The Canadian Psychological Association was organized in 1939 and incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act, Part II, in May 1950.
Its objectives are: To improve the health and welfare of all Canadians; to promote excellence and innovation in psychological research, education, and practice; to promote the advancement, development, dissemination, and application of psychological knowledge; and to provide high-quality services to members.
The Canadian Psychological Association was organized in 1939 and incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act, Part II, in May 1950.
Its objectives and mission are: To improve the health and welfare of all Canadians; to promote excellence and innovation in psychological research, education, and practice; to promote the advancement, development, dissemination, and application of psychological knowledge; and to provide high-quality services to members.
The official website of the group is http://www.cpa.ca/.
The Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards (ASPPB) is the alliance of state, provincial, and territorial agencies responsible for the licensure and certification of psychologists throughout the United States and Canada.
ASPPB was formed in 1961 to serve psychology boards in the two countries. Much of the impetus for its founding related to mobility for practitioners. By consensus, the first step was to create and maintain a standardized written Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP). ASPPB has done so since 1965.
Today, in addition to creating the EPPP, ASPPB coordinates cooperative efforts of boards, facilitates communication among boards, maintains a Disciplinary Data Bank, issues a Certificate of Professional Qualification in Psychology (CPQ), advocates for the advancement of mobility by encouraging board acceptance of the CPQ and the ASPPB Agreement of Reciprocity (AOR), maintains a Credentials Verification Program (CVP), and provides a Score Transfer Service. ASPPB acts as a voice for those responsible for the regulation of the practice of psychology.
ASPPB has drafted a Model Act, Model Regulations, a Code of Conduct, and guidelines for the use and/or adoption by state and provincial psychology boards.
ASPPB also generates a number of publications to aid psychology students in preparing for licensure, as well as publications for practitioners. Several of ASPPB’s publications have proven to be of great interest to individuals preparing to practice psychology, to
licensed psychologists, and to academic and private institutions. Two of ASPPB’s most popular publications are Items from Previous Examinations, and Psychology Exam Scores by Doctoral Program (Previously: Educational Reporting Service).
ASPPB Vision Statement:
ASPPB is the international leader and knowledge resource in the regulation and credentialing of psychologists.
In order to reach this vision, they commit their efforts to the following four activities:
1. Offering exemplary examination and credentialing programs.
2. Providing state of the art programs and services to all our stakeholders.
3. Serving as the source for the most current and accurate information about the regulation of psychologists.
4. Advocating for the critical consumer protection perspective in the on-going development of the profession.
Annual and Midyear Meetings
ASPPB hosts two membership meetings each year: the Midyear Meeting, normally held in April and an Annual Meeting, normally held in October.
These meetings take place at different venues each year. The meetings feature speakers who are experts in professional regulatory law, testing, issues facing regulatory boards, and administrative matters. The meetings are designed to offer educational and interactive
sessions for psychology board members, administrators, and attorneys engaged in regulating the profession.
The Annual and Midyear Meetings provide an opportunity to gain continuing education credits. ASPPB is approved by the American Psychological Association to offer continuing education (CE) credits for psychologists.
The Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP).
ASPPB creates and maintains the Examination for Professional Practice in Psychology (EPPP). The EPPP is used by 59 agencies in assessing entry-level knowledge to practice. ASPPB has an ongoing research and development program to ensure that the EPPP is valid and legally defensible.
For more information and queries their website is http://www.asppb.net.
Those persons who wish to avoid depression when they reach middle age better start eating healthy diet now.
A recent study from the United Kingdom has shown that eating healthy foods such as high proportion of fruits, vegetables and fish, protects middle aged people against depression compared to a processed food diet containing a high proportion of high fat dairy
food, processed meat, fried food, refined grains and sugar-laden desserts.
The research was made possible through the effort of researchers from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London (UCL), UK and the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM), and University of Montpellier, France.
Based on their study, the researchers revealed that much research on diet and depression tends to focus on individual nutrients so they thought they would look at links between overall dietary patterns and depression.
To get the data, the researchers looked at 3,486 participants of average age 57 years (nearly three quarters were men) who were part of the Whitehall II study.
