A research published ahead of print in the British Journal of Ophthalmology suggests certain types of drugs prescribed to lower blood pressure seem to increase the risk of corrective cataract surgery.
Cataracts cause blurred vision, and if left untreated can lead to blindness. They cloud over the lens at the front of the eye. In order to produce a sharp image, the lens must be transparent for light to pass through to the retina at the back of (more…)

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Hybridyne Imaging Technologies, Inc., of Toronto, Canada, have won a 2009 R&D 100 Award for developing a compact gamma camera for high-resolution imaging of prostate cancer.
The camera system, called ProxiScan, is a nuclear medical instrument that can localize cancer tissue in the prostate gland (more…)

"You hear the pitch in drug ads all the time: ‘Ask your doctor if this medication is right for you,’" reports MSNBC. However, evidence to show whether a treatment is appropriate for a given patient is often scarce. Matching therapies to patients is further complicated by vast difference in how people respond to medicines. However, a national push for so-called comparative effectiveness research (more…)

Psychopharmaceutical use has risen over recent years. This is fact, but what is not clear is the reason why. Researchers from four Madrid-based health centres have shown that family conflict is not a significant factor. However, the results published in the journal Atenci??n Primaria are striking: in Spain, 24% of women take antidepressants and more than 30% take tranquillisers.
"The use of psychopharmaceuticals (more…)

New research indicates that screening children for symptoms of depression, the most common mental health disorder in the United States, can begin a lot earlier than previously thought, as early as the second grade.
A University of Washington study that followed nearly 1,000 children from the second to the eighth grades also found five distinct patterns for the way symptoms of depression develop among adolescents.
"Some children are reporting (more…)

Whether it’s getting a cold during exam time or feeling run-down after a big meeting, we’ve all experienced feeling sick following a particularly stressful time at work or school. Is this merely coincidence, or is it possible that stress can actually make us sick? In a new report in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, psychologist Janice K. Kiecolt-Glaser from the Ohio (more…)

Say a deadly campus shooting occurs. It might seem sensible to offer everyone on campus psychological support to prevent psychological repercussions, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
However, a new review from Wales and Australia suggests the opposite: Researchers found no evidence to support offering interventions to everyone involved in a traumatic event. In fact, they found that some forms of blanket intervention might foster worse outcomes (more…)

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have shown that disclosing genetic risk information to adult children of patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) who request this information does not result in significant short-term psychological distress. The report from the REVEAL Study*, which appears in the July 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first randomized trial to disclose to participants whether or not (more…)

Young people with asthma have nearly twice the incidence of depression compared to their peers without asthma, and studies have shown that depression is associated with increased asthma symptoms and, in some cases, death.
How stress and depression play upon one another to worsen asthma is a lingering question.
A new study by researchers at the University at Buffalo has shown that depressed children with asthma (more…)

What is going on in teenagers’ brains as their drive for peer approval begins to eclipse their family affiliations? Brain scans of teens sizing each other up reveal an emotion circuit activating more in girls as they grow older, but not in boys. The study by Daniel Pine, M.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of National Institutes of Health, and colleagues, shows how emotion circuitry diverges in the male and female (more…)