Heart disease, cancer shorten lifespans in schizophrenia
Undiagnosed heart disease and cancer steal 12 to 15 years from the lives of people with schizophrenia, reports a studyContinue Reading
Tag: mental health
Brain scanners turn to mice
Mice carrying a truncated form of DISC1, a gene related to psychiatric illness, also show defects in the dopamine systemContinue Reading
Stress reworks dopamine systems
Stressful events contribute to the development of psychiatric illnesses, but what are the transducers of this connection? Two studies publishedContinue Reading
DSM-5 field tests reliably detect schizophrenia
Clinicians trying out the new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-5, largely come toContinue Reading
Family roots for mental illness
Despite clinical boundaries between autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, a new study in Archives of General Psychiatry suggests they haveContinue Reading
DNA damage
Disorder-specific patterns of DNA damage in neurons mark the brain in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, according to a recent studyContinue Reading
Spontaneous mutations linked to bipolar disorder
Bipolar disorder has joined the ranks of brain disorders associated with mutations called copy number variations (CNVs) — specifically spontaneously-occurringContinue Reading
The urban brain
The brains of city dwellers are more sensitive to social stress than those of country folk, according to a studyContinue Reading
WCPG 2011 — The coming calamity in research funding
Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, delivered the expected news of a prolonged period of researchContinue Reading
The shifting diagnostic sands of psychosis
A new study finds that the diagnosis initially given to 50% of study participants who had been admitted to theContinue Reading
Hyperactive clues to depression
A recent report in Nature links hyperactive synapses in the lateral habenula to learned helplessness in rats — a modelContinue Reading
Odd coupling in depression
A physical interaction between two types of dopamine receptor appears enhanced in human depression, and interfering with this coupling hasContinue Reading
Michele Solis 