Tag Archives: psychiatry

Plant extract fights brain tumor

Scientists around G�nter Stalla, endocrinologist at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, now discovered in cell cultures, animal models and human tumour tissue that a harmless plant extract can be applied to treat Cushing Disease. “Silibinin is the major active constituent of milk thistle seeds. It has an outstanding safety profile in humans and is already used for the treatment of liver disease and poisoning,” explains Marcelo Paez-Pereda, leading scientist of the current study published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine. After silibinin treatment, tumour cells resumed normal ACTH production, tumour growth slowed down and symptoms of Cushing Disease disappeared in mice…

Three-quarters of depressed cancer patients do not receive treatment for depression; new approach could transform care

An analysis of data from more than 21,000 patients attending cancer clinics in Scotland, UK, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, found that major depression is substantially more common in cancer patients than in the general population. Major depression was most common in patients with lung cancer (13%) and lowest in those with genitourinary cancer (6%). Moreover, nearly three quarters (73%) of depressed cancer patients were not receiving treatment. To address the problem of inadequate treatment the SMaRT Oncology-2 randomised trial, published in The Lancet, evaluated the effectiveness of a new treatment program called ‘Depression Care for People with Cancer’ (DCPC)…

Lacking trust in one’s doctor affects health of emotionally vulnerable cancer patients

Patients who feel anxious and uneasy with their doctor may be impacted the most. “Anxiously attached patients may experience and report more physical and emotional problems when the relationship with their physician is perceived as less trusting,” said Chris Hinnen, Ph.D., lead author and clinical psychologist at Slotervaart Hospital in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The researchers acknowledge that the issue of trust between patients and their doctors can be complicated, but observe that it’s important to understand fears of rejection and abandonment that often exist in anxiously attached patients. Hinnen and his colleagues analyzed questionnaire responses from 119 participants with breast, cervical, intestinal or prostate cancers at 3, 9 and 15 months after their diagnosis. …

Overexpressed protein to be culprit in certain thyroid cancers

The scientists found that over-activation of a certain protein in hormone-secreting cells helps fuel medullary thyroid cancer cells in mice as well as in human cells, making the protein a potentially good target for therapies to inhibit the growth of these cancer cells. The discovery by the multidisciplinary team at UT Southwestern has implications for neuroendocrine cancers that arise in organs farther removed from the brain, including the lung and the pancreas. Although rare, medullary thyroid cancer is often fatal. …

Treating depression: One size does not fit all

Nearly 15 million U.S. adults suffer from clinical depression. Treating them is currently a process of trial and error. “It's always been a combination of physician preference, patient preference and… who you actually choose to see for your depression,” Dr. Helen Mayberg, a neurologist at Emory University School of Medicine, said. “If you choose to go see a psychologist, psychologists do therapy. If you go to your family doctor… the likelihood is that you'll be prescribed a medication.” With fewer than 40 percent of patients achieving success with their initial treatment for depression, the majority have to wait to see if additional therapies are effective. “It's a serious illness,” Mayberg said. “There are consequences to going another six weeks, another eight weeks, another 12 weeks on a treatment that is unlikely to work.” Now, Mayberg and a team of researchers may have discovered a way to reduce the guesswork involved with treating clinical depression. Their study, published online in JAMA Psychiatry, suggests the solution is locked in a portion of the brain called the anterior insula. PET scans revealed that patients who benefitted from escitalopram (an antidepressant also known by the brand name Lexapro) had different activity levels in the anterior insula than patients who responded well to “talk therapy.” “The patients who did the best on escitalopram have high insula activity (compared to other parts of the brain),” Callie McGrath, an Emory graduate student and lead author of the study, said. “And the patients who do the best on cognitive behavioral therapy have low insula activity.” The researchers believe they've found the first reliable indicator to guide doctors in their selection of initial treatments for clinical depression. This has the potential to spare many patients from the prolonged suffering and uncertainty associated with current trial and error methods. “It's a very discouraging process,” said Edi Guyton, who leads local support programs with the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). “It's long. You begin to feel hopeless.” Guyton said she struggled with treatment-resistant depression for most of her life until she was able to bring it under control through deep brain stimulation (DBS), an experimental therapy developed by Dr. Mayberg. Guyton said she hopes Mayberg's separate study on the relationship between brain activity and treatment outcomes will lead to more research that takes the hit and miss factor out of helping people with depression. “That would be wonderful, just knowing what medicine,” Guyton said. “If you were pretty sure, even 80 percent sure, that this is gonna work for me, I think it would make all the difference in the world.”source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/06/13/depression-treatments-brain-scans-may-suggest-best-course/