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New meta-analysis tells it like it is: television viewing damages our health

A new meta-analysis in the Journal of the American Medical Association tells it like it is: television viewing damages our health.  The paper's title is "Television viewing and risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and all-cause mortality" and its abstract reads:

Exercise 1: checking it's safe to start

I've talked a lot on this blog about the tremendously worthwhile gains we can make for our physical health by exercising regularly.  See for example the posts "Does healthy lifestyle really make a difference?" and "Common sense isn't common".  Now the recent national depression guidelines "Updated NICE guidelines on treating depression" and "SIGN guidance on non-pharmaceutical management of depression" underline the importance of exercise for psychological health too.

Handouts & questionnaires for outcome tracking: depression, mania, side-effects, anxiety, worry, alcohol, sleep, gambling & more

Well, well, well ... what a lot of amazing information there is out there on the internet.  I was trawling to try to find the copyright position of the Panic Disorder Severity Scale (more on this soon in a future post) when I tumbled into Mark Zimmerman's "Outcome Tracker" website.  Mark is "Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University, the Director of Outpatient Psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital, and Principal Investigator of the Rhode Island Methods to Improve Diagnostic Assessment and Services (MIDAS) project."

Updated NICE guidelines on treating depression

NICE - the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - recently published guidance on "Depression in adults (update)" and on "Depression with a chronic physical health problem".  The "Depression in adults (update)"  replaces guidance originally published in 2004 and amended in 2007.  The 28 page Quick reference guide provides a helpful overview.  Interestingly NICE here use the DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for depression rather than the ICD-10 criteria (used in their earlier publications).  A four step approach is charted - each step is described both by who the intervention is for (e.g.

Recent research: six studies on depression – pregnancy, young children, antidepressant side effects, SAD & CBT, and suicide risk

Here are half a dozen recent research papers on depression (all details & abstracts to these studies are given further down this blog posting).  Yonkers et al's publication is a very welcome one - "The management of depression during pregnancy: a report from the American Psychiatric Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists."  At last here's a major review giving good advice on this extremely important subject.  To learn more it's worth getting hold of a copy of the complete text.  You may have access to this through your academic department.  If not, authors are usually happy to send a PDF via email when asked to - emails can be dug out via a little Google detective work.  Following the [Abstract/Full Text] link will also provide various access routes including a low-cost patient information option.  In further work looking at depression

Recent research: two papers on mindfulness, two on insomnia & two on antidepressants in pregnancy

Here are six recently published research papers.  Barnhofer and colleagues report on encouraging results using mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) for sufferers from chronic-recurrent depression while they are still depressed.  The three major studies published already have used MBCT for recurrent depression while the sufferers are reasonably well.  The next step will clearly be a fuller randomized controlled trial.  Heeren and colleagues report on the how MBCT acts to reduce overgeneral autobiographical memoriy in formerly depressed patients. 

Archer and colleagues describe the successful development and assessment of a group-based cognitive behavioural intervention for sleep problems.  Participants' satisfaction ratings with the training were very high and there were very encouraging reductions in their sleep problems and depressive symptoms.  Morin and coworkers also report on CBT for sleep problems, this time singly or combined with sleep medication.  They concluded that "In patients with persistent insomnia, the addition of medication to CBT produced added benefits during acute therapy, but long-term outcome was optimized when medication is discontinued during maintenance CBT."

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