Therapist Unlimited Blog

Researchers have found new evidence showing that parents play a key role in whether or not their adolescent children who experiment with tobacco progress to become daily smokers before they graduate from high school.
A study published on-line and in the September issue of journal Pediatrics shows that parents can be a positive or negative influence on their children’s future smoking habit.
"If parents really don’t want their children to smoke they need to communicate that by establishing clear guidelines in their families about not smoking and discuss them with their school-age children." said Min Jung Kim, a research scientist with the University of Washington’s Social Development Research Group and lead author of the study.
At the same time, parents can increase their children’s chances of smoking by their own use of tobacco.
"If parents smoke, teens have more access to cigarettes than teens who have non-smoking parents. A second preventive measure for smoking parents is to quit smoking themselves," said Kim.
The study included 270 adolescents who had begun smoking by the eighth grade but had not advanced to daily smoking at that time.
Daily smoking was defined as smoking one cigarette a day for the past 30 days prior to annual interviews. By the time the students were in the 12th grade, 156, or 58 percent, had become daily smokers.
The children in the study were 51 percent male and 85 percent white. They were drawn from a larger study looking at the development of healthy and problem behaviours among children at 10 suburban schools in the Pacific Northwest. Information about their smoking habits was collected during annual interviews from the seventh through 12th grades.
Aside from parenting and parental tobacco use, other factors that predicted teen smoking were having friends who smoked and involvement in other problems behaviours such as skipping school, getting into fights and engaging in vandalism.

Kim said most smoking prevention programs to not directly address the role of parental smoking or the link between anti-social behaviour and smoking, which commonly occur together.
"Parents need to know that they are still important and can make their children feel good when they do something right and also know that there are consequences when they do something wrong. Many parents think adolescence is the time for children to have their independence. But it is important to maintain good supervision of your teen. Parents who smoke also need to understand that they are modeling behavior and if they quit smoking they send a strong message to their teenager," said Kim.
She recommends that parents "should not ignore children’s experimental smoking at any age because it put them at great risk of progressing to daily smoking." To do that, parents should:
    * Set and enforce clear guideline about tobacco.
    * Monitor to ensure that your children are following your guidelines.
    * Know and monitor your children’s friends.
    * Provide clear, consistent and positive consequences for following those guidelines and appropriate, consistent negative consequences for violating them.

According to a latest research it was discovered that pain in elderly with dementia are often undetected.
The researchers discovered that the elderly who suffer from dementia aren’t able to say when something hurts or is sore.
They may demonstrate their pain through behaviours like rocking or striking out, and we often dismiss these actions as symptoms of the dementia instead of pain, which is usually from a different problem.
The researchers revealed arthritis, diabetic neuropathy, fractures, muscular contractures, bruises, abdominal pain and mouth ulcers are among the list of common ailments that go undetected.

The family of elderly suffering from dementia need to be vigilant since studies show the pain suffered by these people often goes undetected.

The research team explained it is important for those who live or work with persons with dementia to know how to identify when an elderly person is experiencing pain and receive treatment sooner rather than later.
The University of Alberta’s Cary Brown, PhD, has a new tool to help.
She has developed an on-line workshop and toolkit for caregivers, health-care providers, family members and friends of people with dementia.
The researcher from the Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine created an evidence-based website with a narrated presentation on pain and dementia, a downloadable resource pack for family members, a downloadable pain log and a facilitator’s toolkit with background material, a planning guide, promotional material and supplemental information for organizations who wish to put on a workshop.

Although alcohol consumption is known to be associated with chronic pancreatitis, new evidence indicates that a threshold of five or more drinks per day is required to significantly raise risk; however, most patients with chronic pancreatitis do not drink this amount.
In addition, based on the study it was also discovered that smoking is an independent, dose-dependent risk factor.
"Chronic pancreatitis is an inflammatory syndrome of the pancreas characterized by progressive parenchymal fibrosis scarring of the organ, maldigestion, diabetes mellitus and pain," the researchers explained.
"Recurrent acute pancreatitis [acute pancreatitis that occurs on two or more occasions and may become chronic] and chronic pancreatitis are associated with alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking.
The etiology of recurrent acute pancreatitis and chronic pancreatitis is complex, and effects of alcohol and smoking may be limited to specific patient subsets."
Dhiraj Yadav, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Pittsburgh, and colleagues in the North American Pancreatic Study Group examined the current prevalence of alcohol use and smoking and their association with pancreatitis in patients evaluated at U.S. referral centers.
Between 2000 and 2006, 1,000 patients (540 with chronic pancreatitis and 460 with recurrent acute pancreatitis) were  enrolled in the North American Pancreatitis Study 2 (NAPS2), as were 695 healthy controls.
All participants (average age 49.7) reported their alcohol consumption and smoking habits.