The Whitehall II study was created by co-author and UCL Professor Sir Michael Marmot to investigate links between disease and social class, psychosocial factors and life style. It began by looking at the health of working people, and is now also looking to answer questions about how previous and current circumstances affect health and quality of life in an ageing group of participants.
The data allowed the researchers to identify two dietary patters: a whole food diet and a processed food diet. The whole food diet comprised mainly fresh fruits and vegetables and fish, while the processed diet comprised mainly sweetened desserts, fried foods, high fat
dairy foods, processed meat and refined grains.
To assess depression, the researchers used self-reported data that had been gathered five years after the dietary data using the CES-D scale. CES-D, short for Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale, is a commonly used self-report questionnaire for assessing depression.
It asks a series of multiple choice questions about how the participant has been feeling over the past week, covering topics such as concentration, loss of appetite, worry, how well they have been able to shake off depressive moods, quality of sleep, feelings of
loneliness, self-worth, energy levels, and so on.
To avoid depression in middle age it is time to engage in a healthy diet now.
When they analysed the results and ruled out potential confounders such as age, gender, education, smoking, exercise, and chronic diseases, the researchers found that:
* Participants in the top 33 per cent (top tertile) of the whole food diet pattern, ie whose diet most closely matched the whole food diet, had a 26 per cent lower risk of receiving a CES-D depression assessment five years later (odds ratio 0.74, with 95 per cent probability of this being in the range 0.56 to 0.99) compared to the bottom 33 per cent (bottom tertile), ie whose diet least closely matched the whole food diet.
* In contrast, participants whose diet was high in processed foods had a 58 per cent higher risk of receiving a CES-D depression rating five years later.
The researchers concluded that:
"In middle-aged participants, a processed food dietary pattern is a risk factor for CES-D depression 5 years later, whereas a whole food pattern is protective."
According to BBC News, co-author Dr Archana Singh-Manoux, who works at UCL and INSERM, suggested there was a possibility that the finding could be explained by a lifestyle factor they had not accounted for.
In other words the study does not prove that a processed food diet causes depression: it could be that people destined to become depressed become inclined to eat more processed foods, that there is a yet undiscovered factor behind both.
However, when results as strong as these emerge, and a consistent pattern linking diet and depression is found by several studies, it would tend to suggest that a healthy diet does protect against mental ill health.
The Chief Executive of the UK-based Mental Health Foundation, Dr Andrew McCulloch told the BBC that:
"This study adds to an existing body of solid research that shows the strong links between what we eat and our mental health."
He said major studies like this were crucial in helping us understand more about how diet contributes to mental illness. He said people in the UK were increasingly adopting unhealthy diets, and eating less nutritious and fresh food and more saturated fats and sugars.
Are you a frequent user of amphetamine in your adolescence?
Well it is time for you to stop such addiction since too much intake of amphetamine could result in memory loss upon reaching adulthood.
The findings was taken on a study conducted by medical experts on a group of rats exposed to high doses of amphetamine.
Based on the study, the experts discovered that The declines in short-term or "working" memory are most pronounced when the rats are exposed during adolescence, rather than as adults.
"Animals that were given the amphetamine during the adolescent time period were worse at tasks requiring working memory than adult animals that were given the same amount of amphetamine as adults," said psychology professor Joshua Gulley, who led the study with graduate student Jessica Stanis. "This tells us that their working memory capacity has been significantly altered by that pre-exposure to amphetamine."
Gulley and his colleagues presented their findings at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago.
The researchers tested two types of amphetamine exposure: intermittent (a steady dose every other day) and "binge-escalation," in which increasing amounts of the drug were given over a period of four days, followed by a simulated binge a high dose every two hours for eight hours on the fifth day.
Too much intake of amphetamine should be avoided since it could lead to memory loss upon reaching adulthood.
The findings reveal some of the potential long-term consequences of amphetamine abuse by adolescents and also may be relevant to those taking amphetamines for therapeutic purposes, such as for the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Gulley cautions that the doses given to the rats are on the high end of what an older, larger adolescent might receive as a therapeutic dose, and that further study is needed to tease out the implications for human health.
