Teenagers suffering from anxiety, depression or bipolar disorder are likely to have a tougher time getting their driver’s license, a new study finds. Teens and young adults with these types of mood disorders are 30% less likely to obtain a driver’s license than peers without a mood disorder, researchers report April 8 in the journal JAMA Network Open. Youths with mood disorders also have nearly twice the risk of losing their license and a slightly elevated risk of crashing a vehicle, the researchers discovered. “Our results indicate that newly licensed youths with mood disorders have a greater risk of crashing than other young drivers, but that this is a manageable risk,” said senior researcher Allison Curry, an associate professor of pediatrics with the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) Center for Injury Research and Prevention. As many as one in 10 teens and young adults have been diagnosed with a mood disorder, researchers said in background notes. These disorders often develop around the age a teen becomes eligible to get a driver’s license, researchers noted. However, skills required for safe driving — attention, memory, motor skills — are often impaired in those with mood disorders. For the study, researchers compared nearly 1,900 teens with mood disorders to more than 84,000 teens without such a disorder, all of whom were eligible to get their license. They linked…  read on >  read on >

Obese folks are less likely to benefit from a nerve-stimulation treatment for sleep apnea that’s recently been made available to them, a new study reports. The treatment is likely to be 75% less effective among obese people with BMIs of 32 to 35, compared to patients with lower BMIs, researchers found. “Our study shows that the more overweight you are, the less likely it is that nerve-stimulation treatment will be effective in treating your sleep apnea,” said senior researcher Dr. Eric Landsness, an assistant professor of neurology with the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t put this device in patients with a BMI of 38 or 40,” Landsness added in a university news release. “But my job as a physician is to help overweight patients make an informed decision, to better understand their odds of success and realize that the chances of it working for them may be a lot less.” The increasingly popular therapy, known as hypoglossal nerve stimulation, originally was approved in 2014 for sleep apnea patients whose weight was in the healthy range, researchers said in background notes. But that approval has now been extended to patients with BMIs up to 40, which is considered severely obese. Healthy BMI ranges from 18.5 to 24.9, and 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight. Sleep apnea occurs…  read on >  read on >

Overuse of marijuana is increasingly being linked to dangerous bouts of psychosis, and a new study finds that antipsychotics may be needed to keep such patients out of the hospital. Psychotic episodes involve a dangerous psychiatric state in which people lose their connection with reality. These episodes can get so out of control that people may need hospitalization. However, new research finds that people who overuse marijuana and then experience their first psychotic episode may be helped by the quick use of injected antipsychotics. “These findings encourage the early use of second-generation, long-acting injectables as an important secondary pre­vention strategy to reduce rates of hospitalization” in such patients, reports a team led by Dr. Alexander Denissoff, of the University of Turku in Finland. His team tracked outcomes for 1,820 people who had a first psychotic episode and also had cannabis use disorder between 2006 and 2021. Just over 1,100 of these patients ended up being hospitalized due to “psychotic relapse,” according to the American Psychiatric Association news release. However, folks who had received any antipsychotic med were a third less likely to require hospitalization due to relapse, compared to those who hadn’t gotten these drugs. Comparing the effectiveness of various antipsychotics, risperidone came out on top, cutting the odds for relapse-linked hospitalization by 60%, the researchers found, followed by aripiprazole (58% reduction), oral clozapine (57%),…  read on >  read on >

A good night’s sleep is often hampered by caffeine, hunger, alcohol or chronic pain. Now, America has a new cause of poor sleep: the sound of gunfire on city streets. New research shows that gunshots are twice as likely to occur at night, mostly affecting the sleep of people in low-income neighborhoods. In fact, nearly three out of four gunshots (72%) occur at night in major U.S. cities, mostly on Saturday and Sunday, researchers found. “A nighttime gunshot likely disrupts the sleep of nearby community residents due to the sheer sound of the shot, which is then followed by a cacophony of sirens from police vehicles and ambulances,” said researcher Rebecca Robbins, an assistant professor of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. For the study, researchers analyzed more than 72,000 records on the time and location of gunshots in six major cities around the United States, including Baltimore, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C., between 2015 and 2021. The team tracked how many gunshots occurred during the day versus at night, and then created maps to show which neighborhoods are most plagued by nighttime gunfire. They also estimated the number of people who lived near a location where gunshots occurred. As many as 12.5 million nights of sleep were ruined by gunfire across the six cities, given the number…  read on >  read on >

