PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Mood instability common to mental health disorders and associated with poor outcomes

2015-05-22
(Press-News.org) A study by researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London has shown that mood instability occurs in a wide range of mental disorders and is not exclusive to affective conditions such as depression, bipolar disorder and anxiety disorder.

The research, published today in BMJ Open, also found that mood instability was associated with poorer clinical outcomes.

Taken together, these findings suggest that clinicians should screen for mood instability across all common mental health disorders. Targeted interventions for mood instability may also be useful in patients who do not have a formal affective disorder.

This study is the first to use an automated information extraction method to acquire data on mood instability from electronic health records. The sample included almost 28,000 adults who presented to the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust (SLaM) between April 2006 and March 2013 with a psychotic, affective or personality disorder.

The presence of mood instability within one month of presentation was identified using natural language processing (NLP). Outcome measures included the number of days spent in hospital, frequency of hospital admission, compulsory hospital admission and prescription of antipsychotics or non-antipsychotic mood stabilisers over a five year follow-up period.

Mood instability was documented in 12 per cent of people presenting to mental healthcare services. It was most frequently documented in people with bipolar disorder (23 per cent), but was also common in people with personality disorder (18 per cent) and schizophrenia (16 per cent). Mood instability was also associated with a greater number of days spent in hospital, higher frequency of hospitalisation, greater likelihood of compulsory admission and an increased likelihood of prescription of antipsychotics or non-antipsychotic mood stabilisers.

Rashmi Patel, Department of Psychosis Studies at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King's College London, said: 'Mood instability can affect people with a wide range of mental disorders but the symptoms are not always recognised. We have developed an innovative text mining tool to identify the presence of mood instability in almost 28,000 people receiving mental healthcare in South London. We found that mood instability affects people with a wide range of common mental health disorders and is associated with worse clinical outcomes. Our findings highlight the importance of screening for mood instability and the need to develop better strategies to treat these symptoms.'

INFORMATION:



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Smoking and drug abuse could more than triple annual ER visits

2015-05-21
BUFFALO, N.Y. - Smokers are four times more likely than non-smokers to become frequent visitors of emergency rooms. That is one of the findings uncovered by a preliminary study led by Jessica Castner, a University at Buffalo emergency room utilization researcher. The research - which sought to shed light on whether patients are replacing visits to their primary care physicians with trips to hospital ERs- also found that Americans with chronic diseases use both services equally and that, overall, medical care visits have soared in recent years. "There are a few super-users ...

Beyond average

Beyond average
2015-05-21
Imagine someone hands you a smoothie and asks you to identify everything that went into it. You might be able to discern a hint of strawberry or the tang of yogurt. But overall it tastes like a blend of indiscernible ingredients. Now imagine that the smoothie is made of 20,000 ground-up cells from, say, the brain. You could run tests to determine what molecules are in the sample, which is what scientists do now. That would certainly give you useful information, but it wouldn't tell you which cells those molecules originally came from. It would provide only an average ...

EBV co-infection may boost malaria mortality in childhood

2015-05-21
Many people who live in sub-Saharan Africa develop a natural immunity to malaria, through repeated exposure to Plasmodium parasites. Even so, the disease kills close to half a million children per year, according to the World Health Organization. What factors can interfere with the development of immunity? Infectious disease researchers at Emory are calling attention to a trouble-maker whose effects may be underappreciated: Epstein-Barr virus (EBV). Their experiments with mice show that co-infection with a virus closely related to EBV can make a survivable malaria parasite ...

Using healthy skin to identify cancer's origins

2015-05-21
Normal skin contains an unexpectedly high number of cancer-associated mutations, according to a study published in Science. The findings illuminate the first steps cells take towards becoming a cancer and demonstrate the value of analysing normal tissue to learn more about the origins of the disease. The study revealed that each cell in normal facial skin carries many thousands of mutations, mainly caused by exposure to sunlight. In fact, around 25 per cent of skin cells in samples from people without cancer were found to carry at least one cancer-associated mutation. ...

Savannahs slow climate change

2015-05-21
Tropical rainforests have long been considered the Earth's lungs, sequestering large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and thereby slowing down the increasing greenhouse effect and associated human-made climate change. Scientists in a global research project now show that the vast extensions of semi-arid landscapes occupying the transition zone between rainforest and desert dominate the ongoing increase in carbon sequestration by ecosystems globally, as well as large fluctuations between wet and dry years. This is a major rearrangement of planetary functions. ...

