At 17, Eleanor Longden had a promising future ahead of her; then she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. After a lifelong battle with the voices in her head, today she has a Masters in psychology and a second chance.
July 2012
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A landmark study of police officers in Buffalo, N.Y., reveals increased incidence of chronic disease, finds suicides higher among those still working.
The daily psychological stresses that police officers experience in their work put them at significantly higher risk than the general population for a host of long-term physical and mental health effects. That’s the overall finding of a major scientific study of the Buffalo Police Department called Buffalo Cardio-Metabolic Occupational Police Stress (BCOPS) conducted over five years by a University at Buffalo researcher.
“This is one of the first police population-based studies to test the association between the stress of being a police officer and psychological and health outcomes,” says John Violanti, PhD, professor of social and preventive medicine in the UB School of Public Health and Health Professions, and principal investigator on the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health.
The research, which is in press this month in a special issue of the International Journal of Emergency Mental Health, reveals connections between the daily stressors of police work and obesity, suicide, sleeplessness and cancer, as well as general health disparities between police officers and the general population.
The study was prompted by the assumption that the danger, high demands and exposure to human misery and death that police officers experience on the job contribute to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and other chronic health outcomes.
“We wanted to know, in addition to stress, what are other contributing factors that lead to cardiovascular disease in police?,” says Violanti, a former New York State trooper. [continue reading…]
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When people have similar injuries, why do some end up with chronic pain while others recover and are pain free? The first longitudinal brain imaging study to track participants with a new back injury has found the chronic pain is all in their heads –- quite literally.
A new Northwestern Medicine study shows for the first time that chronic pain develops the more two sections of the brain — related to emotional and motivational behavior — talk to each other. The more they communicate, the greater the chance a patient will develop chronic pain.
The finding provides a new direction for developing therapies to treat intractable pain, which affects 30 to 40 million adults in the United States.
Researchers were able to predict, with 85 percent accuracy at the beginning of the study, which participants would go on to develop chronic pain based on the level of interaction between the frontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens.
The study is published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
“For the first time we can explain why people who may have the exact same initial pain either go on to recover or develop chronic pain,” said A. Vania Apakarian, senior author of the paper and professor of physiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
“The injury by itself is not enough to explain the ongoing pain. It has to do with the injury combined with the state of the brain. This finding is the culmination of 10 years of our research.”
The more emotionally the brain reacts to the initial injury, the more likely the pain will persist after the injury has healed. “It may be that these sections of the brain are more excited to begin with in certain individuals, or there may be genetic and environmental influences that predispose these brain regions to interact at an excitable level,” Apkarian said.
The nucleus accumbens is an important center for teaching the rest of the brain how to evaluate and react to the outside world, Apkarian noted, and this brain region may use the pain signal to teach the rest of the brain to develop chronic pain.
“Now we hope to develop new therapies for treatment based on this finding,” Apkarian added.
Chronic pain participants in the study also lost gray matter density, which is likely linked to fewer synaptic connections or neuronal and glial shrinkage, Apkarian said. Brain synapses are essential for communication between neurons.
“Chronic pain is one of the most expensive health care conditions in the U. S. yet there still is not a scientifically validated therapy for this condition,” Apkarian said. Chronic pain costs an estimated $600 billion a year, according to a 2011 National Academy of Sciences report. Back pain is the most prevalent chronic pain condition.
ᔥUniversity of North Carolina School of Medicine
Autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may share common underlying factors, study suggests
New research led by a medical geneticist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine points to an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) among individuals whose parents or siblings have been diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
The findings were based on a case-control study using population registers in Sweden and Israel, and the degree to which these three disorders share a basis in causation “has important implications for clinicians, researchers and those affected by the disorders,” according to a report of the research published online July 2, 2012 in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
“The results were very consistent in large samples from several different countries and lead us to believe that autism and schizophrenia are more similar than we had thought,” said Patrick F. Sullivan, MD,
FRANZCP, professor in the department of genetics and director of psychiatric genomics at UNC.
Sullivan and colleagues found that the presence of schizophrenia in parents was associated with an almost three times increased risk for ASD in groups from both Stockholm and all of Sweden.
Schizophrenia in a sibling also was associated with roughly two and a half times the risk for autism in the Swedish national group and a 12 times greater risk in a sample of Israeli military conscripts. The authors speculate that the latter finding from Israel resulted from individuals with earlier onset schizophrenia, “which has a higher sibling recurrence.”
Bipolar disorder showed a similar pattern of association but of a lesser magnitude, study results indicate.
Our findings suggest that ASD, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder share etiologic risk factors,” the authors state. “We suggest that future research could usefully attempt to discern risk factors common to these disorders.”
Study co-authors with Sullivan are Cecilia Magnusson, MD,PhD, Christina M. Hultman, PhD, Niklas Langstrom, MD, PhD, Paul Lichtenstein, PhD, Marcus Bowman, BS, Christina Dalman, MD, PhD, Anna C. Svensson, PhD and Michael Lundberg, MPH, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden; Abraham Reichenberg, PhD, Kings College, London, England; Michael Davidson MD, and Mark Weiser, MD, Sheba Medical Center and Tel Aviv University, Israel; Eyal Fruchter, MD Israeli Defense Force Medical Corp, Ramat Gan, Israel.
The study was funded in part by The Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research, the Swedish Research Council and the Beatrice and Samuel A. Seaver Foundation.
