The AP (7/10, Tanner) reports that according to a study published July 9 in JAMA Psychiatry, adverse reactions to psychiatric medications result in some 90,000 emergency department “visits each year by US adults, with anti-anxiety medicines and sedatives among the most common culprits.” After analyzing “2009-2011 medical records from 63 hospitals that participate in a nationally representative government surveillance project,” researchers found that the majority of ED “visits were for troublesome side effects or accidental overdoses and almost 1 in 5 resulted in hospitalization.”

Related Links:

— “STUDY: PSYCH DRUG ER TRIPS APPROACH 90,000 A YEAR,” Lindsay Tanner, Associated Press, July 9, 2014.

Medscape (7/8, Brauser) reports that according to the results of a 712-patient study recently presented at the International Congress of the Royal College of Psychiatrists 2014, “excessive exercising, or so-called ‘exercise addiction,’ is a real problem and often occurs within the context of eating disorders.” The study also revealed that patients with an eating disorder “had significantly higher scores in weight control exercise, lack of enjoyment, exercise rigidity, and avoidance behaviors than those without an” eating disorder.

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)

The Boston Globe (7/8, Kotz) “Daily Dose” blog reports that 49 percent “of Americans experienced an earth-shattering, stressful event last year that completely altered their lives.” Approximately “half of the time, these events were related to a major health problem, either their own or a loved one’s that may have ended in death,” according to the results “a new survey [pdf] of more than 2,500 Americans released Monday by the Harvard School of Public Health, National Public Radio, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.”

The Huffington Post (7/8, Holmes) reports that other common sources of stress for people are “followed by work problems (13 percent) and life changes (9 percent),” the survey revealed. Investigators also “discovered that many who experienced large amounts of stress in the last month turned to healthy activities like spending time with loved ones, meditating and eating well in order to deal with their worries.”

Related Links:

— “Half of Americans under high stress over past year, survey says,” Deborah Kotz, The Boston Globe, July 7, 2014.

Reuters (7/8, Kelland) reports that according to a study published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, researchers in the UK have completed identification of 10 blood proteins predictive of the onset of Alzheimer’s disease in people who have mild cognitive impairment (MCI) with a little less than 90% accuracy.

Reuters notes that pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson are using different approaches to develop treatments to stop progression of the disease. However, over the past decade and a half more than 100 experimental drugs have failed in trial, which one of the authors of the study said could be attributed to conducting drug trials at too late a stage.

Related Links:

— “Study paves the way for a blood test to predict Alzheimer’s,” Kate Kelland, Reuters, July 7, 2014.

The McClatchy-Tribune News Service (7/6) reported that according to a study published recently in the journal Biological Psychiatry, researchers have “shown that chronic stress of poverty, neglect and physical abuse in early life may shrink the parts of a child’s developing brain responsible for memory, learning and processing emotion.”

The two parts of the brain involved are the hippocampus and the amygdala. The study involved 128 12-year-olds, all of whom underwent magnetic resonance imaging scans.

Related Links:

— “Researchers: Early stress from poverty hurts brain development,” McClatchy-Tribune News Service, Detroit Free Press, July 6, 2014.