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)

Reuters (10/11, Lehman) reports on a study published in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice finding, “Women who have asthma during their pregnancies are more likely to experience postpartum depression.” The study included “the health histories of more than 35,000 pregnant women with asthma and almost 200,000 women without asthma who delivered babies in Quebec between 1998 and 2009.”

Related Links:

— “Asthma during pregnancy tied to postpartum depression risk, “Shereen Lehman, Reuters, October 11, 2018.

Newsweek (10/10, Gander) reports that researchers “have found a link between” atrial fibrillation “and the risk of developing dementia.” The findings were published in Neurology.

Reuters (10/10, Carroll) reports that the investigators “found that atrial fibrillation raises the overall risk of developing dementia by 40 percent and the risk of vascular and mixed dementias by nearly 90 percent.” However, people with atrial fibrillation “who got anti-clotting drugs were 60 percent less likely than those who didn’t get the drugs to develop dementia.”

Related Links:

— “Irregular heart beat tied to increased risk for dementia, “Linda Carroll, Reuter, October 10, 2018.

USA Today (10/5, O’Donnell) reported, “Medical professionals and researchers have long” examined how adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) affect “lifelong mental health and addiction.” Currently, “awareness is growing of the link between childhood trauma on long-term physical health.” In fact, “the more ACEs a person suffers as a child – divorce, domestic violence, family members with addiction – the higher the risk of problems later in learning, mental and physical health, even early death.” Individuals “with ACEs are more likely to experience ‘toxic stress’ – repeated, extreme activation of their stress response.”

Related Links:

— “‘Toxic stress’ on children can harm their lifelong learning, mental and physical health, “Jayne O’Donnell, USA Today, October 5, 2018.

MD Magazine (10/8, Bahrenburg) reports, “In the treatment of schizophrenia, second generation antipsychotic medications are significantly less likely to cause tardive dyskinesia…than first generation antipsychotics,” researchers concluded in a meta-analysis, the findings of which were published online Sept. 7 in the journal World Psychiatry.

Related Links:

— “Reduced Risk of Tardive Dyskinesia with 2nd-Generation Antipsychotics Re-Established, “Caitlyn Bahrenburg, MD Magazine, October 8, 2018.