A rotten work schedule in young adulthood can affect a person’s middle-aged health, a new study finds. Young adults who worked shifts outside the usual 9-to-5 schedule were more likely to report worse sleep and symptoms of depression in their 50s, researchers discovered. “Work that is supposed to bring resources to help us sustain a decent life has now become a vulnerability to a healthy life,” said researcher Wen-Jui Han, a professor with New York University. For the study, Han and her colleagues analyzed data from a long-term study that tracked the health of more than 7,000 people in the United States for more than three decades. Results showed that in their 20s through their 40s, people rarely have a straight 9-to-5 schedule. “Indeed, about three-quarters of the work patterns we observed did not strictly conform to working stably during daytime hours throughout our working years,” Han said in a university news release. “This has repercussions.” These sort of volatile work hours are associated with bad sleep, physical fatigue and emotional exhaustion, all of which can contribute to poor health, Han said. “People with work patterns involving any degree of volatility and variability were more likely to have fewer hours of sleep per day, lower sleep quality, lower physical and mental functions, and a higher likelihood of reporting poor health and depressive symptoms at age…  read on >  read on >

Two newly discovered genetic variations can have a powerful effect on a person’s risk for obesity, a new report says. Variants in the gene BSN, also known as Bassoon, can increase risk of obesity as much as sixfold, researchers report April 4 in the journal Nature Genetics. These variants affect about 1 in every 6,500 adults, researchers said. Variants of the APBA1 gene also are associated with increased obesity risk, results show. “We have identified two genes with variants that have the most profound impact on obesity risk at a population level we’ve ever seen,” said researcher Giles Yeo, a professor with the Medical Research Council’s Metabolic Diseases Unit at Cambridge University. Previous genetic variants associated with obesity have been linked to the brain pathways normally associated with appetite regulation, known as the leptin-melanocortin pathway, researchers said. Interestingly, neither the BSN nor the APBA1 gene are known to be involved in that brain pathway, researchers said. Instead, prior studies have found that these genes play a role in the transmission of signals between brain cells — suggesting that age-related brain declines might affect appetite control. Further, neither gene is associated with childhood obesity risk, researchers said. For the study, researchers used data from the UK Biobank genetic research project to perform genetic sequencing of body mass index in more than a half-million people. They found…  read on >  read on >

Massive racial disparities exist in the treatment of pregnancy-related mood disorders in the United States, a new study shows. White women suffering from depression or anxiety during or after pregnancy are nearly twice as likely receive treatment as women of color are, researchers report April 1 in the journal Health Affairs. About two-thirds of white women (67%) said they received mental health treatment for their diagnosed depression or anxiety during pregnancy or in their first year of motherhood, researchers found. Comparatively, fewer than two out of five (37%) Black and Hispanic received treatment for their pregnancy-related mood disorders, results show. That number dipped to one in five (20%) for other ethnicities, including Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern and North African. “Our study in concert with existing work shows that Asian, Black and Latine birthing people, who may be at the greatest risk of postpartum depression, are the least likely to receive any form of postpartum mental health care — illustrating stark racial inequities in how postpartum depression is identified and managed in the U.S.,” said lead researcher Sarah Haight, a doctoral candidate in epidemiology with the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City. Nearly one in eight people who give birth wind up suffering postpartum depression, researchers said in background notes. For the study, they surveyed more than 4,500…  read on >  read on >