About one-fourth of both controls and patients were lifetime abstainers. Among those with chronic pancreatitis, 38.4 percent of men and 11 percent of women were very heavy drinkers  (five or more drinks per day), compared with 16.9 percent of men and 5.5 percent of women with recurrent acute pancreatitis and 10 percent of men and 3.6 percent of women in the control group.
"We found the threshold drinking amount for association between alcohol use and chronic pancreatitis to be five or more drinks per day," the authors write. Compared with abstaining and light drinking (half a drink per day or less), very heavy drinking was associated with approximately triple the odds of developing chronic pancreatitis. However, fewer patients with chronic pancreatitis  than expected (about one-fourth) drank at this level. Other factors, including genetic mutations, also contribute to pancreatitis risk.
Although many heavy drinkers also smoked, cigarette use was an independent risk factor for both chronic pancreatitis and recurrent acute pancreatitis. Among smokers, those with chronic pancreatitis tended to smoke more (26.6 pack-years, vs. 19.5 pack-years for those with recurrent acute pancreatitis and 16.2 pack-years for controls; one pack-year is about 7,300 cigarettes  smoked) and had smoked for a longer period of time (a median or midpoint of 30.5 years, vs. 21.9 years for controls and 22.7 years for those with recurrent acute pancreatitis), suggesting a dose-dependent effect.
"In conclusion, only very heavy alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking are independent risk factors for chronic pancreatitis," the authors write. "Risk for chronic pancreatitis from alcohol consumption occurs above a threshold level, while risk due to smoking is dose dependent. Drinking levels in subjects with recurrent acute pancreatitis are similar to controls.
Only a minority of patients with recurrent acute pancreatitis and chronic pancreatitis currently seen at secondary or tertiary U.S. centers could be categorized as very heavy drinkers."

Middle-aged white women in the United States had reasons to be careful these days.
This developed after recent data has shown that death rate from unintentional poisoning already triples in the US for these people.
Based on the study made by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy it was discovered that white women between 45 and 64 years old experienced a 230 percent increase in the rate of poisoning mortality over the study period.
The data they gathered also showed that white men in this age group experienced an increase of 137 percent.
The researchers also discovered that mortality rates from falls varied widely across age and gender.
The researchers revealed the death rate from falls increased 38 percent for white men and 48 percent for white women 65 and older.
The research team explained mortality rate did not increase significantly for older blacks of either sex.
The researchers said overall, 89 percent of the total increase in unintentional injury deaths in the U.S. between 1999 and 2005 was due to poisoning among those 15 to 64 years old and falls among those 45 and older, which increased by about 11,200 and 6,600, respectively.

Middle-aged women need to be careful since they are prone to unintentional poisoning.

Study co-author Susan P. Baker, MPH, a professor with the Bloomberg School’s Center for Injury Research and Policy said the large increases in the number of deaths attributable to poisoning and falls underscore the need for more research on the specific circumstances involved.
Baker added that while we don’t know the cause behind the recent increase in falls mortality, it appears that the increase in poisonings is largely due to prescription drugs.
She said national prevention efforts are needed to control the abuse of prescription drugs and limit access.
She added prescriptions for opioid analgesics to address pain have increased dramatically in the past decade, and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that prescription drugs have replaced illegal drugs such as cocaine as the most prominent substances in fatal drug overdoses.
In addition to falls and poisonings, four other leading causes of intentional injury deaths were identified for subsequent analyses: suffocation, drowning, fire/burns and motor vehicle crashes. Suffocation rates generally decreased or had no significant change, but they greatly increased in white children less than one year old.
Drowning rates increased among white men 65 and older and among white middle-aged women, but decreased in black males 5 to 24 years old, black females 5 to14 years old, and whites females 15 to 24 years.
Mortality from fires and burns decreased the most.
The rate of dying due to a motorcycle crash more than doubled in Hispanic males 15 to 24 years and in white males ages 45 to 64 years.

