Category: Mental Health

Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study finds that treatment of maternal depression with serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) can accelerate babies' ability to attune to the sounds and sights of their native language, while maternal depression untreated by SRIs may prolong the period of tuning.

"This study is among the first to show how maternal depression and its treatment can change the timing of language development in babies," says Prof. Janet Werker of UBC's Dept. of Psychology, the study's senior author. "At this point, we do not know if accelerating or delaying these milestones in development has lasting consequences on later language acquisition, or if alternate developmental pathways exist. We aim to explore these and other important questions in future studies."

The study followed three groups of mothers — one being treated for depression with SRIs, one with depression not taking antidepressants and one with no symptoms of depression. By measuring changes in heart rate and eye movement to sounds and video images of native and non-native languages, the researchers calculated the language development of babies at three intervals, including six and 10 months of age. Researchers also studied how the heart rates of unborn babies responded to languages at the age of 36 weeks in the uterus.

"The findings highlight the importance of environmental factors on infant development and put us in a better position to support not only optimal language development in children but also maternal well-being," says Werker, who adds that treatment of maternal depression is crucial. "We also hope to explore more classes of antidepressants to determine if they have similar or different impacts on early childhood development."

High resolution photos of Werker (reading to children) and co-author Tim Oberlander are available upon request.

Background

"These findings once again remind us that poor mental health during pregnancy is a major public health issue for mothers and their infants," says co-author Dr. Tim Oberlander, a professor of developmental pediatrics at UBC and CFRI. "Non-treatment is never an option. While some infants might be at risk, others may benefit from mother's treatment with an antidepressant during their pregnancy. At this stage we are just not sure why some but not all infants are affected in the same way. It is really important that pregnant women discuss all treatment options with their physicians or midwives."

Previous research by Werker has found that during the first months of life, babies rapidly attune to the language sounds they hear and the sights they see (movements in the face that accompany talking) of their native languages. After this foundational period of language recognition, babies begin focusing on acquiring their native tongues and effectively ignore other languages.

The current study suggests that this key developmental period — which typically ends between the ages of eight and nine months — can be accelerated or delayed, in some cases by several months. In another recent study, Werker has found that this development period lasts longer for babies in bilingual households than in monolingual babies, particularly for the face recognition aspects of speech.

The maternal depression and language acquisition study was co-authored by UBC post-doctoral fellow Whitney Weikum at CFRI, Tim Oberlander of CFRI, UBC's Dept. of Pediatrics and BC Children's Hospital, and Takao Hensch, a professor of neurology at Harvard University.

This program of research was funded by agencies including the Human Frontiers Research Program (HFSP), the Canadian Institutes for Advanced Research (CIFAR), the Michael Smith Foundation, and the 

Journal Reference:

1. Whitney M. Weikum, Tim F. Oberlander, Takao K. Hensch, and Janet F. Werker. Biological Embedding of Early Social Adversity: From Fruit Flies to Kindergartners Sackler Colloquium: Prenatal exposure to antidepressants and depressed maternal mood alter trajectory of infant speech perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1121263109

 The combination of shortened telomeres, a biological marker of aging associated with cancer development, and elevated depression significantly impacted bladder cancer mortality, according to data presented at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research, held in Anaheim, Calif. Oct. 16-19, 2012.

"We found that patients with bladder cancer with shorter telomeres and high levels of depression symptoms have a threefold increased risk for mortality," said Meng Chen, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

As part of an ongoing, large-scale epidemiologic study of bladder cancer, Chen and colleagues collected clinical and mental health information on 464 patients with bladder cancer. They assessed patients' depression levels with the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D).

Depression symptoms alone affected mortality: Patients with CES-D scores of 16 or greater had a median survival time of 58 months, while those with scores below 16 had a median survival time longer than 200 months. In addition, patients with CES-D scores of 16 or greater had a 1.89-fold increased risk for all-cause mortality compared with patients with CES-D scores less than 16.

Telomere length was measured from patient blood samples. Univariate analysis revealed that long telomeres were associated with improved survival, but this finding was not significant in a multivariate analysis.

When evaluating the combination of depression and telomere length, the researchers found that compared with patients without depression symptoms (i.e., CES-D scores less than 16) and long telomeres, patients with depression symptoms (i.e., CES-D scores of 16 or greater) and short telomeres demonstrated more than a threefold increased risk for mortality and significantly shorter disease-free survival (31.3 months versus 199.8 months).

