Minneapolis St. Paul Mental Health Blog

Does Sleep apnea in young children may affect youngsters' attention, memory and language development?

Sleep apnea causes people to experience repetitive pauses in breathing while they sleep. This causes oxygen levels to drop temporarily, according to the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

The new study involved almost 1,400 public schoolchildren with sleep apnea. The kids ranged in age from 5 to 7. Some, but not all, of the children snored.

Women who regularly consume more than 2 caffeinated beverages a day leading up to conception are more likely to miscarry a pregnancy, according to research published in Fertility and Sterility.

Eating Disorders | Taking note of patients that have lost weight could be a signal that there is a lot more going on such as an eating disorder.

According to new research, adolescents with atypical anorexia nervosa (AN) have psychological and physical morbidity that may be just as severe as that among adolescents with full-threshold AN, according to new research.

In atypical AN, a person loses a significant amount of weight but does not become underweight, Dr. Susan M. Sawyer of the University of Melbourne in Australia and her colleagues explain in their report, published online March 29 in Pediatrics.

"We have observed a striking increase in this type of presentation among adolescent inpatients," they write. "Remarkably, of patients admitted to hospital with restrictive eating disorders, the proportion who were not underweight rose from 8% to 47% over a six-year period."

Adolescents with atypical AN have behaviors and cognitions similar to those of patients with AN, the researchers add, and similar acute physical complications. To investigate further, the researchers compared 42 patients with atypical AN and 118 with full-threshold AN who presented to a specialist pediatric eating disorder program.

Among the atypical patients, 71% were overweight or obese, versus 12% of the full-threshold patients. Average weight loss was 17.6 kg for the atypical AN group, compared to 11 kg for the AN patients, and the atypical patients also lost weight over a longer period of time (13.3 versus 10.2 months).

Frequency of bradycardia and orthostatic instability were similar for the atypical AN and AN groups. There were also no significant differences in the frequencies of psychiatric comorbidities or suicidal ideation.

According to a recent study in Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Adolescents with prior lifetime mental disorders had high rates of both alcohol (10.3%) and illicit drug (14.9%) abuse, with or without dependence.

By age 18, approximately one-third of adolescents with preexisting mental disorders were regular alcohol drinkers or illicit drug users.

Screen time is a reality of modern childhood, with kids of every age spending hours upon hours in front of iPads, smartphones and televisions. So, what does this mean for overall development?

Bipolar disorder is one of the most important psychiatric illnesses because it is fairly common - affecting between 1 and 3 percent of the population - and quite debilitating. So, what about genetic profiling?

When parents suffer depression, there can be a negative effects on their children. When Mom gets better, the children get better.

Observation studies on the relationship between coffee intake / risk of depression

...and the relationship between caffeine consumption and depression remain controversial, here are some relevant findings:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued a guideline with 12 recommendations for primary care clinicians who prescribe opioids for chronic pain outside of active cancer treatment, palliative care, and end-of-life care.

Specifically, the recommendations cover when to initiate or continue opioid treatment, which opioids should be used and for how long, and how to address potential harms associated with treatment.

Prescriptions for benzodiazepine and overdose deaths increased considerably from 1996 to 2013, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health.

Marcus A. Bachhuber, MD, MSHP, from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, N.Y., and colleagues examined data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and multiple-cause-of-death data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to describe trends in benzodiazepine prescriptions and overdose deaths among adults.