The Hill (3/11, Coleman) reports that more than “20 percent of health care workers worldwide have experienced depression and anxiety amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published Wednesday” in PLOS One. A meta-analysis of 65 studies “surveying more than 97,000 people between December 2019 and August 2020 concluded that 21.7 percent of health care workers have experienced depression and 22.1 percent have experienced anxiety during the COVID-19 crisis.” Researchers “averaged the results of nine of these studies to predict that 21.5 percent of health care workers worldwide have reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

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— “More than 20 percent of health care workers experience depression, anxiety amid pandemic: study ” Justine Coleman, The Hill, March 11, 2021

HealthDay (3/10, Mann) reports, “Sustaining just one head injury may up your chances of developing dementia decades later by 25%, and this risk increases with each subsequent head injury,” investigators concluded after analyzing “25 years of data on more than 14,000 people in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study.” The study also revealed that “a history of two or more head injuries was associated with more than two times the risk of developing dementia 25 years later.” The findings were published online in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.

Related Links:

— “Even 1 Concussion May Raise Your Odds for Dementia Later ” Denise Mann, HealthDay, March 10, 2021

HealthDay (3/10, Mozes) reports research indicates that as COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdowns keep “people from regular exercise,” rates of depression have begun to rise. Investigators arrived at this conclusion “based on multiple mental health surveys conducted among three successive groups of University of Pittsburgh students, totaling nearly 700 in all.” The findings were published online March 2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Related Links:

— “As Lockdowns Cut Into Exercise Time, Depression Rates Are Rising “Alan Mozes, HealthDay, March 10, 2021

Healio (3/10, Gramigna) reports, “Benzodiazepine or Z-drug treatment was linked to increased risk for nonfatal drug-related poisoning among patients with opioid use disorder,” researchers concluded after analyzing “prescription claims of 23,036 individuals aged 12 to 64 years with opioid use disorder who experienced drug-related poisoning and who had buprenorphine prescriptions and claims data in the IBM MarketScan databases between 2006 and 2016.” The findings of the “case-crossover analysis” were published online March 3 in the American Journal of Psychiatry, a publication of the American Psychiatric Association.

Related Links:

— “Buprenorphine treatment may reduce benzodiazepine risks for those with opioid use disorder “Joe Gramigna, Healio, March 10, 2021

MedPage Today (3/9, Walsh) reports, “The presence of depression or anxiety among patients with psoriatic arthritis [PsA] was associated with a diminished likelihood of achieving a state of minimal disease activity, regardless of the method used to diagnose depression/anxiety,” investigators concluded. The findings of the 743-patient study were published online in Arthritis Care & Research.

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— MedPage Today (requires login and subscription)