Although the mechanisms behind these findings need to be furthered studied, "these results suggest the potential important role of psychological factors to improve survival in cancer patients," Chen said.

In addition, the researchers pointed to evidence that smoking cessation, weight loss and increased physical activity can slow telomere shortening and potentially improve survival.

"In terms of building a prediction model for bladder cancer mortality, current models only focus on clinical variables, such as treatment and tumor stage and grade," Chen said. "Our study suggests that psychological factors and perhaps lifestyle changes could be included in this prediction model."

 Men have borne the brunt of worsening mental health across the population of England since the start of the economic downturn in 2008, reveals research published in the online journal BMJ Open.

But unemployment and a falling household income don't seem to be the culprits, prompting the authors to suggest that it is the threat of losing their jobs that has affected men's mental health.

They base their findings on data taken from the national representative annual Health Survey for England for adults aged 25 to 64, between 1991 and 2010.

Response rates during this period varied from 85 per cent in 1991 to 64 per cent in 2008, and included just short of 107,000 people.

Respondents were asked about their employment status and educational attainment, and those scoring 4 or more on the General Health Questionnaire-12, which is used to gauge levels of anxiety and depression, were deemed to have a high likelihood of poor mental health.

The analysis showed that rates of poor mental health were highest between 1991 and 1993, when the UK was in recession, after which they fell steadily until 2004, when they started a gradual rise until 2008, at which point they rose sharply.

In 2008, when the global economic downturn began, the prevalence of mental ill health was 13.7 per cent, rising to 16.4 per cent in 2009, falling back to 15.5 per cent in 2010.

Over most of the period under study, more women than men reported poor mental health. But during periods of recession the sharpest rises in the prevalence of mental ill health occurred among men.

In the early 1990s, the prevalence of mental ill health among men rose from 12.3 per cent in 1991 to 14.5 per cent in 1992.

A similar trend occurred in the 2008 economic downturn when the prevalence among men rose from 11.3 to 16.6 per cent among men in 2009; among women this rose from 16 to 16.2 per cent.

Factoring in age, indicated that the prevalence of poor mental health among men increased by 5.1 per cent in 2009 and by 3 per cent in 2010. There were no such significant increases among women.

But the study only examined changes in mental health up to 2010, and women may have been affected more severely after this time, particularly given subsequent changes in public sector employment, say the authors.

The prevalence of mental ill health, however, was not confined to those out of work; and taking account of employment status and educational attainment made no difference to the figures.

"The finding that mental health across the general population has deteriorated following the recession's onset, and that this association does not appear to be limited to those out of employment nor those whose household income has declined, has important implications," say the authors.

They suggest that the reason for the gender differences in the impact of recession could be that men's mental health is more vulnerable to the fear of job loss.

"One potential explanation for our results would be that job insecurity during the current recession is responsible for the deterioration in mental health, with men's psychological health remaining more affected by economic fluctuations despite greater female labour market participation," they conclude.

Low depressive symptoms and a longer telomere length are compelling factors that contribute to a prolonged life for bladder cancer patients, according to researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

In an observational study, a team of MD Anderson researchers analyzed clinical and behavioral data collected from 464 bladder cancer patients, according to research presented at the 11th Annual AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Cancer Prevention Research.

"This is the first study of its kind that analyzes bladder cancer outcomes," said Meng Chen, Ph.D., an instructor in MD Anderson's Department of Epidemiology. "Psychological factors are not usually included in epidemiologic studies"

The patients observed were enrolled in an ongoing study of bladder cancer that provides extensive genetic, epidemiologic and psychological data. The collaboration of MD Anderson epidemiologists and psychologists is led by the study's principal investigator, Xifeng Wu, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chair of the epidemiology department.

Patients' information was analyzed according to four different groups. The first group involved patients with long telomeres and no depressive symptoms; the second identified patients who had long telomeres with depressive symptoms; the third had shortened telomeres and no depressive symptoms, while the fourth group had shortened telomeres and depressive symptoms.

Bladder cancer is the fourth most common cancer of men and is usually diagnosed in people over the age of 60. The American Cancer Society estimates 56,000 men and 18,000 women will have a bladder cancer diagnosis in 2012.

Research has identified shortened telomere length as an aging-associated biomarker in several diseases, including cancer. As people grow older, telomeres on the tips of chromosomes, which protect chromosomes from unraveling as cells replicate, shorten and eventually fail, leading to cell death. MD Anderson researchers analyzed blood samples to measure telomere length.