Who says it is better to find medical cure in the past than today?
A recent analysis has found that adolescents and young adults who were recently diagnosed with blood-related cancers have
better long-term survival rates than those who were diagnosed in the 1980s.
Based on the study it was uncovered that significant advances have been made in the treatment of 15 to 24 year-olds with leukemias and lymphomas; however, survival rates in this age group are
still lower than those seen in younger children.
It is said that few studies have looked at trends in the long-term survival of adolescents and young adults with blood-related cancers, which include Hodgkin’s lymphoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, acute myeloblastic leukemia, and chronic myelocytic leukemia.
To get the data, Dianne Pulte, MD, of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and her colleagues analyzed data from the Surveillance,
Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) database, which is a population-based cancer registry in the United States.
The team then compare survival rates of young patients diagnosed in recent years with those diagnosed two decades ago.

Those who are suffering from leukemia and lymphoma find better cure today than in the past.

Based on the information they gathered from SEER data from 1981-1985 with data from 2001-2005, they found that survival significantly improved in each of the five blood-related malignancies.
The researchers revealed the 10-year survival rates increased from 80.4 percent to 93.4 percent among adolescents and young adults with Hodgkin’s lymphoma; from 55.6 percent to 76.2 percent for non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma; from 30.5 percent to 52.1 percent for acute lymphoblastic leukemia; from 15.2 percent to 45.1 percent for acute myeloblastic leukemia; and from 0 percent to 74.5 percent for chronic myelocytic leukemia.
Furthermore, the researchers also that survival improved steadily over the two decades for the lymphomas and chronic myelocytic leukemia, but survival was stable during the late 1990s and early 21st century for the
acute leukemias.
In addition, the exception of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, survival in adolescents and young adults still lags behind survival in children and, in the case of acute myeloblastic leukemia, even behind survival in older adults.
The researchers explained the persistent lower survival rates for adolescents and young adults with acute leukemias compared with children with these diseases remain a major challenge.
They said more research into how to treat these diseases and how to make sure that all patients have access to the best treatment is needed.
 

Middle-aged white women in the United States had reasons to be careful these days.
This developed after recent data has shown that death rate from unintentional poisoning already triples in the US for these people.
Based on the study made by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Injury Research and Policy it was discovered that white women between 45 and 64 years old experienced a 230 percent increase in the rate of poisoning mortality over the study period.
The data they gathered also showed that white men in this age group experienced an increase of 137 percent.
The researchers also discovered that mortality rates from falls varied widely across age and gender.
The researchers revealed the death rate from falls increased 38 percent for white men and 48 percent for white women 65 and older.
The research team explained mortality rate did not increase significantly for older blacks of either sex.
The researchers said overall, 89 percent of the total increase in unintentional injury deaths in the U.S. between 1999 and 2005 was due to poisoning among those 15 to 64 years old and falls among those 45 and older, which increased by about 11,200 and 6,600, respectively.

Middle-aged white women need to be careful since they are prone to unintentional poisoning.

Study co-author Susan P. Baker, MPH, a professor with the Bloomberg School’s Center for Injury Research and Policy said the large increases in the number of deaths attributable to poisoning and falls underscore the need for more research on the specific circumstances involved.
Baker added that while we don’t know the cause behind the recent increase in falls mortality, it appears that the increase in poisonings is largely due to prescription drugs.
She said national prevention efforts are needed to control the abuse of prescription drugs and limit access.
She added prescriptions for opioid analgesics to address pain have increased dramatically in the past decade, and data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that prescription drugs have replaced illegal drugs such as cocaine as the most prominent substances in fatal drug overdoses.
In addition to falls and poisonings, four other leading causes of intentional injury deaths were identified for subsequent analyses: suffocation, drowning, fire/burns and motor vehicle crashes. Suffocation rates generally decreased or had no significant change, but they greatly increased in white children less than one year old.
Drowning rates increased among white men 65 and older and among white middle-aged women, but decreased in black males 5 to 24 years old, black females 5 to14 years old, and whites females 15 to 24 years.
Mortality from fires and burns decreased the most.
The rate of dying due to a motorcycle crash more than doubled in Hispanic males 15 to 24 years and in white males ages 45 to 64 years.

