Schizophrenia emerges from an altered pattern of brain development, and researchers continue to search for the genes that cause the brain to develop along a path that ultimately leads to schizophrenia. In a high priority article to be published in Biological Psychiatry on March 1st, researchers report their findings on a new genetic link to schizophrenia.A prior genetic mapping study indicated that a particular gene, multiple epidermal growth factor-like domains 10 or MEGF10, may be associated with schizophrenia. In this new paper, Chen and colleagues directly studied this particular MEGF10 gene in both schizophrenia patients and healthy control subjects. They found that a variant of the MEGF10 gene is associated with the heritable risk for schizophrenia in family-based and case-control genetic studies. Further, the MEGF10 gene appears to be expressed to a greater extent in post-mortem brain tissue from individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia compared to tissue from a group of unaffected individuals. [continue reading…]
February 2008
Children who under-achieve at school may just have poor working memory rather than low intelligence according to researchers who have produced the world’s first tool to assess memory capacity in the classroom.
The researchers from Durham University, who surveyed over three thousand children, found that ten per cent of school children across all age ranges suffer from poor working memory seriously affecting their learning. Nationally, this equates to almost half a million children in primary education alone being affected.
However, the researchers identified that poor working memory is rarely identified by teachers, who often describe children with this problem as inattentive or as having lower levels of intelligence.
The new tool, a combination of a checklist and computer programme informed by several years of concentrated research into poor working memory in children, will for the first time enable teachers to identify and assess children’s memory capacity in the classroom from as early as four years old.
The researchers believe this early assessment of children will enable teachers to adopt new approaches to teaching, thus helping to address the problem of under-achievement in schools. [continue reading…]
 Teens with difficult-to-treat depression who do not respond to a first antidepressant medication are more likely to get well if they switch to another antidepressant medication and add psychotherapy rather than just switching to another antidepressant, according to a large, multi-site trial funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The results of the Treatment of SSRI-resistant Depression in Adolescents (TORDIA) trial were published February 27, 2008, in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
“The findings should be encouraging for families with a teen who has been struggling with depression for some time,” said lead researcher David Brent, M.D., of the University of Pittsburgh. “Even if a first attempt at treatment is unsuccessful, persistence will pay off. Being open to trying new evidence-based medications or treatment combinations is likely to result in improvement.”
Adolescents with treatment-resistant depression have unique needs, for which standard treatments do not always work. [continue reading…]
