The Huffington Post (4/14, Chan) reported, “Exercise could be the secret weapon to help breast cancer patients combat common side effects of cancer and cancer treatments,” according to research presented at a Society of Behavioral Medicine meeting.

HealthDay (4/14, Preidt) reported, “University of Miami researchers examined the physical activity levels and mental/physical health of 240 women with non-metastatic breast cancer…who were recruited for the study four to 10 weeks after surgery.”

WebMD (4/14, Boyles) reported, “Half the women took part in a 10-week, group-based behavioral therapy program aimed at reducing stress, while the other half participated in a much less intensive, single-day educational session.” The investigators “found that women who increased the time they spent engaged in physical activity between the time of surgery and other treatments had less fatigue-related disruptions in everyday activities.” The researchers reported that “women in both groups who exercised more also experienced less depression and scored higher on tests measuring quality of life.”

Related Links:

— “Exercise Could Lower Fatigue And Depression In Breast Cancer Patients: Study,”Amanda L. Chan, The Huffington Post , April 13, 2012.

HealthDay (4/14, Preidt) reported, “Adults with mental illness are more likely to have certain types of chronic physical health problems than those without mental illness,” according to a report (pdf) issued April 5 by the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). “The report said adults aged 18 and older who had any type of mental illness in the past year had higher rates of high blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, heart disease and stroke.” In addition, “people with mental illness had higher rates of emergency-department use and hospitalization,” the report found.

“Those with any mental illness, serious mental illness, or a major depressive episode also had greater use of healthcare resources,” MedPage Today (4/14, Neale) pointed out. “Among those with any mental illness, for example, the rate of emergency department use was 38.8% (versus 27.1% for those who reported no mental illness) and the rate of hospitalization was 15.1% (versus 10.1%).”

Related Links:

— “Mental Illness Tied to Higher Rates of Physical Problems: Report,”Robert Preidt, HealthDay, April 13, 2012.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post (4/13), former Sen. Pete Domenici, a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and former Sen. Gordon H. Smith, president and chief executive of the National Association of Broadcasters, call on the Obama administration to “issue its final regulations to implement the Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act for mental health parity in health insurance.” They note that when Congress passed the Act in 2008, then-Sen. Obama voted for it, and “all indications are that he remains supportive” as President. However, “regulatory action has stalled since 2010. The final rule that would provide clarity to the millions who have a mental illness or substance-use disorder, and to their employers, has not been issued.”

Related Links:

— “Waiting for mental health parity,”Pete Domenici, The Washington Post, April 12, 2012.

The Washington Post (4/10, Butler) reports that “aging does seem to make us more vulnerable to depression, but it’s not a foregone conclusion.” Susan Lehmann, MD, director of the Geriatric Psychiatry Day Hospital at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, “notes that research has shown that major depression occurs in about two percent of people 65 and older, while minor depression strikes about a quarter of them, with the number even higher in nursing homes.” Research also suggests that strong social connections can be a proactive safeguard against depression among the elderly, Dr. Lehmann notes.

Small Study: Shortened Telomere Length May Be Associated With Depression, Trauma. On the front of its Personal Journal section, the Wall Street Journal (4/10, D1, Wang, Subscription Publication) reports that according to research conducted in 2011 at the University of California-San Francisco and published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, shortened telomere length, a normal phenomenon of aging, may be associated with depression and even trauma in childhood. In a study involving 47 healthy adult controls and 43 adults with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), researchers found that telomeres were shorter in the people who had PTSD. On average, the shorter length equaled an aging gain of about 4.5 years. A Swedish study of 91 patients with major depression and 451 mentally healthy controls, published this past February in the journal Biological Psychiatry, found an association between shortened telomeres with depression and perceived stress.

Related Links:

— “Aging makes people more vulnerable to depression, but the problem can be treated,”Carolyn Butler, The Washington Post, April 9, 2012.

HealthDay (4/11, Preidt) reports that according to a study published online March 6 in the Journal of Adolescent Health, male teens who have been sexually abused may be more likely to engage in unsafe sex. After analyzing data on some 40,000 US and Canadian high-school males, researchers found that “compared to those with no history of sexual abuse, young males who were sexually abused were five times more likely to cause teen pregnancy, three times more likely to have multiple sexual partners and two times more likely to have unprotected sex.”

Related Links:

— “Sexual Abuse May Put Boys at Risk for Unsafe Sex,”Robert Preidt, HealthDay, April 10, 2012.