Depressive symptoms were analyzed using the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). The self-report scale — one of the most common screening tests used for finding levels of depression — revealed patients who scored at high levels of depressive symptoms have a 1.89-fold risk of dying compared to those with lower levels of depression, who will live a little over three times longer — 200 months vs. 58 months.

The study also revealed the combination of factors, longer telomeres and low levels of depressive symptoms, increased survival for bladder cancer patients by more than six-fold — 31.3 months vs 199.8 months. Those with short telomeres and high levels of depression had a three-fold risk of mortality.

A certain level of stress, which has also been associated with shortened telomere length, is a dominating factor with many cancer patients. "People are not treating the depression directly, but mainly focused on coping with cancer,"said Chen. "This leads to additional stress that increases mortality."

Enhanced stress management should be an integral part of cancer treatment, "Lifestyle behaviors including a healthy diet, regular exercise and smoking-cessation are factors for reducing stress and ultimately depression in cancer patients." " said co-author Jie Lin, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology.

Lin also said the new risk factors such as psychological risk factors identified by the team could be included in future risk prediction models. The team is optimistic that this study will encourage clinicians to incorporate behavioral factors into risk models so interventions can be developed to prolong survival for bladder cancer patients.

Contributing authors to the work include Jan Blalock, Ph.D., Paul Cinciripini, Ph.D. from the Department of Behavioral Science, and Lorenzo Cohen, Ph.D., from the Department of General Oncology.

After waking up, the concentration of the stress hormone cortisol in saliva rises considerably; this is true not only for grown-ups but for babies as well. A research team from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and from Basel has reported this finding in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.

"This gives us a new, non-invasive and uncomplicated possibility to already research the activity of the stress system during infancy," Prof. Dr. Gunther Meinlschmidt, of the Clinic of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy at the LWL University Hospital of the RUB, said.

The information not only open doors to the pursuit of as-yet unresolved research inquiries, but could also be used in the future to diagnose illnesses in the hormone-producing organs, such as the adrenal gland, of infants.

Testing stress hormones: easy with grown-ups, hard with babies

Scientists usually test the stress hormones of grown-ups by placing test subjects in an experiment under stress-inducing conditions. Since a similar practice is, for ethical reasons, unthinkable to use with babies, it is rather more difficult to find out how well-developed their stress systems are. The German-Swiss research team circumvented this problem by observing a naturally occurring "stress situation" — waking up. The cortisol-concentration in grown-ups rises after they wake up, presumably to prepare the body for the requirements of the day. At what age this cortisol-reaction develops has long been unclear.

Cortisol levels rise in babies upon waking up

Data from 64 newborns and infants between the ages of three weeks and six months were used in the study. On two days the infants' parents had their children suck on a small cotton swab at home, once right after waking up and once half an hour later. Through this saliva, the scientists determined the cortisol-concentration. The cortisol amount rose considerably after the infants awoke in 63 % of cases. Neither the hour that the child woke up nor breastfeeding after waking played any role in these findings.

The shorter the pregnancy, the less the cortisol-level rises

Instead the length of the pregnancy had an effect. The earlier the children were born, the less their cortisol-levels rose after they woke up. "The stress hormone system may be less mature in babies who were born after a shorter pregnancy, which could have negative consequences," assistant professor Marion Tegethoff, of the Faculty for Psychology at the University of Basel, said. Since cortisol can inhibit the immune system, the lack of cortisol-level rises could lead to excess immunological responses, similarly to what occurs with allergies.

Approaching new research questions through saliva tests

Stress increases the risk for mental disorders and bodily illnesses. There is now a new method available to investigate the stress systems easily in babies. Prof. Meinlschmidt, head of the Research Department of Psychobiology, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy at the LWL University Hospital in Bochum explains future research questions: "In some rodents the hormonal stress response in the first weeks of life is, for a specific timeframe, close to shut down — perhaps to protect organs that are developing during this time. It is still unknown if there is a comparable phase in humans, since it has long been impossible, because of ethical reasons, to repeatedly assess the hormonal stress reaction."

Despite differences in rituals and beliefs among the world's major religions, spirituality often enhances health regardless of a person's faith, according to University of Missouri researchers. The MU researchers believe that health care providers could take advantage of this correlation between health — particularly mental health — and spirituality by tailoring treatments and rehabilitation programs to accommodate an individual's spiritual inclinations.

