HealthDay (2/11, Norton) reports that according to a RAND Corp. study published online Feb. 10 in the journal Pediatrics, “the cost of services for children with autism averages more than $17,000 per child each year – with school systems footing much of the bill.” Investigators “found that compared to kids without autism, those with the disorder had higher costs for doctor visits and prescriptions – an extra $3,000 a year, on average.” The study also revealed that “‘non-health care’ services averaged $14,000 per child, and special education at school accounted for more than 60 percent of those costs.” In arriving at these conclusions, the RAND researchers examined data derived from two US-wide surveys involving 19,000 families with children without autism and 246 families with youngsters with autism.

Related Links:

— “Autism Costs Average $17,000 Yearly for Each Child, Study Finds, ” Amy Norton, HealthDay, February 10, 2014.

In a column for the New York Times (2/9, Subscription Publication), Nicholas Kristof notes that as humane, cost-effective ways of treating mental illnesses have been cut back, the US is increasingly resorting to detaining individuals with mental illnesses in jails and prisons. Kristof notes that while people are not “officially incarcerated” for psychiatric ailments, many “are brought in for offenses that flow from mental illness,” and argues that the US, as a society has “in effect, returned to the 1800s.”

Related Links:

— “Inside a Mental Hospital Called Jail, ” Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, February 8, 2014.

MedPage Today (2/8, Hartman) reported that late last year, “to mark the one-year anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy, Vice President Joe Biden announced the executive branch would invest $100 million in the nation’s mental health system,” with the funds being “used to expand mental health services at community health centers and in rural America.” The Vice President’s “announcement was welcome news since the American Psychiatric Association estimates that in 2015 the nation will face a shortage of 22,000 child psychiatrists and 2,900 geriatric psychiatrists, and many of them are aging out of the profession according to the National Institute of Mental Health website (2/10), which notes that 55% of all psychiatrists are older than 55.”

Related Links:

— “Mental Health: Parity Yes, Providers No
, ” Ben Hartman, MD, MedPage Today, February 7, 2014.

MedPage Today (2/7, Neale) reports that research offers “support for depression as a treatable cause of coronary heart disease.” In one study, “which relied on repeat measures of depressive symptoms over 2 decades of follow-up,” researchers “demonstrated dose-response relationships between depression and both coronary death and nonfatal myocardial infarction, but not stroke.” The study was published online in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. In a separate study, which was “a post hoc analysis of a randomized trial,” researchers found “that an intervention to treat depression in older adults reduced the risk of hard cardiovascular events, but only in those who did not have pre-existing cardiovascular disease at baseline.” The study was published in Psychosomatic Medicine.

Related Links:

— “Treat Depression to Prevent CVD?, ” Todd Neale, MedPage Today, February 7, 2014.

The Daily Caller (2/7, Callahan) reports that according to the results of the four-year Marine Resiliency Study published in the February issue of JAMA Psychiatry, “soldiers who experience brain trauma in combat are more likely to experience symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).” The study of 1,648 Marines revealed that “moderate to severe brain trauma raised PTSD symptom scores by 71 percent.” The study authors concluded, “Probability of PTSD was highest for participants with severe pre-deployment symptoms, high combat intensity, and deployment-related” traumatic brain injuries.

Related Links:

— “What causes PTSD? Researchers come closer to finding out, “Katie Callahan, The Daily Caller, February 7, 2014.