Healio (5/13, Young) reports, “Vaccination for SARS-CoV-2 before and during pregnancy was not significantly associated with symptoms of postpartum depression, according to research.” Investigators came to this conclusion after evaluating “627 participants…from the CDC-funded Generation C…and NIH-funded Generation CSF…prospective pregnancy cohorts at Mount Sinai Health System.” The findings were presented at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting.

Related Links:

— “COVID-19 vaccination before, during pregnancy not linked to postpartum depression,”Kate Young, Healio, May 13, 2024

Psychiatric News (5/13) reports, “Adults who are incarcerated have nearly nine times the risk of dying by suicide within a year of their release than those who have never been in jail, according to a study.” Additionally, “the study…found that people who were released from jail within the year accounted for nearly 20% of all adult deaths by suicide.” The findings were published in JAMA Network Open.

Related Links:

— “Adults Recently Released from Jail Account for One in Five Adult Suicide Deaths, Psychiatric News, May 13, 2024

Psychiatric News (5/10) reported, “By combining high-powered microscopy with AI-guided illustration software, researchers reconstructed a 1 cubic millimeter fragment of living human brain tissue; these findingswere published in…Science.” The “detailed 3D rendering required 1,400 terabytes of data. By comparison, today’s high-end computer games typically contain around 0.1-0.2 terabytes of data.”

Related Links:

— “Researchers Reconstruct 3D Fragment of Human Brain, Psychiatric News, May 10, 2024

HealthDay (5/10, Miller) reported, “When folks in rural America need treatment for a substance use disorder, significant obstacles stand in their way, researchers say.” Specifically, “they are more likely to have to look outside their insurance network for care, resulting in higher out-of-pocket costs, according to a recent study published in the journal Health Services Review.” In the study, “compared to those in urban areas, rural patients were less likely to initiate treatment for disorders involving alcohol (37% versus 38%), opioids (41% versus 44%) or other drugs (38% versus 40%).”

Related Links:

— “Getting Help for Alcohol, Drug Abuse Tougher for Rural Americans,”Carole Tanzer Miller, HealthDay , May 10, 2024

Psychiatric News (5/9) reports that on Wednesday, “as the 2024 Annual Meeting wound down, outgoing APA President Petros Levounis, M.D., M.A., capped his presidential theme of ‘confronting addiction’ with a presentation titled ‘Technological Addictions: The New Frontier in Addiction Medicine.’” Levounis “outlined some of the parallels between technological addictions and substance use disorder (SUD) in terms of assessment, diagnosis, and treatment.” Levounis “said that technological addictions (such as video/internet gaming, cybersex, and online gambling addiction) have several characteristics in common with other addictions such as SUD.” Levounis “said that cognitive behavioral therapy is better suited to patients who already recognize they have a problem and want to address it.”

Related Links:

— “https://alert.psychnews.org/2024/05/technology-addictions-are-real-but.html, Psychiatric News, May 9, 2024

MedPage Today (5/8, Monaco ) reports, “Almost a quarter of surveyed U.S. adults met criteria for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), though the vast majority of them were undiagnosed, a retrospective cross-sectional study suggested.” Out of more than 75,000 “respondents to the online 2022 National Health and Wellness Survey, 23.3% screened positive for anxiety using the 7-Item GAD Questionnaire, Daniel Karlin, MD, chief medical officer of MindMed in New York City, reported…at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting.” However, “of those who screened positive, 83.1% had never received a GAD diagnosis. Most (55.1%) of the individuals screening positive had moderate symptoms while 44.9% had severe symptoms.”

Related Links:

— MedPage Today (requires login and subscription)

HealthDay (5/8, Miller) reports, “Using mindfulness to help people trying to overcome opioid addiction can boost their odds of continuing treatment, new research shows.” Researchers “found that supplementing standard opioid addiction treatment with an intervention called Mindfulness Oriented Recovery Enhancement (MORE) cut dropout rates by 59% and relapses by 42%.” The results were published in JAMA Psychiatry.

Related Links:

— “How Mindfulness Could Help Folks Quit Opioids,”Carole Tanzer Miller, HealthDay, May 8, 2024

Healio (5/7, Young) reports, “Referrals for eating disorder treatment spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, with patients more likely to present with eating disorder as a primary diagnosis, according to a poster at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting.” According to the researchers, “the average number of referrals per month spiked from 3.67 pre-pandemic to 8.56 during the pandemic.”

Related Links:

— “Eating disorder referrals spiked during COVID-19 pandemic,”Kate Young, Healio, May 7, 2024

Healio (5/7, Young) reports, “A poster presented at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting highlighted the need for greater access and engagement in trauma-focused care for incarcerated women, including peer-led interventions.” In a study of such individuals, “all 51 participants reported experiencing at least one traumatic event prior to incarceration, with 98% reporting physical and emotional abuse. Symptoms of PTSD were present in 96% of participants, and 43% had a history of drug-related charges. Of those selected for in-depth interviews, 87.5% reported substance use before incarceration.”

Related Links:

— “‘Very clear’ need, desire for trauma-focused treatment in women’s prisons,”Kate Young , Healio, May 7, 2024

The New York Times (5/6, Belluck ) reports, “Scientists are proposing a new way of understanding the genetics of Alzheimer’s that would mean that up to a fifth of patients would be considered to have a genetically caused form of the disease.” The concept “involves a gene variant called APOE4. Scientists have long known that inheriting one copy of the variant increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, and that people with two copies, inherited from each parent, have vastly increased risk.”

The AP (5/6, Neergaard ) reports that now, “research published Monday suggests that for people who carry not one but two copies of the gene, it’s more than a risk factor, it’s an underlying cause of the mind-robbing disease.” Additionally, for these patients, “symptoms can begin seven to 10 years sooner than in other older adults who develop Alzheimer’s.” Around “15% of Alzheimer’s patients carry two copies of APOE4.”

Reuters (5/6, Steenhuysen) reports, “The reclassification could change Alzheimer’s research, diagnosis and approaches to treatment, according to the researchers, whose study was published in the journal Nature Medicine.”

Related Links:

— “The New York Times (requires login and subscription)