Researchers warned those persons who are taking depression medicines to be careful since new pieces of evidence have shown that it could affect the fertility of men.
According to the recent research conducted by NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center it was found out that the antidepressant medication paroxetine (trade names Seroxat, Paxil) may have increased sperm DNA fragmentation  a predictor of compromised fertility.
Based on the research made by NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center it was also discovered that the changes are reversible with normal levels of sperm returning after discontinuation of the drug.
The researchers said this medical report should serve as warning to those taking depression medicines to be careful on the dosage of the medicine to avoid chances they will suffer from infertility.
Dr. Peter Schlegel, the study’s senior author revealed the study is considered as one of the first scientific investigations into the effect of antidepressants on sperm quality.

Those male patients taking depression medicines should be careful since the medication could result in infertility.

Schlegel added although their study doesn’t look directly at fertility, it can infer that as many as half of men taking SSRIs have a reduced ability to conceive.
He said these men should talk with their physician about their treatment options, including non-SSRI depression medications.
The lead researcher said the study also confirmed the effect of SSRIs on sexual function, with more than a third of study participants reporting significant changes in erectile function and almost half reporting ejaculatory difficulties.
With this finding those people who are regularly using depression medicines should always be careful in taking the drugs to avoid chances of suffering that their fertility will be affected.

According to a latest study, four simple questions on well-being asked at the start of each session of ongoing couples therapy can greatly increase chances for reconciliation and improved relationships.
Based on the result of the largest clinical trial with couples to date, it shows that divorce and separation rates for couples that used this feedback technique were 46.2 percent less than that of couples who received therapy as usual.
The data are taken from the 2-year study conducted at the Vestfold Family Counseling Center in Norway by a U.S.-Norwegian team of researchers.
The researchers revealed from October 2005 to December 2007, 205 randomly selected couples receiving therapy in southern Norway participated in the study, which investigated the effects of providing ongoing feedback regarding the progress of treatment to both clients and therapists.
The research team said the couples had problems typical of struggling relationships: communication difficulties, loss of feeling for partner, jealousy/infidelity, conflict, and coping with partner’s physical or psychological problems.
They said half of the study group had feedback incorporated into their therapy while the other half did not.
The team bared couples who used the feedback method rated their well-being on an individual, interpersonal, social, and overall basis by using a visual scale called the Outcome Rating Scale (ORS) at the beginning of each session.

Marriages of couples on the brink of separation were saved by a highly effective therapy technique that uses feedback method.

The researchers explained the results were used to guide each session: if progress was not noted, new directions for therapy were discussed and implemented.
It is noted that therapists participating in the study received training on how to integrate the findings of the ORS and collaborate with couples to find new solutions.
Dr. Barry Duncan, one of the authors of the study said adding feedback can be the start of a revolution in couples therapy.
Duncan explained it encourages couples to honestly evaluate their progress and enables therapists to adjust therapy before it’s too late.
It is said that although feedback has been demonstrated to improve individual psychotherapy outcomes, no studies until now have examined couples therapy.
To get the data, participants were contacted 6 months after the last therapy session.
Respondents then answered questions about their experience in treatment, including whether the couple remained together.
Based on the study it was discovered that the feedback couples were not only more satisfied with their relationships but also reported significantly lower rates of separation or divorce: a 18.4 percent separation/divorce rate for ORS couples versus 34.2 percent for non-ORS couples.
The researchers said this study adds to growing evidence that ongoing client feedback in psychotherapy can significantly improve outcomes.

Recent studies have shown that infants who excel at processing new information at 6- and 12-months-old, typically excel in intelligence and academic achievements as young adults in their 20’s.
The data was taken from the study made by Case Western Reserve University Psychologist Joseph Fagan.
Fagan and his team discovered that the more intelligent infant becomes the more intelligent and more highly achieving adult in the future.
The lead researcher explained intelligence involves processing new information and then making associations with other information an individual encounters throughout life.
He said these processes work together to allow an individual to grow in knowledge.

