Reuters (5/4, Kelland) reported that according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and scheduled for presentation this past weekend at the annual meeting of the Pediatrics Academic Societies, environmental factors may be at least as important as genetics when it comes to autism. For the study, researchers analyzed data on two million youngsters born in Sweden between the years 1982 and 2006. Of those children, 14,516 were diagnosed with autism.

HealthDay (5/4) reported that researchers also found that “children with brothers or sisters who had previously been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum had a 10-fold higher risk for being diagnosed with the disorder themselves.”

Related Links:

— “Environment as important as genes in autism, study finds,” Kate Kelland, Reuters, May 3, 2014.

Medscape (5/4, Brooks) reports that according to a study presented at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting, “Instagram, the popular picture-based social media platform with more than 80 million users, contains ‘alarming’ prosuicidal or self-harm images, despite its stated policy against such content.” Researchers arrived at that conclusion after having conducted “a search on Instagram using the search term, ‘hashtag suicide’ (#suicide), and analyzed the content of the first 60 images and quotes they found.” Investigators discovered that 27% of the images “had either a prosuicide (15%) or pro-self-harm (12%) theme, and none of them identified mental health resources or help.”

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)

HealthDay (5/2, Dotinga) reports that according to a review published online April 30 in the journal BMJ Open, “overweight teens are likely to feel stigmatized, isolated and even bullied for their size.” After reviewing “30 studies that surveyed teens in the United Kingdom (aged 12 to 18) about weight issues,” researchers concluded that “approaches that merely educate and admonish individuals about lifestyles and being overweight are not only insufficient but also potentially counterproductive.”

Related Links:

— “Overweight Teens Feel Stigmatized, Bullied: Study,” , HealthDay, May 1, 2014.

HealthDay (5/2, Preidt) reports that according to the results of a study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and presented at the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry’s annual meeting, “health, money and family problems – not depression – are the main factors that trigger thoughts of death and suicide among elderly Americans.” The study, which included “nearly 3,500 New York City residents, aged 65 to 75, found that factors other than depression were responsible for thoughts of death and suicide 75 percent of the time.”

Related Links:

— “When Older Adults Consider Suicide, Depression May Not Be Main Reason,” Robert Preidt, HealthDay, May 1, 2014.

USA Today (5/2, Painter) reports that according to a study published online May 1 in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry, “detailed, high-profile newspaper stories about individual suicides may have played a role in creating suicide clusters among young people, at least in the 1980s and 1990s.” Researchers arrived at that conclusion after having collected and then analyzed “information on 48 communities where clusters of suicides in youths ages 13 to 20 occurred between 1988 and 1996.” An editorial accompanying the study suggests that “an obvious next step is looking at whether discussions of suicide in social media might lead to copycat cases.”

Related Links:

— “Newspaper coverage linked with youth suicide clusters,” Kim Painter, USA Today, May 1, 2014.