The AP (10/21, Reeves) reported healthcare “workers say they are seeing signs of mental problems in residents more than a week after” Hurricane Michael ravaged parts of Florida, “and the issues could continue as a short-term disaster turns into a long-term recovery that will take years.” Looking back at the psychological aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, researchers found in one study that “five years after the storm, parents reported more than 37 percent of children had been clinically diagnosed with depression, anxiety, or a behavior disorder.” As for adults now struggling in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, one expert “said most people will be back to where they were within a year or so, but others will have difficulty for a longer period.”

Related Links:

— ““I don’t feel real”: Mental stress mounting after Michael, “Jay Reeves, AP, October 21, 2018.

The Boston Globe (10/19, Finucane) reported a study published in JAMA Network Open found that people with the ApoE4 gene and who also have chronic inflammation have a higher risk of contracting Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers “used data from the Framingham Heart Study, which includes more than 3,000 human subjects.”

Related Links:

— “BU researchers examine role of inflammation in Alzheimer’s disease, “Martin Finucane, The Boston Globe, October 19, 2018.

Neurology Advisor (10/18) reports researchers found in a medical literature review that “for most patients, treatment with clozapine can produce a slight reduction in the antipsychotic-induced movement disorder tardive dyskinesia and can greatly reduce the disorder’s severity in patients with moderate to severe cases.” The findings were published online Sept. 18 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

Related Links:

— “Clozapine Monotherapy Improves Antipsychotic-Induced Tardive Dyskinesia, Neurology Advisor, October 18, 2018.

Anne Zink, MD, “the immediate past president of the Alaska chapter of the American College of Emergency Physicians,” writes in STAT (10/18) “First Opinion” about “psychiatric boarding,” the practice of emergency departments holding patients with mental health issues “because no appropriate mental health care is available.” Dr. Zink outlines different initiatives that aim to address the problem before concluding that “the better able we are to treat patients with mental and behavioral issues, communicate and collaborate effectively, and match patients with the appropriate resources outside of the emergency department, the better off our health system and our patients will be.”

Related Links:

— “Mental health patients, with nowhere else to go, are overwhelming emergency departments, “Anne Zink, STAT, October 18, 2018.

The New York Times (10/17, Bakalar) reports, “Having pre-eclampsia – dangerously high blood pressure during pregnancy – is linked to an increased risk for dementia later in life,” research indicated.

MedPage Today (10/17) reports the condition is particularly tied to “vascular dementia, later in life,” researchers concluded in an analysis involving “over one million women over a median of 21 years.” The findings were published online in the BMJ. The authors of an accompanying editorialobserved, “What the study endorses is some commonality between preeclampsia and vascular dementia: both are propagated by preexisting cardiovascular risk factors and have a pathogenesis that targets blood vessels – something not seen with the Alzheimer’s variant of dementia, for example.” HealthDay (10/17, Thompson) also covers the study.

Related Links:

— “High Blood Pressure of Pregnancy Tied to Dementia Later in Life, “Nicholas Bakalar, The New York Times, October 17, 2018.

Reuters (10/16, Carroll) reports researchers found that “people with restless legs syndrome may be more likely to think about suicide or to actually make plans to take their own lives, compared to people without the troublesome condition.” The findings were published in Sleep Medicine.

Related Links:

— “Restless legs syndrome linked with risk for suicidal thoughts, “Linda Carroll, Reuters, October 16, 2018.

Medscape (10/16, Brooks, Subscription Publication) reports researchers found that “older adults with a history of intentional self-harm are at risk of dying from unnatural causes, particularly suicide, yet they often are not referred for mental health care services.” The findings were published in Lancet Psychiatry. In an accompanying commentary, Rebecca Mitchell of Macquarie University in Australia, said the findings raise “questions regarding adherence to recommended clinical guidelines for the clinical management of older adults who self-harm and has signalled the need for improved quality of health care for this population.”

Healio (10/16) reports the researchers also found that “in the first year after self-harm, only about 12% of older adults were referred by a primary care physician to mental health services.” The researchers wrote that “self-harm among older people has received little attention compared with other age groups.”

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)

NPR (10/15, Silberner) reports on its website that the Lancet Commission on Global Mental Health released “a comprehensive report” on mental health and mental illness around the world. NPR says that while “it’s a major milestone in the fight to recognize mental health and mental illness as global issues,” the release of the report “was not a celebratory event,” because “threaded throughout the 45-page report is a lament that the world is ignoring millions of suffering people.” The report calls international financial support for mental healthcare and people with mental illnesses “pitifully small.”

Related Links:

— “Report: World Support For Mental Health Care Is ‘Pitifully Small’, “Joanne Silberner, NPR, October 15, 2018.

Healio (10/15, Demko) reports researchers found in an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “that a 1% point increase in state-level depression diagnoses was tied to a 26% increase in opioid analgesic-related deaths.” The findings were published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.

Related Links:

— “Strong link between depression rates, opioid-related deaths, “Savannah Demko, Healio, October 15, 2018.

Medscape (10/11, Davenport, Subscription Publication) reports on a study presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Congress and published in Psychoneuroendocrinology finding that “childhood trauma, particularly sexual abuse, is more common in those with anxious depression and causes permanent biological changes that may explain poorer responses to standard treatment in this patient population.” The study included 144 “patients with major depressive disorder” and found “that those with anxious depression were almost twice as likely to have suffered sexual abuse in childhood and were 1.3 times more likely to have experienced emotional neglect than those with depression that was not accompanied by anxiety.”

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)