Researchers have developed a new form of psychotherapy that is effective in most cases of eating disorders in adults.“Eating disorders are serious mental health problems and can be very distressing for both patients and their families,” said Christopher Fairburn, professor and principal research fellow at the University of Oxford.
“Now for the first time, we have a single treatment which can be effective in treating the majority of cases without the need for patients to be admitted to hospital,” added Fairburn, who led the study.These disorders are a major cause of physical and psycho-social impairment in young women, affecting at least one in 20 between the ages of 18 and 30. Eating disorders are less common in young men.
Three eating disorders are recognised: anorexia nervosa, (hunger signals are ignored to control the desire to eat), accounting for 10 percent cases in adults; bulimia nervosa, (repeated binge eating) which accounts for a third of all cases; and the remainder are classed as atypical eating disorders, which account for over half of all cases.
In these atypical cases, the features of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are combined in a different way, according to an Oxford release.These disorders vary in their severity, but typically involve extreme and relentless dieting, self-induced vomiting or laxative misuse, binge eating, driven exercising and in some cases marked weight loss.
Common associated features are depression, social withdrawal, perfectionism and low self-esteem. The disorders tend to run a chronic course and are notoriously difficult to treat. Relapse is common.This new “enhanced” form of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT-E) improves the current leading treatment for bulimia nervosa as recommended by the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).
CBT-E is the first treatment to be shown to be suitable for the majority of cases of eating disorders. This new treatment derives from an earlier form of CBT. Both were developed exclusively for patients with Bulimia Nervosa by Fairburn.
The study was published on Monday in the American Journal of Psychiatry.Parkinson’s disease affects more than just the body: Parkinson’s disease affects 6.3 million people worldwide with 40 percent of its patients not only suffering physical problems but also developing changes in thought, behaviour and judgment, says a medical expert.
In more advanced stages, these symptoms include hallucinations and paranoid delusions where they become distrustful of even their closest friends and family members.“While the physical manifestations of Parkinson’s disease are difficult to deal with, the changes in thought, behaviour and judgment strain.
The bonds between patients and their care givers and families,” said Bernard Ravina, director of the Movement and Inherited Neurological Disorders Unit at the University of Rochester, New York. According to a recent online survey, over a third of those attending to patients of Parkinson’s are unaware that changes in thought, behaviour, and judgment can accompany the disease.
“As a registered nurse (RN), I was prepared for the physical problems with my husband’s Parkinson’s disease but, despite my job, I was totally unprepared for the psychiatric issues,” said Carol McLain, a care giver who took the survey.
It’s the non-physical symptoms of the disease that are often most devastating for both the patient and care giver. As the patient’s mental health deteriorates, the family often has to make the painful and expensive decision of moving the patient into a nursing home,” said Ravina.
There are currently no approved treatments for these particular non-physical symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, according to a Rochester release.Nevertheless, doctors often resort to the use of potent anti-psychotic drugs to treat these symptoms even though these drugs sometimes have serious side effects, particularly in the elderly, including worsening of motor skills, excessive sleepiness, increased infections, stroke, and sudden death in some patients.
Good nerve cells, ‘bad’ cancer cells survive in similar way: Cancer cells and nerve cells or neurons could not have been more dissimilar, yet they use strikingly similar ways to survive, according to new research.The study, conducted by Chapel Hill School of Medicine, University of North Carolina (UNC), describes how neurons and cancer cells achieve.
The common goal of inhibiting the series of biochemical events called apoptosis that eventually causes cells to break down and die. That’s good in the case of neurons, but bad when it comes to cancer.“In neurons, inhibiting cell death is physiologically important to ensuring their long term survival,” said the study’s co-author, neurobiologist Mohanish Deshmukh, associate professor of cell and developmental biology at UCN.
“In cancer cells, blocking cell death allows them to evade the host defence systems and proliferate uncontrollably.”Both neurons and cancer cells do have something in common: relying extensively on the metabolism of glucose, a simple sugar. But until now, the advantages of this common characteristic have remained unclear.
One reason why these results are so interesting is that neurons and cancer cells are as different from each other as you can imagine. For example, cancer cells divide continuously, whereas neurons don’t divide at all,” Deshmukh said.
Deshmukh and UNC graduate student Allyson Vaughn (currently postdoctoral scientist at MIT) found that to prevent death, neurons and cancer cells use a specific metabolic pathway, or series of chemical reactions, said an UNC release.
This pathway - the pentose phosphate biochemical pathway - inhibits the activation of a key protein involved in the process of cell death called cytochrome c. “What we show is that both neurons and cancer cells inhibit the cell death process mediated by cytochrome c,” Deshmukh said.
Specifically, according to the study, cytochrome c’s ability to induce death can be turned off if the cellular environment contains high levels of antioxidants. The study was published in the December issue of Nature Cell Biology.