John Cleese takes us on a tour of a laughter therapy practice in India.
Laughter promotes stress reduction, community bonding, stronger immune system... and joy. What a simple solution!
Insomina -- the inability to fall asleep naturally -- affects most people at some time in their roller coaster lives. And insomina cures are possible with self-managed changes in behavior in many cases.
Sleepless nights. Missed work days. As anyone with insomnia will attest, a sleep-deprived condition can lead to intense personal suffering.
But combine insomnia with anxiety, depression and chronic pain, and sleeplessness can become even more troubling.
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), however, may be a remedy for this multi-faceted problem, says a Ryerson University professor.
"When you have another disorder, you face unique barriers that other people do not," says Dr. Colleen Carney, assistant professor of psychology, and director of Ryerson's Sleep and Mood Disorder Program. "For example, a conventional insomnia strategy involves getting out of bed at the same time every day. But someone with depression may wonder, "what if I have nothing to get out of bed for?"
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
Carney's latest book is Quiet Your Mind and Get to Sleep: Solutions to Insomnia for Those With Depression, Anxiety or Chronic Pain is the only self-help book that focuses on people with insomnia combined with other health conditions. Quiet Your Mind and Get to Sleep was co-authored by Dr. Rachel Manber of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.
Insominia is Common...and Disruptive
According to insomina research - one in every seven of us - experiences problems going to sleep and/or staying asleep. Furthermore, insomnia is a characteristic of almost all psychological diagnoses. Sleep clinics also report that insomnia patients with psychological disorders outnumber those without other conditions at a rate of nearly two to one.
Quiet Your Mind and Get to Sleep suggests many cognitive behavioural solutions to insomnia. Some of the tips in this practical book about insomnia cures include:
Previous insomnia research studies have also demonstrated that CBT offers many advantages over sleep-aid medications. Among them,
CBT has also become a popular choice for the treatment of sleeplessness says Dr. Carney. Through worksheets and a structured program, Quiet Your Mind and Get to Sleep helps readers discover and then address the cause of their insomnia.
CBT Can be a Self-Help Solution for Insomnia
"For this reason, CBT makes intuitive sense to people," says Carney. "It's a brief treatment and, as our book proves, it can be done on a self-help basis."
In addition to teaching at Ryerson Universtiy Carney is also president of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, an interest group on insomnia and other sleep disorders.
Ryerson University is Canada's leader in innovative career-focused education, offering close to 100 PhD, master's, and undergraduate programsIn recent studies of married couple supportiveness issues in their first few years of marriage, researchers learned that too much support is harder on a marriage than not enough. When it comes to marital satisfaction, both partners are happier if husbands receive the right type of support, and if wives ask for support when they need it.
The married support findings
illustrate the need for couples to understand the various ways they can
be supportive, and the importance of communicating what they need and
when, said Erika Lawrence, associate professor of psychology
in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Marriage issues are
solved with understanding and slightly changed support behaviors.
"The idea that simply being more supportive is better for your marriage is a myth," Lawrence said. "Often husbands and wives think, 'If my partner really knows me and loves me, he or she will know I'm upset and will know how to support me.' However, that's not the best way to approach a supportive marriage. Your partner shouldn't have to be a mind reader. Couples will be happier if they learn how to say, 'This is how I'm feeling, and this is how you can help me.'"
Too much of a good thing in marriage issues
In one study, Lawrence and colleagues discovered that receiving more support than desired is a greater risk factor for marital decline than not being there for a spouse.
"If you don't get enough support, you can make up for that with family and friends -- especially women, who tend to have multiple sources of support," she said. "When you receive too much support, there's no way to adjust for that."
The supportive marriage issues study involved 103 husbands and wives who completed surveys five times over their first five years of marriage. The questionnaires looked at how support was provided and measured marital satisfaction.
Types of supportive marriage
Four kinds of marriage issue support were identified in the study:
Worst! Too much unwanted advice!
Results showed that too much informational support -- usually in the form of unwanted advice-giving -- is the most detrimental.
Always Wanted in Marriage: Genuine Esteem Support!
In contrast, you can never go wrong providing esteem support, assuming it's genuine.
Too little marriage support was more common than too much.
