College Campuses See Rise in Cases of Severe Mental Illness

More cases of severe mental illness are being reported among college students than a decade ago, as more young people with mental health issues tackle a post secondary education and are open to getting help when they need it, a new U.S. study shows. The use of prescription medications by students to treat psychiatric illness has also risen significantly over the past decade, the research team noted. "If we look at the average college student and their level of psychological and emotional functioning and distress, on the whole they are not necessarily worse off than they were 10 years ago," explained study author John C. Guthman, director of student counseling at Hofstra University's division of student affairs.

"However, there are some students who are outliers and they have some difficulty in some areas. And these relatively few students that present in significant distress seem to have increased to a greater percentage than they were a decade ago." Guthman and his colleagues are to report their findings Thursday at the American Psychological Association annual meeting, in San Diego. The authors noted that their observations appear to be in line with what mental health professionals have observed and reported anecdotally in recent years.

To get a handle on the current state of affairs, Guthman and his team analyzed diagnostic records concerning nearly 3,300 undergraduate and graduate students who had sought college counseling at some point in the 10 years between 1997 and 2009. After examining intake information concerning mental disorders, suicidal tendencies and behavioral reports, the team determined that over the years most students had been diagnosed with mood and anxiety disorders and that, on average, the nature of these cases had remained relatively mild over time.

Heartbreak Puts Brakes on Heart

Waiting for another person's opinion of you will slow your heart, and its rate will dip even further if you get rejected, a new Dutch study has found. "Unexpected social rejection could literally feel 'heartbreaking,' as reflected by a transient slowing of heart rate," the study authors wrote in a news release from the Association for Psychological Science. In the study, volunteers were asked to submit photos of themselves and told that students at another university would look at the images and decide whether they liked the person in the photos. This was a ruse: no one was actually looking at them. But the volunteers didn't know that, and returned later to look at a series of photos of the college students who were ostensibly judging them and guess what their opinions of the volunteers had been.

Using an electrocardiogram, researchers then measured the heart rates of the volunteers as they discovered what the other students supposedly thought of them. The researchers found that the heart rates of the volunteers fell as they waited to learn about a supposed judgment. If they were rejected, their heart rates slowed even more, and they slowed the most in those who expected the other person would like them. Bregtje Gunther Moor and colleagues at the University of Amsterdam and Leiden University in the Netherlands released their study online recently in advance of publication in an upcoming print issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Anger Focuses Attention on Rewards, Not Threats: Study

Even though anger is a negative emotion, angry people tend to pay more attention to rewards than threats, a new study finds. Previous research has found that people with other types of negative emotions, such as fea or anxiety, tend to focus more on threat than reward. For example, they'll spend more time looking at a picture of a person holding a knife threateningly than a picture of a sexy couple. On the other hand, people experiencing a positive emotion such as excitement are drawn to rewards, explained Brett Q. Ford, of Boston College, and colleagues. "Emotions can vary in what they make you want to do. Fear is associated with a motivation to avoid, whereas excitement is associated with a motivation to approach.

It can make you want to seek out certain things, like rewards," Ford said in an Association for Psychological Science news release. In the study, volunteers were asked to write for 15 minutes about one of four personal memories, and were assigned to write about a time when they were angry, afraid, excited/happy, or felt little or no emotion. Depending on the emotion the participant had been assigned, a five-minute piece of music was played to reinforce the feeling.After completing the writing task, the volunteers were asked to look at two side-by-side pictures. The investigators used a device that monitors eye movement to determine how much time the volunteers spent focusing on each picture.

They found that volunteers who had been assigned to recall an angry memory spent more time looking at rewarding pictures, as did the people who recalled feeling happy and excited. The findings suggest that visual attention may not be related to negative versus positive emotions, but instead related to how a person's emotions motivate them. For example, anger might motivate someone to approach something in an aggressive way, while happiness might cause someone to want to approach things in a social or friendly way, the study authors noted in the news release. "Attention kicks off an entire string of events that can end up influencing behavior," the authors concluded in the news release. The study findings were released online in advance of publication in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science.

Placebo Pill Gives Boost to Some Women's Sex Drive

About one-third of women given a placebo pill to treat a low libido reported improvements in their sex lives, a finding researchers say is evidence of the powerful and somewhat mysterious mind-body connection surrounding arousal and desire. After drugs like Viagra and Cialis revolutionized the treatment of male sexual dysfunction in the late 1990s, a flurry of clinical trials were conducted in women in the hopes that the drugs could do the same to revive a woman's flagging sex drive. The drugs flopped in women. But recently, researchers went back and looked at the old data on Cialis and found that not only did about 35 percent of women given the placebo pill experience significant improvement in psychological aspects of sex such as desire, many reported improvements in the physical aspects of arousal, including better lubrication, more frequent orgasms or more easily attainable orgasms, according to the study.

"Everything across the board improved in some women," said study author Andrea Bradford, a post-doctoral fellow at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. The study is published in the current issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine. In the original study, 50 women aged 35 to 55 who were diagnosed with female sexual arousal disorder were given either Cialis or a placebo for 12 weeks. The women, most of whom were married, were asked to have sex at least three times a month. "Many went above and beyond," Bradford noted. Women also had to keep a diary of how often they had sex and how satisfying it was. Bradford suspects the improvements were due to several aspects of the study the hope that the pill might be working plus speaking with medical professionals about sex, thinking about sex and trying to have better sex.

