MedPage Today (12/10, George) reports, “Having an older sibling with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder” (AD/HD) “raised the risk of being diagnosed with either condition,” research indicated. In the study that “included 730 younger siblings of children with” AD/HD, “158 younger siblings of children with autism, and 14,287 younger siblings of children with no known diagnosis of either disorder,” investigators found that youngsters “whose older brother or sister had autism were 30 times more likely to receive an autism diagnosis and 3.7 times more likely to be diagnosed with” AD/HD “than children whose older sibling did not have either disorder.” The findings were published online Dec. 10 in JAMA Pediatrics.

According to Psychiatric News (12/10), the authors of an accompanying editorial wrote, “[This study] used a simple and transparent design to report novel data on later-born within- and cross-condition recurrence of ASD and” AD/HD “in a way that is useful in the clinic but also motivates research to understand how and why these conditions commonly co-occur both within individuals and within families.” HealthDay(12/10, Thompson) also covers the study.

Related Links:

— “Older Sibling with Autism or ADHD Ups Risk for Younger Kids, “Judy George, MedPage Today, December 10, 2018.

The sixth article in a series on battling opioid addition for the Boston Globe (12/9, Freyer) addresses recent emergency room improvements in helping addicted patients. For decades, according to the piece, “programs for people with addiction have developed largely outside the medical system.” But because of pressure from physicians like Dr. Alister Martin at the Massachusetts General Hospital, a new state law requires emergency departments to begin addiction treatment on site, “a mandate that calls on hospitals to meet the challenge of a crisis claiming four or five lives each day in Massachusetts.”

Related Links:

— “Emergency rooms once offered little for drug users. That’s starting to change, “Felice J. Freyer, The Boston Globe, December 09, 2018.

According to Reuters (12/7, Rapaport), a 60-study review suggests that “breast cancer survivors may be more likely to experience anxiety, depression, sleep troubles and other mental health issues than women who have not been diagnosed with the disease.” The findings were published online Nov. 7 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Related Links:

— “Breast cancer survivors may have lingering mental health effects, “Lisa Rapaport, Reuters, December 07, 2018.

Vox (12/6, Lopez) reports in an article about video game addiction that “this year, the World Health Organization (WHO) for the first time recognized ‘gaming disorder’ in the 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11).” By doing so, “the WHO joined the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which had previously added ‘internet gaming disorder’ as a phenomenon worthy of more research in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)

Related Links:

— “Video game addiction is real, rare, and poorly understood, ” German Lopez, Vox, December 06, 2018.

Healio (12/6, Demko) reports, “After conducting a meta-analysis of data from functional MRI studies, researchers found that patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder [OCD] showed hyperactivation in certain regions of the brain during error-processing and hypoactivation in other regions during inhibitory control when compared with healthy” individuals, researchers concluded after conducting “a large-scale meta-analysis of the existing literature” using “unthresholded t-maps from studies comparing patients with OCD with healthy controls during error-processing and inhibitory control.” In other words, “in OCD, the brain responds too much to errors, and too little to stop signals,” the study found. The findings were published online in Biological Psychiatry.

Related Links:

— “Error processing, inhibitory control both altered in OCD, “Savannah Demko, Healio, December 06, 2018.