(Press-News.org) August 21, 2014 (Toronto) – A mindfulness-based therapy for depression has the added benefit of reducing health-care visits among patients who often see their family doctors, according to a new study by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES).
The research showed that frequent health service users who received mindfulness-based cognitive therapy showed a significant reduction in non-mental health care visits over a one-year period, compared with those who received other types of group therapy.
The study was published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research.
The mindfulness therapy group had one fewer non-mental health visit per year, for every two individuals treated with this therapy – which translates into a reduction of nearly 2,500 visits to primary care physicians, emergency departments or non-psychiatric specialists in Ontario over eight years.
"We speculate that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy has elements that could help people who are high health-care utilizers manage their distress without needing to go to a doctor," says Dr. Paul Kurdyak, lead author and Director of Health Systems Research at CAMH and Lead of the Mental Health and Addictions Research Program at ICES.
Senior author Dr. Zindel Segal, who developed mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, says, "the goal of this therapy is to treat depression or anxiety so this unintended effect is striking, particularly as there is limited evidence on interventions that effectively reduce high health care use." Dr. Segal is Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, and a Senior Scientist with CAMH's Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute.
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is a structured form of psychotherapy that combines elements of cognitive-behaviour therapy with mindfulness meditation. It is delivered in a group setting for eight weekly sessions. The therapy was originally developed to prevent relapse of symptoms among people with recurring depression, as an alternative to ongoing medication treatment. It has been proven effective in multiple studies, and has been applied to other conditions such as anxiety and chronic pain.
To conduct their study, researchers identified 10,633 individuals who received group-based mindfulness-based cognitive therapy between 2003 and 2010, based on billing records from the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP). The therapy was delivered by 24 specially trained psychiatrists or family doctors. Among these patients, 4,851 (46 per cent) were considered high health service users, having more than five visits to a primary care physician, emergency department or other specialist in a year.
For comparison, researchers identified 29,795 who received group therapy, such as cognitive-behaviour or interpersonal psychotherapy, without a mindfulness component, and who were matched for age, sex and neighbourhood income; 13,274 of these controls were high service users. For both groups, non-mental health care visits were examined one year before the therapy, and one year after it ended.
"Primary care physicians play a large role in managing patients with distress, and they often report feeling overwhelmed and unable to effectively deal with cases of medically unexplained symptoms," says Dr. Kurdyak. "This study shows the potential of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy to help both patients and their doctors."
INFORMATION:
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) is Canada's largest mental health and addiction teaching hospital, as well as one of the world's leading research centres in its field. CAMH combines clinical care, research, education, policy development and health promotion to help transform the lives of people affected by mental health and addiction issues. CAMH is fully affiliated with the University of Toronto, and is a Pan American Health Organization/World Health Organization Collaborating Centre.
For more information, please visit http://www.camh.ca.
Media Contact:
Kate Richards
Media Relations
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH)
(416) 535-8501 ext. 36015
media@camh.ca
Mindfulness-based depression therapy reduces health care visits
2014-08-21
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
800 meters beneath Antarctic ice sheet, subglacial lake holds viable microbial ecosystems
2014-08-21
BATON ROUGE – In a finding that has implications for life in other extreme environments, both on Earth and planets elsewhere in the solar system, LSU Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Brent Christner and fellow researchers funded by the National Science Foundation, or NSF, this week published a paper confirming that the waters and sediments of a lake that lies 800 meters (2600 feet) beneath the surface of the West Antarctic ice sheet support "viable microbial ecosystems."
Given that more than 400 subglacial lakes and numerous rivers and streams are thought to ...
Arctic sea ice influenced force of the Gulf Stream
2014-08-21
For AWI geologist Juliane Müller the Fram Strait is a key region in the global oceanic circulation. "On the east side of this passage between Greenland and Svalbard warm Atlantic water flows to the north into the Arctic Ocean while on the west side cold Arctic water masses and sea ice push their way out of the Arctic into the North Atlantic. A considerable portion of the Atlantic water cools here on its way to the north and sinks to deeper layers. The circulation of the water caused in this manner drives the global band of oceanic currents like a giant pump and influences, ...
