Recovery Michigan

A international group of researchers have found that food craving activates different brain networks between obese and normal weight patients. This indicates that the tendency to want food may be 'hard-wired' into the brain of overweigh patients, becoming a functional brain biomarker.

Obesity is one of the most difficult problems facing modern society. Treating obesity is a health priority, but most efforts (aside from bariatric surgery) have met with little success. In part, this is because the mechanisms associated with the desire to eat are poorly understood. Recently, studies are beginning to suggest that the brain mechanisms underlying obesity may be similar to those in substance addiction, and that treatment methodologies may be approached in the same way as other substance addictions, such as alcohol or drug addiction.

How to reach people with chronic or recurrent depression? In a randomized trial, they benefited from a self-management support service that included regular outreach care management and a self-care group with a combined behavioral and recovery-oriented approach. Over 18 months, patients improved significantly in all four measured outcomes. Compared to patients in usual care, they had less severe symptoms and less likelihood of having major depression, higher recovery scores, and higher likelihood of being much improved. Psychiatric Services published Organized Self-Management Support Services for Chronic Depressive Symptoms: A Randomized Controlled Trial.

"What makes this program unique is that it combines a traditional mental health model aiming to reduce symptoms with a recovery model focused on achieving life goals despite symptoms," said study leader Evette J. Ludman, PhD, a senior research associate at Group Health Research Institute.

"When depression persists or recurs, people may start thinking that treatment will never help them to recover," Dr. Ludman added. "But this intervention really seems effective at improving their lives, and the differences between the groups were continuing to diverge at 18 months." You can read a blog that Dr. Ludman wrote about the Organized Self-Management Support Services for Chronic Depressive Symptoms (Stride) trial.

A new smartphone app called Start aims to change that. Developed for people on newly prescribed antidepressants, the app is designed to track and summarize their response to the medication over time so that they can determine whether or not it’s working.

Available for download today on Apple’s App Store, the iOS-only Start is the latest offering from Iodine, a health tech startup that crowdsources reviews of medications for everything from asthma to heartburn. Since its launch last year, Iodine’s founders — one a former executive editor of Wired, the other a former Google engineer who co-developed the company’s flu-tracking software — noticed that a significant number of reviews submitted to the site were for antidepressants.

"The oropharynx of schizophrenics seems to harbor different proportions of oral bacteria than healthy individuals," said Eduardo Castro-Nallar, a Ph.D. candidate at GW's Computational Biology Institute (CBI) and lead author of the study. "Specifically, our analyses revealed an association between microbes such as lactic-acid bacteria and schizophrenics."

Recent studies have shown that microbiomes--the communities of microbes living within our bodies--can affect the immune system and may be connected to mental health. Research linking immune disorders and schizophrenia has also been published, and this study furthers the possibility that shifts in oral communities are associated with schizophrenia.

Thanks to digital photography, almost anyone can take a beautiful picture without the need of a dark room or strategic lighting - even the blind. 

Tammy Ruggles, 54, was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition that results in the deterioration of the retinas over time. At age 40, she was declared legally blind and subsequently lost her career as a social worker.

'It was my chosen profession, and I didn't give it up lightly,' Kentucky-based Tammy explained in a post for Vox. 'When it disappeared, so did some of my confidence and sense of identity. What was I to call myself if not a social worker?'

When she was a youngster, Tammy had been an avid fan of photography, picking up old Kodak and Polaroid cameras to snap shots of pets and family members with dreams of taking it farther.

But those dreams would be dashed as her vision deteriorated - she was unable to use the manually-operated cameras that were around in the age before digital photography, and her night blindness meant she would never be able to work in a dark room. 

'So as a teenager I decided, regretfully, to put my love of photography in a box and leave it alone,' she said. 'I didn't feel bitter about it. It was just another adjustment I had to make given the vision problem I had.'

However, the idea remained in the back of her mind. 

Over the years, Tammy read about great photographers and imagined the scenes she wished she could capture on film. 

Then, in 2013, with no ability to drive, pursue her previous career or even to sketch pictures, she decided to go back to her childhood passion. With the advent of user-friendly digital cameras, it was more possible than ever before, so she ordered herself one.

Sleep difficulty is a primary symptom of both PTSD and TBI and has been found to affect the severity of both conditions. TBI patients can suffer from permanent sleep problems regardless of the severity of their initial injury. Approximately 40 to 65 percent of individuals have insomnia after mild TBI, while patients with sleep difficulties are at a higher risk of developing PTSD. Despite recent attention, sleep has been understudied in the veteran population.

The review found that poor sleep often persists in veterans after resolution of their PTSD and mild TBI symptoms, but few treatments and rehabilitation protocols target sleep specifically. "In these veterans, sleep disturbances continue to adversely impact daily functioning and quality of life. "PTSD, TBI, and sleep problems significantly affect functional status and quality of life in veterans returning from combat," explains lead author Yelena Bogdanova, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at BUSM add VA title.

Medicaid is expected to save billions of dollars a year as patents for several blockbuster antipsychotic medications expire and use of generic versions of these drugs increases, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. These savings may provide relief from the high costs of these medications and allow policymakers to lift restrictions on patients' access, the researchers argue.

The study forecast that annual Medicaid payments for antipsychotic medicines will decrease by nearly $1.8 billion (or nearly 50 percent) by 2016 and by $2.8 billion (or 76 percent) by 2019. The forecasting models were developed by the authors, Eric Slade, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Linda Simoni-Wastila, BSPharm, MSPH, PhD, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. The study, the first to look at these possible cost savings, was published in the July issue of the journal Psychiatric Services.

The researchers predicted changes in overall Medicaid spending for antipsychotics between 2011 and 2019. In 2011, Medicaid spent more than $3.6 billion on second-generation antipsychotics. Five branded medications -- aripiprazole, quetiapine, olanzapine, ziprasidone, and paliperidone -- accounted for $3.3 billion or 90 percent of this spending. Medicaid is the major payer for antipsychotic medications in the U.S., accounting for between 70 percent and 80 percent of all antipsychotic prescriptions.

Drug overdoses killed 44,000 people in 2013. "More than half of these deaths (51.8 percent) were related to prescription drugs, with more than 16,000 deaths related to prescription painkillers, and nearly 7,000 related to anxiety and sleep medications," the report reads.

These drug overdose deaths put West Virginia at the top of the list for accidental deaths. It has the most injury deaths overall, at 97.9 per 100,000 people, and a drug overdose death rate of 33.5 per 100,000 people.

Suicides are the second-leading cause of injury death, with 41,000 a year.

Car accidents come next. "Motor vehicle deaths have decreased by 25 percent in the past decade, but more than 33,000 Americans still die each year from motor vehicle crashes," the report finds.