HealthDay (12/6, Preidt) reported that according to a study published Dec. 5 in the journal PLoS One, “text reminders improve the chances that patients will stick with their medication regimen.” The study, which involved 300 patients who had been prescribed medications to lower cholesterol or control hypertension and who had been divided into a group receiving reminder texts and another group receiving no texts, revealed that “only nine percent of patients in the text message group stopped taking their medications, compared with 25 percent of patients who did not receive text messages.” Also covering the story were BBC News (12/6) and The Telegraph (UK) (12/5, Knapton).

Related Links:

— “Text Messages Remind People to Take Medications,” Robert Preidt, HealthDay, December 5, 2014.

HealthDay (12/6, Preidt) reported that according to a study published online in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, “young adults who skip college are more likely to abuse prescription painkillers than their degree-bound peers.” Researchers arrived at this conclusion after analyzing “data collected between 2008 and 2010 from nearly 37,000 participants, aged 18 to 22, in the annual US National Survey on Drug Use and Health.” Notably, the association “between education and painkiller abuse among young adults was much stronger among women than among men,” the study also found.

Related Links:

— “Painkiller Abuse More Likely for Those Who Skip College: Study,” Robert Preidt, HealthDay, December 5, 2014.

Medscape (12/6, Helwick) reported that according to research presented last month at the American Public Health Association’s annual meeting, “a survey of school shootings in the United States revealed that only 17% of the perpetrators had a diagnosis of mental illness, but several risk factors emerged that could have served as warning signs.” After identifying “157 school shooting incidents from 2005 to 2012, involving 403 students,” researchers found that the “most common motivating factors were an argument or fight (22%), gang-related or other crime (20%), and stalking or intimate partner violence (10%).”

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)

The Washington Post (12/6, Maese) reported that “science increasingly points to a strong link between head injuries and psychiatric and mood disorders.” For example, in one study involving 70 youngsters ranging in age from five to 14 who were tracked after having had a concussion, researchers found that “in the first six months, 36 percent…experienced a new onset of psychiatric disorders,” with 10 percent experiencing a “full depressive disorder.”

Another study published earlier this year in the Journal of Adolescent Health revealed that “repeatedly concussed teens to be three times more likely to develop depression.” That study examined health information from some 36,000 teens.

Related Links:

— “Concussions and depression: Questions renewed over whether there’s a link,” Rick Maese, Washington Post, December 6, 2014.

Reuters (12/8, Doyle) reported that teenagers who use hookah or snus, a smokeless tobacco product, are more likely to use cigarettes, according to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics. The study, which surveyed more than 2,500 youths during 2010 and 2011, found that those who had used snus and hookah at the time of the first survey were two to three times more likely to be cigarette smokers by the second survey.

Related Links:

— “Teen hookah and snus users more likely to move on to cigarettes,” Kathryn Doyle, Reuters, December 8, 2014.