The concerns are most robust for adolescents who abuse amphetamines, Gulley said, as they may use much higher doses than those who are prescribed drugs that contain amphetamines.
"Adolescence is a time when the brain is continuing to develop into its mature form, so drug exposure during this critical period could have long-lasting, negative consequences," he said. "Our findings reveal that adolescents are particularly sensitive to the adverse effects of amphetamine on cognitive function and that these effects can persist well after drug use is discontinued."
The researchers found that the types of shoes women wear, specifically high-heels, pumps and sandals, may cause future hind-foot (heel and ankle) pain. Nearly 64 percent of women who reported hind-foot pain regularly wore these types of shoes at some point in their life.
We found an increased risk of hind-foot pain among women who wore shoes, such as high-heels or pumps, that lack support and sound structure," says lead author Alyssa B. Dufour, a graduate student in the Institute’s Musculoskeletal Research Program.
Published in the October issue of the journal Arthritis Care & Research, the study is one of the first to examine the association between shoe wear beyond just high-heel use and foot pain. The researchers, who analyzed foot-examination data from more than 3,300 men and women in The Framingham Study, say past shoe wear among women is a key factor for hind-foot pain. They found no significant link between foot pain and the types of shoes men wear.
High-heels shoes could result in pain in later life for women.
While foot pain is a common complaint in the U.S. adult population foot and toe symptoms are among the top 20 reasons for physician visits
among those 65 to 74 years of age relatively little is known about the causes of foot pain in older adults. Women are more likely than men to have foot pain; however, it is not known if this is due to a higher prevalence of foot deformities, underlying disease, shoe wear, or other lifestyle choices.
From a list of 11 shoe types, study participants were asked about the one style of shoe they currently wear on a regular basis, what they regularly wore during five age periods in the past, and if they experience pain, aching or stiffness in either foot on most days.
Nearly 30 percent of women and 20 percent of men reported generalized foot pain, which is in line with other foot-pain studies.
Ms. Dufour’s team, however, found a significant association in women who reported hind-foot pain and past shoe wear that included high-heels and pumps.
The shoe types were classified as "poor" (high-heels, pumps, sandals and slippers), "average" (hard- or rubber-soled shoes and work boots), and "good" (athletic and casual sneakers). More than 60 percent of women reported wearing "poor" shoes in the past, compared to only 2 percent of men (13 percent of women said they currently wear "poor" shoes).
When we walk, a significant biomechanical shock is delivered to the foot each time our heel strikes the ground. "Good" shoes, such as sneakers and other athletic footwear, often have soles and other features that soften this shock and protect the foot. The heel and ankle take the brunt of this shock, which may be why women who wear high-heeled shoes often report pain in this part of the foot.
"Young women," says Ms. Dufour, "should make careful choices regarding their shoe types in order to potentially avoid hind-foot pain later in life."
Pregnant women around the world should avoid high fat diet during their pregnancy.
This developed after a recent medical study has shown a mother’s diet of high fat could result in a severe form of liver disease in her child.
Based on the study made by the University of Southampton it was discovered that a high fat diet during a woman’s pregnancy makes her offspring more likely to develop a severe form of fatty liver disease when they reach adulthood.
It is said that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a condition associated with obesity and caused by the build up of fat in the liver.
The condition advances in some people and it is important to understand the factors that contribute to disease progression. Until recently, NAFLD was considered rare and relatively harmless but now it is one of the most common forms of liver disease that may progress to cirrhosis a serious life threatening chronic liver disease.
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Pregnant women should avoid high fat diet since it could lead to a liver disease.
Professor Christopher Byrne, with colleagues Dr Felino Cagampang and Dr Kim Bruce, of the University’s School of Medicine and researchers at King’s College London, conducted the study, funded by the BBSRC. Prof Byrne explained: "This research shows that too much saturated fat in a mother’s diet can affect the developing liver of a fetus, making it more susceptible to developing fatty liver disease later in life.
An unhealthy saturated fat-enriched diet in the child and young adult compounds the problem further causing a severe form of the fatty liver disease later in adult life."
The next stage of this research, also funded by the BBSRC, will be to understand, more precisely, the reason why fatty liver disease develops and to intervene to prevent the fatty liver disease occurring.
