The New York Times (11/14, F2, Carrns, Subscription Publication) reports, “About a quarter of American adults suffer from some type of mental health problem each year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, and six percent suffer severe ailments, like…major depression.” For that reason, “taking periodic stock of your emotional well-being can help identify warning signs of common ailments like depression or anxiety. Such illnesses are highly treatable, especially when they are identified in their early stages, before they get so severe that they precipitate some sort of personal — and perhaps financial — crisis.” The Times quotes psychiatrist Jeffrey Borenstein, MD, editor in chief of Psychiatric News, published by the American Psychiatric Association, who said that having a “mental health checkup” is “just as important as having a physical checkup.”

Related Links:

— “A Regular Checkup Is Good for the Mind as Well as the Body, “Ann Carrns, The New York Times, November 13, 2012.

The Los Angeles Times (11/14, Morin) reports, “Soccer players who repeatedly strike the ball with their heads may be causing measurable damage to their brains, even if they never suffer a concussion, according to a” research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “By examining brain scans of a dozen professional soccer players from Germany, researchers found a pattern of damage that strongly resembled that of patients with mild traumatic brain injury [TBI].”

HealthDay (11/14, Gordon) reports that the study’s senior author “noted that the researchers don’t know what caused the changes in the white matter of the soccer players, only that there were changes. ‘It could be from heading the ball, or due to impact of hitting other players or from sudden acceleration,’ she said.”

MedPage Today (11/14, Neale) reports, “As an alternate explanation,” the study authors “noted that ‘soccer players showed increased axial diffusivity in the absence of increased radial diffusivity limited to the corpus callosum, possibly resulting from specialized training or neuroinflammation.'”

Related Links:

— “Soccer players may injure brains when ‘heading’ ball, study says,”Monte Morin, Los Angeles Times, November 14, 2012.

Psychiatric News (11/8), a publication of the American Psychiatric Association, reports that a study published online Nov. 6 in the Archives of General Psychiatry “identifies factors that can signal” suicide risk in young people with bipolar disorder (BD). After tracking “413 youths (average age, 12.6) with a diagnosis of” BD for about five years, researchers found that “the strongest indicators of a later suicide attempt were severity of depression at intake and a family history of depression.” But, “after intake, more time with threshold depression, the presence of substance use disorder or mixed mood symptoms, and more time receiving outpatient psychosocial services, all indicated greater risk as well.”

Related Links:

— “Study Identifies Suicide Risk in Youth With Bipolar Disorder,Psychiatric News Alert , November 7, 2012.

Medscape (11/8, Helwick) reports, “Children and adolescents may be ‘overlabeled’ as being suicidal by school authorities,” according to research presented Oct. 20 at the American Academy of Pediatrics 2012 National Conference and Exhibition. After examining 581 records, “investigators at the Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in New York City came to this conclusion after they found that fewer than one half of children referred by schools to the emergency department (ED) for suicidal behavior received psychiatric treatment.”

HealthDay (11/13, Preidt) reports, “Undiagnosed, chronic vision problems are common in US veterans with traumatic brain injury [TBI] or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),” according to two studies presented at an ophthalmology meeting. “One study looked at 31 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with mild blast-related traumatic brain injury and found that 67 percent had chronic vision disorders.” The second study involving two million medical records “found that veterans with PTSD or depression are much more likely to develop dry eye syndrome than veterans without these mental health disorders.”

Related Links:

— “Undiagnosed Eye Problems Plague Some U.S. Veterans, “Robert Preidt, HealthDay, , 2012.

MedPage Today (11/13, Gever) reports, “Depression and asthma appear to go hand in hand, even in patients whose asthma is relatively mild and who report generally good health,” according to a study presented at the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology annual meeting. “Analysis of some 13,000 participants in the Cooper Institute Longitudinal Study indicated that a diagnosis of asthma was a risk factor for reports of significant current depressive symptoms with an odds ratio of 1.41 (95% CI 1.16 to 1.65, P<0.001) after adjusting for asthma severity and self-assessment of overall health status." In addition, "asthma and a previous history of depression...were significantly associated, with an odds ratio of 1.65 (95% CI 1.40 to 1.90, P<0.001)," researchers reported. Related Links:

— “Asthma Patients Often Depressed,”John Gever, MedPage Today, November 12, 2012.

Medwire (11/13, Cowen) reports, “Depressive episodes take significantly less time to develop in patients with bipolar disorder (BD) than in those with unipolar depression,” according to a studypublished Dec. 15 in the Journal of Affective Disorders. The “study of 24 BD patients and 122 with unipolar depression who were aged at least 18 years and treated for a depressive episode” revealed that “the duration of depressive episode onset among BD inpatients was slightly more than one week, compared with around one month in those with unipolar depression.”

Related Links:

— “Speed of depression onset increased in bipolar patients, “Mark Cowen, Medwire News, November 13, 2012.

The Los Angeles Times (11/11, Glover, Girion) reported that prescription medication overdoses “now claim more lives than heroin and cocaine combined, fueling a doubling of drug-related deaths in the United States over the last decade. Health and law enforcement officials seeking to curb the epidemic have focused on how OxyContin [oxycodone], Vicodin [acetaminophen and hydrocodone], Xanax [alprazolam] and other potent pain and anxiety medications are obtained illegally.” But authorities “have failed to recognize how often people overdose on medications prescribed for them by their doctors.” A Times investigation “has found that in nearly half of the accidental deaths from prescription drugs in four Southern California counties, the deceased had a doctor’s prescription for at least one drug that caused or contributed to the death.”

Related Links:

— “Legal drugs, deadly outcomes, “Scott Glover, Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2012.

HealthDay (11/11, Preidt) reports, “People with rheumatoid arthritis [RA] have higher-than-normal rates of depression, which could increase their risk of death, according to a new study” scheduled to be presented at the American College of Rheumatology annual meeting. Investigators followed 530 patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Altogether, the researchers found that patients who were depressed faced twice the risk of death during the study period compared to patients who were not depressed. The study found that “the risk of death among depressed men was twice that for depressed women.” Male patients “with depression were five times more likely to die than women without depression.”

Related Links:

— “Study: Rheumatoid Arthritis Plus Depression May Be Deadly, “Robert Preidt, Healthday, November 12, 2012.

In an op-ed for USA Today (11/12), Warren Kinghorn, MD, a psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Durham, NC, said veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are dealing with more than a medical problem. Kinghorn said VA and other healthcare systems “need adequate resources to provide medical and psychiatric care for returning combat veterans. But perhaps even more than good medical care, veterans need individuals and communities who will commit to walk patiently alongside them, allowing them to tell their stories if and when they are ready to do so, even when these stories are distressing or complex or unbearably sad.” Veterans, Kinghorn said, “need a civilian culture that refuses to distance itself from them either through reflexive condemnation or, more commonly, through reflexive valorization.”

Related Links:

— “Column: PTSD, the moral dimensions, “Warren Kinghorn, USA TODAY, November 11, 2012.