Recovery Michigan

The study abstract, "Persistent Opioid Usage among Pediatric Patients Following Surgery in the United States," will be presented on Sunday, Sept. 17, at the Marriott Marquis Chicago.

They found the incidence of new persistent opioid use following surgery was 4.8 percent, ranging from 2.7 percent to 15.2 percent across procedures, as compared to 0.1 percent in the nonoperative control group.

Canada and the U.S. have seen alarming increases in opioid prescribing and in opioid-related overdose deaths. Prince's tragic opioid-related death further highlights this international public health problem.

Indeed, the spectre -- and reality -- of opioid limits have sent shockwaves through segments of the chronic pain community. The vast majority of individuals prescribed opioids take them responsibly, yet are now subject to laws created to prevent illicit opioid use.

Patient advocacy groups have loudly decried unjust medical care for chronic pain. Limiting opioids may preclude some opioid overdose deaths, they say, but what about the untold suffering -- and the suicides -- that may occur when patients cannot tolerate severe ongoing pain? The lives of people with chronic pain matter, too, and they should be treated as patients, not as addicts.

It's a Catch-22, of course. The opioid debate engenders strong emotions for both sides: opioid access versus limits. Is it really a zero-sum game where one group must suffer so the other group may survive?

Even when opioids are taken exactly as prescribed by exemplar patients, they come with a range of health risks including overdose fatality. How do we address the need to reduce health risks while treating chronic pain?

Do opioids help some people with chronic pain? Absolutely. For this reason, prescribers must retain discretion to prescribe them, while recalling that it will be for a minority of patients. Opioids may help, but they can't be the whole story.

Today, the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence and the Consortium for Risk-Based Firearm Policy are proud to announce the release of a new report, “Breaking Through Barriers: The Emerging Role of Healthcare Provider Training Programs in Firearm Suicide Prevention.” The report’s release coincides with National Suicide Prevention Week.

Michigan House Speaker Tom Leonard recently established a bipartisan task force, called Michigan C.A.R.E.S, to work on Mental Health reform across Michigan and especially across Michigan’s Criminal Justice System.

Representative Klint Kesto (R) and Hank Vaupel (R) are the co-chairs of the task force and they have opened up an online space for public comment and also released a public meeting schedule for the task force.

While the task force has a wider mandate, my area of concern is mental health in jails and prisons (so I will limit my comments to only reforms in the area of incarceration).

I have been writing about mental health reform in Michigan’s jails and prisons for over a year now (usually using the vehicle of my recaps of the television show Orange Is the New Black). Also, I am a formerly incarcerated person.

In the 1960s, New York began to clear out its scandal-ridden psychiatric hospitals. In their place, a new system emerged. Thousands of mentally ill New Yorkers moved into “adult homes,” large apartment complexes concentrated mostly in New York City and its surrounding suburbs. The homes were meant to provide a safer, more humane alternative to the hospitals; they were closer to where many of the patients lived, and promised modest psychiatric care and other services.

In 2001, New York Times metro reporter Cliff Levy spent a year investigating conditions of the homes. He found that more than 1,000 people died in a six-year period. Some threw themselves off of rooftops. Others succumbed to extreme heat, only to be found days later, decomposing in fetid rooms. He found that the homes were often staffed by unqualified workers paid a pittance to look after a population in desperate need.

Today, Cliff is a deputy managing editor at the Times. He has joined us on this episode of The Breakthrough to discuss the 2001 series, “Broken Homes.”

He describes how he developed his own novel way of obtaining records of deaths in the facilities, and how he tracked down former workers who detailed schemes invented by the home’s operators to maximize profits. He tells us how he made cold call after cold call to reach the relatives of dead residents.

“It’s exhausting, and it’s really depressing,” Levy said in describing the effort. “And you ask yourself, like, ‘Maybe I’m just wasting my time.’ But then, at some point, you reach someone.”

The stories helped prompt a class-action lawsuit, which led to a federal court order requiring New York state’s Department of Health to move as many as 4,000 mentally ill residents into their own apartments, where they can live more independently with individualized services.

New study challenges assumption that most human emotions fall within the categories of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust.

The Emoji Movie, in which the protagonist can’t help but express a wide variety of emotions instead of the one assigned to him, may have gotten something right.

A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, challenges a long-held assumption in psychology that most human emotions fall within the universal categories of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust.

Using novel statistical models to analyze the responses of more than 800 men and women to over 2,000 emotionally evocative video clips, UC Berkeley researchers identified 27 distinct categories of emotion and created a multidimensional, interactive map to show how they’re connected.

Their findings are published this week in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

“We found that 27 distinct dimensions, not six, were necessary to account for the way hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in response to each video,” said study senior author Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychology professor and expert on the science of emotions.

Moreover, in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an island, the study found that “there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration,” Keltner said.

“We don’t get finite clusters of emotions in the map because everything is interconnected,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. “Emotional experiences are so much richer and more nuanced than previously thought.”

Both studies tested the effects of four diet types - ketogenic, low carbohydrate, high fat, or control - in mice. The scientists used tasks involving mazes, balance beams, and running wheels to test the development of the mice's cognitive skills and physical strength as they aged.

The researchers also monitored the mice for alterations in heart function, and any changes in the regulation of gene expression.

What the researchers at the Buck Institute - in collaboration with teams from other institutions - found was that the effects of the ketogenic diet on the body were very similar to those of fasting and other such dietary restrictions. For example, it impacted insulin signaling and gene expression in much the same way that fasting would.

The Buck Institute team found that a keto diet fed to mice on a cyclical basis - that is, alternated with the control diet - prevented obesity, reduced mid-life mortality, and prevented memory loss.

"The older mice on the ketogenic diet had a better memory than the younger mice. That's really remarkable," says Dr. Verdin.

The keto diet can raise the concentration of beta-hydroxybutyrate acid (BHB) in the body, which, the researchers note, improves memory function.

After years of lobbying and experimental research, the FDA has granted "breakthrough therapy" status for the drug MDMA as a potential treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. The designation does not mean the drug is FDA-approved, but it does ease the way for clinical trials to test its safety and effectiveness in patients with PTSD.

The non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which has been advocating and fundraising for MDMA research for three decades, announced the FDA's designation late last week. (The FDA told CBS News it does not publicly disclose information about which drugs qualify for breakthrough status, citing confidentiality, but said researchers or drug companies are free to do so.)

More commonly known as its street names ecstasy or Molly, MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine) is a psychoactive drug that produces feelings of energy and euphoria, often followed by an emotional crash. In recent years, some in the scientific community have suggested it could have medical benefits, as well.