The University’s School of Medicine has a worldwide reputation for its pioneering research into the relationship between mothers’ diets in pregnancy and future health problems in their offspring.
A popular saying state that the eyes is the windows to the soul.
But recent medical research has shown that eyes is more than just a window for the soul since it can also offer important clues to your risk of heart disease and stroke.
Researchers of the Centre for Eye Research Australia (CERA) are currently doing an extensive study to prove that blood vessels in the retina at the back of the eye reflect changes in blood vessels in other parts of the body, especially the brain, kidneys and heart.
The team of medical experts believed that that blood vessels in the retina can be photographed and the images analysed by a computer to accurately determine a person’s risk of heart attack or stroke cardiovascular diseases that change the appearance of blood vessels in the eye.
Lead CERA researcher, Professor Tien Wong, explained through their study they wish to show that that combining this non-invasive retinal scan with the results from current risk assessment methods will improve precision and reliability in predicting cardiovascular disease.
Wong and his team has taken thousands of eye images and created a program that recognises common features of conditions that cause damage to be seen on the retina.
Your eyes is not only the window of the soul but also an indicator if a man suffers from a form of heart disease.
Once a person has symptoms of cardiovascular disease, damage has already been done to the body. So finding and treating high risk people early, even before they have symptoms, could minimise blood vessel damage and potentially avoid heart attack or stroke.
At present, doctors estimate a person’s statistical chance of developing cardiovascular disease by looking at individual factors such as whether they smoke, their family history, weight, blood cholesterol and blood pressure. Once you get symptoms, more extensive and sometimes invasive tests, such as angiogram are needed to confirm the result and assess severity of damage to the arteries of the heart or elsewhere.
Professor Wong said, "Results from the retinal scan would be delivered to GPs for a better picture of their patient’s health.
Dr. Christine Bennett, chair of the MBF Foundation Steering Committee and Bupa Chief Medical Officer*, went on to say, "This early assessment of the likelihood that a person will develop diseases like heart disease, stroke or even type 2 diabetes has the potential to significantly improve quality of life, reduce hospitalisations and the 50,000 deaths each year caused by cardiovascular disease."
Once a person knows their risk they may be able to delay the onset of developing cardiovascular disease by modifying their lifestyle accordingly.
"We know that smoking, too much alcohol, inactivity and poor nutrition are bad for our health but seeing the evidence not with, but in, your own eyes could be the wake-up call that triggers change," Bennett said.
A recent medical research has shown that those children who are popular and exert power among their school classmates enjoy better health as adults.
To get the data, researchers studied more than 14,000 children who were born in Sweden in 1953 and who were part of the Stockholm Birth Cohort Study.
The team then monitors the long term health of children born between 1953 and 2003.
When the children reached sixth grade in 1966 and were 12 to 13 years old, the degree of popularity, power, and status enjoyed by each child was evaluated.
It was assessed by asking them who they most preferred to work with at school.
Using national hospital discharge records, this information was then matched to data on subsequent hospital admissions for the period between 1973 and 2003.
Investigation revealed that children who were the least popular at school had the highest overall risk of serious health illness as an adult. The pattern
was obvious for both men and women. But there were differences in the types of health illness they developed.
Children who shows leadership skills have better chances of having a healthy life when they reach adulthood.
Children who were the least accepted and dominant at school were more than four times as likely to require hospital treatment for hormonal
(including diabetes), nutritional, and metabolic diseases as their most popular and powerful classmates.
In addition, they were more than twice as likely to develop mental illness and behavioural problems, including suicide attempts and self harm.
They were more than five times as likely to be admitted for unintentional poisoning, while those classified as "peripheral" were more than seven times as
likely to require hospital care for this same event.
They were also considerably more likely to develop drug and alcohol addiction problems and nine times more likely to develop ischaemic heart disease.
Childhood social class was not considered in the account of the findings.
Moreover, the researchers suggest that "peer status in childhood is linked to adult health through behavioural and psychological factors that influence the development of disorders and diseases in which these factors feature."
Smoking ban effective in reducing risk of heart disease
Author: admin
Two new studies have found that the number of heart attacks has fallen by up to a third in countries where bans on smoking in public places have been introduced.
