps that exist in the system,” said lead researcher Nitin Vidyasagar, a second-year student at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine. “We can now use the information to help treat people who need it the most.” Buprenorphine works by activating the same brain receptors that more powerful opioids target. However, the effects are weaker, helping addicts wean themselves off other substances like heroin and fentanyl. Analyzing federal data on substance use, researchers found that primary care doctors are more likely to offer long-acting buprenorphine shots than treatment centers. This might be because doctor’s offices face fewer regulatory and administrative hurdles to prescribe the medication as a monthly injection, the researchers said. “The takeaway is, we still have a lot of work to do to make the full complement of opioid treatment options… read on > read on >

Telehealth might be a more effective way of treating alcoholism than in-person therapy sessions, a new study reports. Alcoholics who receive treatment through telehealth were more likely to engage in more therapy visits and stick to anti-alcohol medication longer than those who venture out for alcohol use disorder therapy, researchers found. These results are “particularly important in the current context, as the United States debates whether to sustain or revoke pandemic-era policies that decreased barriers to telehealth,” concluded the research team led by Dr. Ponni Perumalswami, of the VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System. For the study, researchers analyzed data from the Veterans Administration gathered during the pandemic, from March 2020 to February 2021, on more than 138,000 patients diagnosed with alcohol use disorder. During the study period, 53% of patients had at least one video visit, 38% had at least one telephone visit but no video visits, and 9% had only in-person visits, researchers said. Telehealth was associated with more therapy visits and medication use compared with in-person visits, researchers found. What’s more, among those who received treatment through telehealth, video visits prompted significantly more therapy sessions than telephone visits. Black patients were less likely to receive video telehealth treatment and were more likely to have in-person visits, highlighting “important disparities in alcohol use disorder telehealth use,” researchers said. The new study was published recently… read on > read on >

U.S. rates of suicide by all methods rose steadily for adolescents between 1999 and 2020, a new analysis shows. During those two decades, over 47,000 Americans between the ages 10 and 19 lost their lives to suicide, the report found, and there have been sharp increases year by year. Girls and minority adolescents have charted especially steep increases in suicides, said a team led by Cameron Ormiston, of the U.S. National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. “An overall increasing trend was observed across all demographics,” the researchers wrote in a study published March 29 in the journal JAMA Network Open. The findings were based on federal death certificate data from 1999 through 2020. By race, sex and means of suicide, some troubling trends stood out. For example, while deaths from drug (or other substance) overdose rose by 2.7% per year between 1999 and 2020 among all adolescents, it rose by 4.5% per year among girls, specifically. That trend has only accelerated in recent years: Between 2011 and 2020, suicides by overdose jumped 12.6% per year among female adolescents, Ormiston’s group reported. All of this suggests that “adolescents are finding more lethal means of poisonings, contributing to an increase in deaths by suicide,” they said. And while suicides using guns rose 5.3% per year during 1999 to 2020 among boys, it increased even more… read on > read on >

A genetic mutation that boosts cell function could protect people against Alzheimer’s disease, even if they carry another gene mutation known to boost dementia risk. The newly discovered mutation appears to protect people who carry the APOE4 gene, which increases risk of Alzheimer’s, researchers said. The protective mutation causes cells to produce a more powerful version of humanin, a tiny protein that plays an important role in cellular function. Humanin levels are higher in people who have reached the age of 100 despite carrying the APOE4 gene, which predisposes people to early death as well as Alzheimer’s, researchers discovered. Humanin produced by this variant also effectively cleared amyloid beta from the brains of lab mice carrying APOE4, researchers report. “This new study sheds light on resilience genes that help people live longer and partially explains why some people at high risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease are spared,” said senior study author Dr. Pinchas Cohen, dean of the University of Southern California (USC) Leonard Davis School of Gerontology. The gene variant that causes higher levels of humanin is called P3S-humanin, researchers said. This variant is thought to be extremely rare, and is found primarily in people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, researchers said. Mitochondria, the energy powerhouse of cells, produce humanin to protect against cellular aging and stress, according to a 2023 review in the journal Biology.… read on > read on >

People taking weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy need to drop them in the days or weeks prior to surgery, a new study warns. Folks on one of these drugs — known as GLP-1 receptor agonists — have a 33% higher risk of developing pneumonia by breathing in their own vomit during surgery, researchers found. “Aspiration during or after endoscopy can be devastating,” said researcher Dr. Ali Rezaie, medical director of the GI Motility Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “If significant, it can lead to respiratory failure, ICU admission and even death,” Rezaie said. “Even mild cases may require close monitoring, respiratory support and medications including antibiotics. It is important we take all possible precautions to prevent aspiration from occurring.” People are typically asked to fast prior to surgery because general anesthesia can cause nausea, and they might inhale and choke on their own vomit. Unfortunately, part of the way that GLP-1 receptor agonists help prompt weight loss is by slowing the digestion process, researchers said. That means it takes longer for food to pass through the stomach. These results jibe with guidance issued last year by the American Society of Anesthesiologists that calls for screening for weight-loss drug use before surgery, and informing patients of the risks involved. Further, another study published earlier this month in the journal JAMA Surgery found… read on > read on >

Children who are obese face double the odds of developing multiple sclerosis later in life, a new study warns. The overall odds for any one child to develop the neurodegenerative illness remains very low. However, the Swedish researchers believe the link could help explain rising rates of MS. “There are several studies showing that MS has increased over several decades and obesity is believed to be one major driver for this increase,” wrote a team led by Claude Marcus, of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. “Thanks to our prospective study design, we can confirm this theory.” The findings will be presented in May at the European Congress on Obesity in Venice. For the study, Marcus and his colleagues tracked data from 1995 through 2020, compiled by the Swedish Childhood Obesity Treatment Register. Almost 22,000 children were covered by that database, and their incidence of MS later in life was compared to that of similar, non-obese children from the general Swedish population. Rates of cases of newly diagnosed MS were tracked till 2023. The result: While 0.06% of the non-obese children went on to develop MS, the rate more than doubled, to 0.13%, among people who had been obese during childhood. Two-thirds of cases occurred in females, the study found, which mimics the general ratio of MS observed in women compared to men. MS was diagnosed… read on > read on >

Ever immersed yourself in a book and lost all sense of the time and place you’re currently in? That’s how reading can meld with mindfulness, one neuropsychologist explains. The experience can bring real mental health benefits, said Dr. Samantha Henry, an assistant professor of neurology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “Reading is a quiet pursuit that can be a more adaptive coping strategy than some other hobbies we engage in,” she said in a Baylor news release. Henry said that there’s a difference between typical reading and mindful reading. Very often, folks are reading for a goal: To read through a document or book within a specific timeframe, with the conscious aim of acquiring valuable knowledge. That’s fine, but it’s different from mindful reading, which focuses only on the pleasure of reading itself, without a set goal, and remaining fully present to understand whatever it is you are reading. According to Henry, you can prepare for mindful reading by practicing mindful breathing, which is often taught in meditation classes. “We can think of mindful reading in the way we think of mindful breathing, which is just focusing on your breath,” she explained. “Normally when we breathe, we don’t think about it because it’s automatic. Traditional reading can be that way too; to get to the destination of finishing that book. Try to slow… read on > read on >