Babies who are intelligent have higher chances of carrying that ability in adulthood.

In the study conducted by the group, the infant test works by pairing two pictures together for a set period of time.
A researcher watches the length of time an infant looks at the pictures.
Then one of these pictures is paired with a new image and again the time the infant focuses on the new and old images is recorded.
Researchers said infants generally spend about 60 percent of the time looking at new images.
Fagan and his co-investigators Cynthia Holland from Cuyahoga Community College and undergraduate student Karyn Wheeler revisited 61 young adults, who had taken the Fagan Test as babies in their first year of life. They also looked at their first IQ tests at the age of 3 and compared them with their scores at 21 years old.
They discovered an association with intelligence between this early ability to process information and IQ during their young adult years.
The researchers said these infants with ability to process new information at an early age showed higher levels of academic achievement later in life.
Moreover, the researchers revealed that attention to novelty tells us that intelligence is continuous from infancy to adulthood and underscore the importance of information processing as a means for studying intelligence.
The researchers added that this knowledge may help researchers also understand how genetics and environment can influence intelligence.

According to a recent medical study the Hispanic population groups have higher incidence rates of certain cancers and worse cancer outcomes if they live in the United States, than they do if they live in their homelands.
Paulo S. Pinheiro, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., researcher in the Department of Epidemiology at the University Of Miami Miller School Of Medicine said Hispanics are not all the same with regard to their cancer experience.
Pinheiro, who is also the study’s lead researcher, added targeted interventions for cancer prevention and control should take into account the specificity of each Hispanic
subgroup: Cubans, Puerto Ricans or Mexicans.
Amelie G. Ramirez, Dr.P.H. director of the Institute for Health Promotion Research, and co-associate director of the Cancer Prevention and Population Studies research program at the Cancer Therapy & Research Center at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio for her part said Hispanics are really heterogeneous from cultural and socioeconomic perspectives and represent several population groups.
Ramirez said the Hispanic population in the United States is increasing nearly one in every three people will be Hispanic by 2050.
She said it is important to conduct studies like this to better understand these differences and learn what predisposes different population groups to certain types of cancer, in order to improve health outcomes.
To get the data they are searching for, Pinheiro and colleagues evaluated the kinds of cancers occurring in each Hispanic population group and compared their risk after moving to the United States.

Studies have shown that Hispanics are probe to suffer from cancer in the United States.

They conducted the study in Florida, which has a diverse Hispanic community composed of Cubans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Central and South Americans.
The results indicated that these population groups showed different patterns of cancer once they moved to the United States; Mexicans had the lowest rates of cancer overall and Puerto Ricans had the highest rates of cancer. Cubans’ risk of cancer most closely resembles that of non-Hispanic whites. Similar to the U.S. non-Hispanic white population, Cubans and Puerto Ricans seemed to acquire higher risk for diet-related cancers relatively quickly.
Furthermore, Cuban males had higher incidence of tobacco-related cancers; Puerto Rican men had high incidence of liver cancer; and Mexican women had a higher incidence of cervical cancer. For all cancers combined, risk for most cancers was higher (at least 40 percent) among Hispanics living in the United States compared with those who live in their countries of origin.
The researchers also discovered that colorectal cancer risk among Cubans and Mexicans who moved to the United States was more than double that in Cuba and Mexico.
The same was said for lung cancer among Mexican and Puerto Rican Floridian women compared to those in Mexico or Puerto Rico.
Pinheiro explained this suggests that changes in their environment and lifestyles make them more prone to develop cancer.
He said it is puzzling that the groups, for which integration in mainstream American society is easier, including access to health care, are also those with higher cancer rates even after accounting for the increased detection of certain cancers in the United States.
Furthermore, the researchers said the results present important opportunities for United States and international collaborations in the prevention, treatment and research of cancer.
Ramirez said while physicians may not have to change the care they provide they should be more aware of the diversity and differences in cancer prevalence among this population.
She said physicians should probe Hispanic patients more on their background and family history to identify any problematic behaviors that could contribute to health problems.
The researchers said patients should become better informed of some of the positive aspects of their original lifestyles and should be strongly discouraged from adopting unfavorable lifestyles that may be more common in the United States, such as unhealthy diets, smoking and alcohol use.