Smoking in pubs, restaurants and other public spaces was banned in England and Wales in July 2007, a year after similar laws were introduced in Scotland.
The Scottish ban led to a 14 per cent fall in the number of people being admitted to
hospital with a heart attack the following year.
Libby Dowling, Care Advisor at Diabetes UK, said: "Diabetes UK supports the smoking ban and we are pleased to hear that it may reduce the number of heart attacks by more than a third in countries where it is implemented.
Studies has recently shown that smoking ban is effective in keeping humans free from any form of heart disease.
Dowling revealed people with diabetes are at increased risk.
He said smoking is harmful to everyone’s health, and in particular to the 2.5 million people with diabetes in the UK.
He added people with the condition are already at increased risk of heart disease, stroke and other circulatory problems.
Moreover, Dowling said smoking doubles the risk of these problems.
Dowling encourage those people with diabetes to give up smoking to protect their health.
A recent medical study has shown that obesity is an important factor contributing to chemotherapy resistance and increasing relapse rates among children with leukemia.
According to the study, obesity is associated with increased incidence and mortality of many types of cancer.
Leukemia is the most common cancer in children, affecting more than 2,000 children each year in the United States alone.
Lead researcher Steven Mittelman, M.D., Ph.D.,fellowship research director of the Division of Endocrinology at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles, and assistant professor of pediatrics, physiology and biophysics at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California explained the increasing prevalence of obesity worldwide, these findings could have important implications for cancer treatment and may help explain the increased leukemia relapse rate in obese patients.
Mittelman revealed obesity could increase cancer incidence and mortality through a variety of ways.
He said it may impair the immune system’s ability to stop cancer, or predispose cells to become cancerous.
He added once you have cancer, and if you are obese, the fat cells themselves may impair the ability of chemotherapy to fight cancerous cells.
This study was inspired by a previous study led by a colleague, Anna Butturini, M.D., associate professor of clinical pediatrics in the Division of Hematology-Oncology at Childrens Hospital, which showed that obese children diagnosed with leukemia have a 50 percent higher chance of relapsing compared with lean children.
Using preclinical models, Mittelman and colleagues investigated the reason why obese children were more at risk of relapse.
Better keep your children away from obesity to ensure easy treatment if ever they get sick with leukemia.
They developed a mouse model of obesity and leukemia, cultured fat and leukemia cells together, and treated the leukemia cells with traditional chemotherapy drugs used in children vincristine, nilotinib, daunorubicin and dexamethasone.
Obese mice with leukemia had higher relapse rates than lean mice after treatment with the first-line chemotherapeutic agent vincristine. The chemotherapy treatments all worked less effectively in culture when fat cells were nearby.
When the mice relapsed from the leukemia, the researchers found leukemia "hiding out" in the fat tissue during chemotherapy, according to Mittelman.
"These four drugs attack leukemia cells by different routes, so when we saw fat cells blocking them we realized there could be an important mechanism promoting their ability to live and divide," he said. "We were surprised to find leukemia cells in the fat tissue."
David Hockenbery, M.D., member of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and professor of internal medicine at the University of Washington, said "this study provides striking experimental support for the clinical observations that obesity is associated with poor prognosis in multiple cancers."
The researchers demonstrated that co-culture of leukemia cells with adipocytes diminishes response to multiple chemotherapeutic agents. Therefore, adipose tissue may function as a "safe haven" for leukemia cells during therapy, according to Hockenbery. Based on the finding that adipocytes accumulate chemotherapeutic drugs, he advised that careful attention be paid to dose adjustments based on pharmacokinetic measurements.
"In addition, by highlighting a potential communication between adipocyte and leukemia cells, this research will stimulate efforts to find a diffusible factor that protects leukemia cells from chemotherapy," said Hockenbery.
More research is needed to figure out how fat cells are a part of the tumor microenvironment and how they block potentially lifesaving treatments, according to Mittelman.
The researchers are currently conducting additional studies to evaluate other chemotherapeutics, how obesity may or may not affect treatment and the effect of fat cells found in bone marrow on leukemia.