UC Davis study finds significant cost savings in pediatric telemedicine consults

2015-05-21
(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) -- Researchers at UC Davis have conducted a comprehensive study to determine whether pediatric telemedicine consultations with rural emergency departments save money compared to telephone consults. The answer is a resounding yes. While telemedicine systems are expensive to install and maintain, they more than pay their way, saving an average $4,662 per use. The study was published in the journal Medical Decision Making. "Our previous work showed that telemedicine was good for kids, families and providers, but we didn't really address the cost issue," ...

Lawrence Livermore researchers use seismic signals to track above-ground explosions

2015-05-21
Lawrence Livermore researchers have determined that a tunnel bomb explosion by Syrian rebels was less than 60 tons as claimed by sources. Using seismic stations in Turkey, Livermore scientists Michael Pasyanos and Sean Ford created a method to determine source characteristics of near earth surface explosions. They found the above-ground tunnel bomb blast under the Wadi al-Deif Army Base near Aleppo last spring was likely not as large as originally estimated and was closer to 40 tons. Seismology has long been used to determine the source characteristics of underground ...

Douglas study on neurogenesis in the olfactory bulb

2015-05-21
This news release is available in French. Montreal, May 21, 2015 - A new study published by the team of Naguib Mechawar, Ph.D., a researcher at the Douglas Institute (CIUSSS de l'Ouest-de-l'île-de-Montréal) and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University, suggests that the integration of new neurons in the adult brain is a phenomenon more generally compromised in the brains of depressed patients. This new work confirms that neurogenesis in the human olfactory bulb is a marginal phenomenon in adults. These findings shed light ...

EARTH: Flames fan lasting fallout from Chernobyl

2015-05-21
Alexandria, VA - In the years following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, forest fires billowed plumes of contaminated smoke, carrying radioactive particles throughout Europe on the wind. Now, researchers fear that a shift to a hotter, drier climate in Eastern Europe could increase the frequency of these fires. Researchers from the University of South Carolina in Columbia used satellite imagery of fires in the 2000s and field measurements of radioisotope levels to model changes in the distribution of radiation over the region. The researchers found that fires likely ...

New model predicts fish population response to dams, other ecological factors

2015-05-21
Researchers have developed a model to assess how dams affect the viability of sea-run fish species that need to pass dams as they use both fresh and marine waters during their lifetimes. NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) and Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office (GARFO) have partnered on this project to test how varying passage efficiency at dams related to survival rates for these species. Using a model of endangered Atlantic salmon in Maine's Penobscot River as a case study, NOAA researchers found that abundance, distribution and number of fish ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Modesty and boastfulness – perception depends on usual performance

Do sweeteners increase your appetite? New evidence from randomised controlled trial says no 

Women with obesity do not need to gain weight during pregnancy, new study suggests

Individuals with multiple sclerosis face substantially greater risk of hospitalisation and death from COVID-19, despite high rates of vaccination

Study shows obesity in childhood associated with a more than doubling of risk of developing multiple sclerosis in early adulthood

Rice Emerging Scholars Program receives $2.5M NSF grant to boost STEM education

Virtual rehabilitation provides benefits for stroke recovery

Generative AI develops potential new drugs for antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Biofuels could help island nations survive a global catastrophe, study suggests

NJIT research team discovering how fluids behave in nanopores with NSF grant

New study shows association of historical housing discrimination and shortfalls in colon cancer treatment

Social media use may help to empower plastic surgery patients

Q&A: How to train AI when you don't have enough data

Wayne State University researchers uncover potential treatment targets for Zika virus-related eye abnormalities

Discovering Van Gogh in the wild: scientists unveil a new gecko species

Small birds spice up the already diverse diet of spotted hyenas in Namibia

Imaging detects transient “hypoxic pockets” in the mouse brain

Dissolved organic matter could be used to track and improve the health of freshwaters

Indoor air quality standards in public buildings would boost health and economy, say international experts

Positive associations between premenstrual disorders and perinatal depression

New imaging method illuminates oxygen's journey in the brain

Researchers discover key gene for toxic alkaloid in barley

New approach to monitoring freshwater quality can identify sources of pollution, and predict their effects

Bidirectional link between premenstrual disorders and perinatal depression

Cell division quality control ‘stopwatch’ uncovered

Vaccine protects cattle from bovine tuberculosis, may eliminate disease

Andrew Siemion to receive the SETI Institute’s 2024 Drake Award

New study shows how the Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus enters our cells

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy proves effective for locally advanced penile squamous cell carcinoma

Study flips treatment paradigm in bilateral Wilms tumor, shows resistance to chemotherapy may point toward favorable outcomes

[Press-News.org] Mood instability common to mental health disorders and associated with poor outcomes