The UK’s Telegraph (4/11, Smith) reports, “Doctors are warning that pressure to be young, beautiful, slim and clever, is driving a generation into buying illicit drugs online in the belief they are not ‘good enough’.” But “the products often contain banned and harmful substances or experimental and adulterated drugs that can cause allergic reactions, liver damage, mercury poisoning, brain damage and even death,” according to the Human Enhancement Drugs – The Emerging Challenges to Public Health report. “The report…charts unprecedented growth over the past few years in the usage of such drugs, sourced from a vast and illicit market.”

Related Links:

— “Warning over online ‘smart drugs’ that can kill,”Rebecca Smith, The Telegraph, April 11, 2012.

The Louisville Courier-Journal (4/11, Ungar) reports, “More than 250 faces stare out from a wall of photos at the National Rx Drug Abuse Summit — men and women, many of them young, lost to drug overdoses.” On Tuesday, US Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, MD, said, “There are too many faces on that wall. There are too many faces that could be on that wall,” and added, “Prescription drug abuse is the nation’s fastest-growing drug problem.” The surgeon general “was one of the keynote speakers at the inaugural national three-day summit organized by the Eastern Kentucky anti-drug group Operation UNITE” that “drew about 700 people involved in battling the prescription-drug abuse epidemic.”

“At the National Prescription Drug Abuse Summit in Orlando Tuesday, Gov. Steve Beshear called for states and the federal government to develop aggressive shared tactics to thwart the devastating scourge of prescription drug abuse,” the Kentucky New Era (4/11) reports. “He also encouraged Kentucky legislators to keep the state on the leading edge of effective anti-drug strategies by passing a broad prescription drug bill,” known as House Bill 4, “on the final day of the legislative session this week.”

Related Links:

— “Prescription drug abuse summit draws 700,”Laura Ungar, The Courier-Journal, April 10, 2012.

MedWire (4/11, Robertson) reports, “Depression is associated with a significantly increased risk for dementia among patients with type 2 diabetes,” according to a study published online in the Archives of General Psychiatry. After analyzing data on some 20,000 patients with diabetes who partook in the Diabetes and Aging Study, researchers found that “depression at baseline was associated with a 2.02-fold greater risk for dementia compared with those without diabetes, after adjustment for covariates.”

Related Links:

— “Depression impacts on dementia risk in diabetes,”Sally Robertson, MedWire News, April 10, 2012.

The Los Angeles Times (4/11, Kaplan) “Booster Shots” blog reports, “Nearly two-thirds of Americans who are obese try to lose weight, and about 40% of them actually succeed. How did they do it? The old-school way: By eating less, exercising more and switching to more healthful foods,” according to a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Researchers examined 4,021 adults who had been obese between 2001 and 2006 before participating in the study. As the blog post notes, “2,523 — or 63% — said they had tried to lose weight in the previous 12 months. And among them, 1,026 — or 41% — were able to shed at least 5% of their body weight…Even better, 510 people — or 20% — succeeded in losing at least 10% of their body weight.” Among participants who lost at least 10%, exercise and healthier eating — not shortcuts –were typical practices.

The Time (4/11, Sifferlin) “Healthland” blog notes that “the most popular strategies were eating less, exercising more, eating less fat and switching to lower-calorie foods. People who used commercial weight-loss programs and prescription weight-loss pills also saw success, but only a small portion of the study participants used them.” Also covering the story are MedPage Today (4/11, Fiore), WebMD (4/11, Mann) and HealthDay (4/11, Doheny).

Related Links:

— “,” , , , 2012.

MedWire (4/10, Cowen) reports that according to a study published April 1 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, “methamphetamine users are at increased risk for developing schizophrenia.” After examining “data from California inpatient hospital discharge records for the period 1990-2000 to identify 42,412 patients with methamphetamine, 39,390 with cocaine, 408,604 with alcohol, 56,844 with opioid, 23,335 with cannabis use disorders, and a comparison group of 188,732 patients with appendicitis,” investigators “found that, compared with appendicitis patients, methamphetamine users had the greatest risk for schizophrenia (hazard ratio [HR]=9.37), followed by cannabis users (HR=8.16), cocaine users (HR= 5.84), those with alcohol use disorder (HR=5.56), and opioid users (HR=3.60), after accounting for age, gender, ethnicity, and other variables.”

Related Links:

— “Methamphetamine use may increase schizophrenia risk,”Mark Cowen, MedWire News, April 10, 2012.