Recovery Michigan

Nutritional supplement kit was designed for postpartum brain changes in women.

A dietary supplement kit, created to counter mood-altering brain changes linked to depression, virtually eliminated the “baby blues” among women in a new study at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

Postpartum blues are common among women after giving birth. However, when severe, they substantially increase the risk of clinically diagnosed postpartum depression, which affects 13 per cent of new mothers and is the most common complication of child-bearing.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was led by Dr. Jeffrey Meyer, who heads the Neuroimaging Program in Mood & Anxiety in CAMH’s Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute.

“Developing successful nutrition-based treatments, based on neurobiology, is rare in psychiatry,” says Dr. Meyer, who holds a Canada Research Chair in the Neurochemistry of Major Depression. “We believe our approach also represents a promising new avenue for creating other new dietary supplements for medicinal use.”

The nutritional kit consists of three supplements. They were carefully selected to compensate for a surge in the brain protein MAO-A, which occurs in the early postpartum phase, and which also resembles a brain change that persists for longer periods in clinical depression. Both findings were discovered in previous brain imaging studies by Dr. Meyer’s group.

MAO-A breaks down three brain chemicals that help maintain mood: serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine. When these chemicals are depleted, it can lead to feelings of sadness. MAO-A levels peak five days after giving birth, the same time when postpartum blues are most pronounced.

The kit includes tryptophan and tyrosine, which compensate for the loss of the three mood-regulating chemicals, as well as a blueberry extract with blueberry juice for anti-oxidant effects. Dr. Meyer’s team had also tested and confirmed that the tryptophan and tyrosine supplements, given in higher amounts than people would normally get in their diet, did not affect the overall concentrations in breast milk.

The Veterans History Project (VHP) today launched “PTSD: A Lasting Impact of War,” the latest installment in its online “Experiencing War” website series.

The site examines 12 digitized collections found in the VHP archive, all of which include veterans describing their military service, its impact on their mental health and the challenges they have faced in finding the care they need while living with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Some of the veterans featured were diagnosed as a result of serving in combat or being held as prisoners of war (POW), while others experienced the trauma of sexual assault. The veterans, ranging from World War II to the Iraq War, represent a variety of branches, service locations and military roles.

One of the featured collections is that of Ralph Earl Moulis, a WWII Army Air Corps veteran who had flown more than two dozen missions before being shot down by German forces and held as a POW.  He escaped 14 months later, but was left with mental scars that manifested as flashbacks, difficulty sleeping and strained personal relationships.

For nuclear missile crewman Reynaldo Puente, the mental stress and anxiety caused by being in a constant state of high alert during the Cold War caused PTSD.  He longed, to no avail, for a medical cure-all that would put an end to his nightmares, so that he could sleep peacefully.

Wendy Marie Wamsley Taines enlisted in 1990 during the Persian Gulf War.  When she left the Army the following year, she was a different woman.  It wasn’t until 10 years later that she was diagnosed with PTSD, and finally sought the help she needed.

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a huge “hidden disability” within prison populations in the US and the UK. Despite evidence that TBI can lead sufferers to be more violent and reoffend, there is a worrying lack of information about the extent of the problem and there is no standard screening process. At a time when there is huge concern about escalating prison population rates, is it not time this issue was addressed?

Prisoners who have had head injuries are more likely to experience a variety of mental health problems including severe depression and anxiety, substance use disorders, anger and suicidal thoughts.

Surprisingly, it is only relatively recently that researchers have started investigating brain injury within the criminal justice context. But those studies show higher rates of TBI within incarcerated populations compared to the rate found in the general population.

There appears to be just cause for concern regarding the rate of recidivism in individuals with TBI. This year researchers published the findings from their study which investigated the rearrest post release from prison among a sample of Indiana inmates who were screened using the Ohio State University Traumatic Brain Injury Identification (OSU-TBI-ID) instrument. Their findings revealed that those with TBI were more likely to commit crimes post release.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is the largest health care provider in the United States. The V.A. runs more than 1,700 locations, provides care to nine million vets and spends an annual budget of around $200 billion. It runs 163 hospitals and employs more than 200,000 people. By contrast, the next largest health care company employs just over 100,000.

That’s a lot of people, a lot of buildings and a lot of cash for what is — by all accounts — a substandard level of care for American veterans. Everyone agrees that the V.A. is broken and everyone seems to think that the best option for fixing it is to pour more money into the broken system.

But it won’t. No amount of money will fix the problem. Digging deep into government reports on the V.A. paints a picture of a systemically broken system, one that can’t build new facilities let alone care for wounded warriors.

At least two life sciences companies are now developing blood tests that can detect concussion more reliably and objectively, and a recent studysuggests such tests may eventually be game-changers. “The biggest problem is that the clinical criteria for diagnosing concussion are very vague,” says Henrik Zetterberg, a professor of neurochemistry at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “If someone hits their head and doesn’t feel 100 percent well afterwards, that can fulfill the criteria—it’s not much stricter than that.” A blood test that diagnoses concussion accurately and reliably would, therefore, be a valuable aid to sports teams—and to medicine in general.

Summary: The probiotic Lactobacillus can reverse symptoms and anxiety and depression, a new study reports.

Source: University of Virginia Health System.

Lactobacillus affects mood, anxiety in mice; researchers optimistic findings should hold true in humans.

Researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have reversed depression symptoms in mice by feeding them Lactobacillus, a probiotic bacteria found in live-cultures yogurt. Further, they have discovered a specific mechanism for how the bacteria affect mood, providing a direct link between the health of the gut microbiome and mental health.

Based on their findings, the researchers are optimistic that their discovery will hold true in people and are planning to confirm their findings in patients with depression.

“The big hope for this kind of research is that we won’t need to bother with complex drugs and side effects when we can just play with the microbiome,” explained lead researcher Alban Gaultier, PhD. “It would be magical just to change your diet, to change the bacteria you take, and fix your health – and your mood.”

People who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) are poorer at learning about the safety of a stimulus than healthy volunteers, which may contribute to their struggles to overcome compulsive behaviour, according to new research from the University of Cambridge.

OCD is a disorder characterised by intrusive thoughts and repetitive, irrational behaviours, for example an obsession with cleanliness leading to repetitive hand washing, or a fear that something terrible will happen if they don't check the door dozens of times, making leaving the house extremely difficult.

A common way of helping treat OCD is to expose people to something they consider threatening - for example, if their obsession is around cleanliness, they may be made to touch a toilet seat but then prevented from washing their hands. However, so-called 'exposure therapy' often only has limited success and compulsions can return in times of stress. This new research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may explain why memories about safety don't stick.

Head injuries can harm hundreds of genes in the brain in a way that increases people’s risk for a wide range of neurological and psychiatric disorders, UCLA life scientists report.

The researchers identified for the first time master genes that they believe control hundreds of other genes which are linked to Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, stroke, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, depression, schizophrenia and other disorders.

Knowing what the master genes are could give scientists targets for new pharmaceuticals to treat brain diseases. Eventually, scientists might even be able to learn how to re-modify damaged genes to reduce the risk for diseases, and the finding could help researchers identify chemical compounds and foods that fight disease by repairing those genes.

“We believe these master genes are responsible for traumatic brain injury adversely triggering changes in many other genes,” said Xia Yang, a senior author of the study and a UCLA associate professor of integrative biology and physiology.

A TALE OF ONE WOMAN'S JOURNEY IN OVERCOMING ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION

I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it. --Maya Angelou