Water window imaging opportunity
2014-08-21
Ever heard of the water window? It consists of radiations in the 3.3 to 4.4 nanometre range, which are not absorbed by the water in biological tissues. New theoretical findings show that it is possible to develop coherent radiations within the water window. These could be the basis of an optimal technique to obtain a high-contrast image of the biological samples or to be used in high-precision spectroscopy. Now, a new theoretical study identifies the physical mechanism needed to efficiently generate the harmonic radiations—which are multiples of an incoming laser’s frequency—at ...
Study shows steep decline in tooth loss, increase in socioeconomic disparities
2014-08-21
Alexandria, Va., USA – The International and American Associations for Dental Research (IADR/AADR) have published a paper titled "Projections of U.S. Edentulism Prevalence Following Five Decades of Decline." This study, by lead researcher Gary Slade, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, follows edentulism (tooth loss) over the last hundred years and highlights the numbers of people losing teeth and requiring dentures. It is published in the OnlineFirst portion of the IADR/AADR Journal of Dental Research (JDR).
The researchers of this study investigated population ...
Tropical Storm Karina looks like a giant 'number 9' from space
2014-08-21
Despite being the eleventh tropical cyclone of the Eastern Pacific Ocean Hurricane Season, Karina looked like a giant number nine from NASA's Aqua satellite.
Tropical Storm Karina was weakening on August 20 when NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard Terra snapped a visible image of Tropical Storm Karina on August 20 at 19:40 UTC (3:40 p.m. EDT). The MODIS image showed that a thick band of strong thunderstorms spiraled into Karina's center from the southeast. The band of thunderstorms wrapped ...
Insulin offers new hope for the treatment of acute pancreatitis
2014-08-21
Acute pancreatitis involves the pancreas digesting itself resulting in severe abdominal pain, vomiting and systemic inflammation. Every year in the UK around 20,000 patients are diagnosed with the disease resulting in 1000 deaths. There is no immediate cure and treatment is restricted to intravenous fluid and nutritional support.
Dr Jason Bruce, from the Faculty of Life Sciences, who led the research, said "The major causes of pancreatitis include bile acid reflux from gall stones and excessive alcohol intake combined with a high fat diet. In fact, the incidence of acute ...
Toothpaste fluorine formed in stars
2014-08-21
The fluorine that is found in products such as toothpaste was likely formed billions of years ago in now dead stars of the same type as our sun. This has been shown by astronomers at Lund University in Sweden, together with colleagues from Ireland and the USA.
Fluorine can be found in everyday products such as toothpaste and fluorine chewing gum. However, the origins of the chemical element have been somewhat of a mystery. There have been three main theories about where it was created. The findings now presented support the theory that fluorine is formed in stars similar ...
Researchers found an important clue to potential treatments for absence seizures
2014-08-21
Absence seizures are believed to be elicited by T-type calcium channels in the thalamic reticular nucleus of the brain that regulate influxes of calcium. These channels enable thalamic reticular nucleus neurons to generate burst firing, leading the neurons to enter a hyper-excited state.
In order to identify the relationship between burst firing and absence seizures, the researchers conducted an experiment to induce absence seizures in mice using gene targeting techniques to delete the T-type calcium channel CaV3.3. The results showed that mice that received a complete ...
Amplitude of sensory nerve action potential in early stage diabetic peripheral neuropathy
2014-08-21
Early diagnosis of diabetic peripheral neuropathy is important for the successful treatment of diabetes mellitus. Research group at the Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University, China, led by Dr. Jianlin Wang sought to establish a sensitive index for nerve conduction studies in the early diagnosis of peripheral neuropathy in 500 patients with diabetes mellitus. Nerve conduction studies revealed that distal motor latency was longer, sensory nerve conduction velocity was slower, and sensory nerve action potential and amplitude of compound muscle action potential ...
Smartphone-loss anxiety disorder
2014-08-21
The smart phone has changed our behavior, sometimes for the better as we are now able to connect and engage with many more people than ever before, sometimes for the worse in that we may have become over-reliant on the connectivity with the outside world that these devices afford us. Either way, there is no going back for the majority of users who can almost instantaneously connect with hundreds if not thousands of people through the various social media and other applications available on such devices and not least through the humble phone call.
However, our dependence ...