"I think just the act of attending to their sex lives was very therapeutic for some women," Bradford said. Over time, the frequency with which women had sex dropped some, but they continued to report better sex lives overall. "It was quality over quantity," she said. When sex is no longer satisfying, women tend to avoid it, noted Aline Zolbrod, a Boston-area clinical psychologist and sex therapist. Without at least giving it a try, there's little hope sex will get better. "I love this study," Zolbrod said. "It does what we'd like to get our patients to do, which is to start having sex again. Instead of getting into bed and sighing, 'Oh, this is never going to work,' instead they are getting into bed and thinking, 'Let's see what happens.' When you have that attitude and you have sex almost once a week, for some women it really did the trick."

Many With Terminal Cancer Still Getting Routine Screens

Many patients with incurable cancer are still being screened for common cancers, although these tests are unlikely to provide any benefit, researchers from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City have found. Specifically, many patients diagnosed with advanced lung, colorectal, pancreatic, gastroesophageal or breast cancer are still undergoing the ordeal of routine breast, prostate and colon cancer screening, said the researchers. Not only might these patients suffer from invasive procedures like colonoscopies near the end of life, the researchers said, but they face the unnecessary risk of additional tests, biopsies and psychological distress resulting from the detection of new malignancies.

"For patients living with advanced cancer, cancer screening should not be a routine procedure," said lead researcher Dr. Camelia S. Sima, an assistant attending biostatistician. "Patients living with advanced malignancies and their doctors should engage in a realistic conversation about the risks and benefits associated with cancer screening in face of a severely limited life expectancy," she added. The report is published in the Oct. 13 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. For the study, Sima's team collected data on 87,736 Medicare patients aged 65 years or older with advanced lung, colorectal, pancreatic, gastroesophageal or breast cancer, whose data was reported in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) tumor registries.

These patients were followed from their diagnosis, between 1998 and 2005, until they died or to the end of 2007. To compare the findings to a control group, the researchers also collected data on 87,307 similar Medicare patients without cancer, who were matched with the other individuals for age, race, sex and SEER data. In both patient groups, Sima's team looked at the rates of mammograms for breast cancer, Pap tests for cervical cancer, prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests for prostate cancer and endoscopy for colon cancer. The investigators found that among women with advanced cancer, 8.9 percent had a mammogram, compared with 22 percent of those without cancer; and 5.8 percent of the cancer patients had a Pap test, compared with 12.5 percent of those without cancer.

Many Girls Now Begin Puberty at Age 7, 8

The onset of puberty is continuing to drop among American girls, with many girls as young as 7 and 8 now showing the beginnings of breast development, new research shows. Rising rates of childhood obesity long linked to earlier sexual development may be to blame, experts say. In the study, more than 1,200 girls ages 6 to 8 from Cincinnati, East Harlem, N.Y. and San Francisco were examined on two occasions between 2004 and 2006 by two different female pediatricians or nurse practitioners who felt for the presence of breast tissue. "We wanted to be careful not to mistake fatty deposits for actual breast tissue," explained study author Dr. Frank Biro, director of adolescent medicine at Cincinnati's Children's Hospital.

Among 7-year-olds, about 10.4 percent of white girls, 23.4 percent of black girls and almost 15 percent of Hispanic girls had started developing breasts, the team report in the September issue of Pediatrics. Among 8-year-olds, 18.3 percent of white girls, about 43 percent of black girls and just under 31 percent of Hispanic girls showed evidence of breast development.The figures suggest a rise in early-onset puberty compared to similar studies conducted earlier. For 7-year-old white girls, especially, they show a doubling of the rate from as recently as a decade ago, Biro said. One study found that about 5 percent of white 7-year-old girls and 10.5 percent of 8-year-olds were showing breast development.

For black girls, the rate of breast development in that study was 15.4 percent for 7-year-olds and 36.6 percent for 8-year-olds. The earlier data did not include information on Hispanic girls. Experts called the findings alarming. In terms of women's health, early puberty, including younger ages at menarche, or first menstrual cycle, is associated with a higher risk of breast cancer throughout the life span, Biro said. In addition, developing early is associated with psychological and social pressures that young girls may be ill-equipped to handle, including sexual advances from older boys and men, said Dr. Marcia Herman-Giddens, adjunct professor of public health at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Side Effects of Steroids

The side effects of steroids can be very stern and even fatal. Nearly everyone on systemic steroids for more than a month suffers from a number of adverse effects, depending on daily dose and how long they have been on systemic steroids. These can include any of the following problems, which are not listed in any particular order of importance.

Different types of steroids are being used by various people in body building. Even athletes participating in many different types of sports have been using steroids to get better performance and build muscle.

How does Steroids Work ?

Steroids work by decreasing inflammation and reducing the action of the immune system. Inflammation is a development in which the body’s white blood cells and chemicals can protect against infection and foreign substance such as bacteria and viruses. In certain diseases, though the body’s immune system doesn’t function properly. This might cause irritation to work against the body’s tissues and cause damage. Inflammation is characterized by redness, warmth, swelling, and pain.

Steroids decrease the production of inflammatory chemicals in order to minimize tissue damage. Steroids also reduce the activity of the immune system by distressing the function of white blood cells. If steroids have been prescribed for one month or less, side effects are infrequently serious. However the following problems can arise:

• Sleep disturbance

• Increased appetite

• Weight gain

• Psychological effects, including increased or decreased energ