"In many ways, the results of our study support the idea that spirituality functions as a personality trait," said Dan Cohen, assistant teaching professor of religious studies at MU and one of the co-authors of the study. "With increased spirituality people reduce their sense of self and feel a greater sense of oneness and connectedness with the rest of the universe. What was interesting was that frequency of participation in religious activities or the perceived degree of congregational support was not found to be significant in the relationships between personality, spirituality, religion and health."

The MU study used the results of three surveys to determine if correlations existed among participants' self-reported mental and physical health, personality factors, and spirituality in Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Catholics and Protestants. Across all five faiths, a greater degree of spirituality was related to better mental health, specifically lower levels of neuroticism and greater extraversion. Forgiveness was the only spiritual trait predictive of mental health after personality variables were considered.

"Our prior research shows that the mental health of people recovering from different medical conditions, such as cancer, stroke, spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury, appears to be related significantly to positive spiritual beliefs and especially congregational support and spiritual interventions," said Cohen. "Spiritual beliefs may be a coping device to help individuals deal emotionally with stress."

Cohen believes spirituality may help people's mental health by reducing their self-centeredness and developing their sense of belonging to a larger whole. Many different faith traditions encourage spirituality though they use different names for the process. A Christian monk wouldn't say he had attained Nirvana, nor would a Buddhist monk say he had communed with Jesus Christ, but they may well be referring to similar phenomena.

"Health workers may also benefit from learning how to minimize the negative side of a patient's spirituality, which may manifest itself in the tendency to view misfortune as a divine curse." As the authors note, spiritual interventions such as religious-based counseling, meditation, and forgiveness protocols may enhance spiritually-based beliefs, practices, and coping strategies in positive ways.

The benefits of a more spiritual personality may go beyond an individual's mental health. Cohen believes that the selflessness that comes with spirituality enhances characteristics that are important for fostering a global society based on the virtues of peace and cooperation.

The paper, "Relationships among Spirituality, Religious Practices, Personality Factors, and Health for Five Different Faiths" was published in the Journal of Religion and Health. The lead author was Brick Johnstone of the MU Department of Health Psychology. The paper's other authors were Dong Yoon of the MU School of Social Work, Laura Schopp of the MU Department of Health Psychology, Guy McCormack now at Samuel Merritt University, Marian L. Smith now of Via Cristi Hospital, and James Campbell of the MU School of Medicine.

Researchers at USC have devised a method for detecting certain neurological disorders through the study of eye movements.

In a study published August 30 in the Journal of Neurology, researchers claim that because Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) and Parkinson's Disease each involve ocular control and attention dysfunctions, they can be easily identified through an evaluation of how patients move their eyes while they watch television.

"Natural attention and eye movement behavior — like a drop of saliva — contains a biometric signature of an individual and her/his state of brain function or dysfunction," the article states. "Such individual signatures, and especially potential biomarkers of particular neurological disorders which they may contain, however, have not yet been successfully decoded."

Typical methods of detection — clinical evaluation, structured behavioral tasks and neuroimaging — are costly, labor-intensive and limited by a patient's ability to understand and comply with instructions.

To solve this problem, doctoral student Po-He Tseng and Professor Laurent Itti of the Department of Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, along with collaborators at Queen's University in Canada, have devised a new screening method.

Participants in the study were simply instructed to "watch and enjoy" television clips for 20 minutes while their eye movements were recorded. Eye-tracking data was then combined with normative eye-tracking data and a computational model of visual attention to extract 224 quantitative features, allowing the team to use new machine-learning techniques to identify critical features that differentiated patients from control subjects.

With eye movement data from 108 subjects, the team was able to identify older adults with Parkinson's Disease with 89.6 percent accuracy, and children with either ADHD or FASD with 77.3 percent accuracy.

Providing new insights into which aspects of attention and gaze control are affected by specific disorders, the team's method provides considerable promise as an easily deployed, low-cost, high-throughput screening tool, especially for young children and elderly populations who may be less compliant to traditional tests.

"For the first time, we can actually decode a person's neurological state from their everyday behavior, without having to subject them to difficult or time-consuming tests," Itti said.

Funding for the research came from the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, the Human Frontier Science Program and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Is attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) due to a delay in brain development or the result of complete deviation from typical development? In the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, Dr. Philip Shaw and colleagues present evidence for delay based on a study by the National Institutes of Health.

New research suggests that choline supplementation in pregnant women lowers cortisol in the baby by changing epigenetic expression of genes involved in cortisol production.