Receiving less support than desired was a complaint of about two-thirds of men and at least 80 percent of women. Only about one-third of men and women reported receiving more support than they wanted.
The paper, published in the Journal of Family Psychology, was co-authored by Rebecca L. Brock, a UI graduate student in psychology.
Marriage Support isn't one-size-fits-all
A related supportive marriage study showed that for men, it's important that their wives provide the right kind of support, offering emotional, informational, tangible or esteem support as needed. For wives, it's more important that their husbands try to be supportive -- even if what they do doesn't quite hit the mark.
"Both parties are more satisfied if the husband gets the right kind of support, and if the wife feels like she's supported," Lawrence said. Marriage issues are shared by both genders. "Husbands shouldn't throw their hands up if they're not sure what to do. They need to stay in there and keep trying, because we found that women appreciate the effort to be supportive."
Dialog solves marriage issues
Lawrence said dialog is key to a supportive marriage. If you need support, request it; if you're providing support, ask how you can help -- don't assume you know what to do. Afterward, talk about what worked and what didn't, and adjust accordingly.
"The assumption is that men just want to be left alone and women want to be held and listened to," Lawrence said. "In reality, different men want different kinds of support, and different women want different kinds of support."
Marriage Issue Research
For this study of marriage support, 275 newlyweds completed questionnaires about supportive behaviors and marital satisfaction, the type of support they received, and whether it was sufficient. Twice during the study, 235 married couples visited the lab to discuss how they would approach a goal such as stress management, a career change, improving family relationships or being more assertive. Researchers shot video of the 10-minute conversations and observed how couples asked for, provided and accepted support.
The supportive marriage behaviors paper was published in the journal Personal Relationships. Lawrence was the lead author, with co-authors from the University of Iowa, CIGNA Health Solutions, Santa Clara University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Both marital support studies were supported by grants from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institute for Child and Human Development, and the UI."This is important, because surgery is not often affordable or reimbursed by insurance," said leading scientist Dr. Donna Ryan. "In fact, many medical treatments are frequently not reimbursed by insurance if they are for obesity. So this research is needed to show that primary care doctors are capable of helping obese patients lose weight to improve health, even those with extreme obesity. "
Ryan said losing only five-percent of body weight can reap healthy benefits for the extremely obese, and nearly 61-percent of those in her clinical trial achieved that. More than 40-percent lost 10-percent body weight or more.
Physicians Trained in Intensive Medical Intervention
Ryan and her team spread out across Louisiana to recruit and train practicing physicians and their office staffs in eight cities in what she called "intensive medical intervention," in which physicians used a combination of medication, low-calorie diets and behavior changes. All of the techniques were endorsed by national guidelines for obesity management. Training of physicians and their staffs took about a day and a half.
Funded by the Louisiana Office of Group Benefits, which provides health coverage for state employees, the research team contacted state employees, seeking participants to screen for and enroll in the trial. Nearly 400 participants enrolled in the two-year trial, called LOSS, using the nearest trained physicians.
About half of the participants received the intensive medical intervention, the other half received what Ryan called "usual care."
Program Starts with Low-calorie Liquid Diet
Those in the intense intervention group were immediately placed on a low-calorie liquid diet. They gradually moved to a low calorie, highly controlled diet using meal replacements, and received weight loss medication and group behavioral therapy that included lessons in exercise, activity, self-monitoring and recommendations for walking, water exercise and weight training. The group sessions were supervised by office staff.
Recommended Activities
Success in Daily Routine of Doctor's Practice
"We conducted this trial as close to the reality of a typical clinic setting as we could," Ryan said, "We didn't want to learn just if these strategies worked, but if they would work in the daily routine of a doctor's practice."
Challenge of Keeping Weight Off
Ryan noted that the continual challenge in weight loss
is keeping weight off, and that means sticking with a routine.
More than 50% of the LOSS participants stuck with it for two years or more, keeping much of the weight off, but Ryan said that does leave room for improving weight loss maintenance.
The LOSS trial results were published in the current issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
The Pennington Biomedical Research Center is a campus of the Louisiana State University System and conducts basic, clinical and population research.Both humans and mice are particularly vulnerable to noise- and drug-induced hearing loss at young ages.
"The laboratory mouse is a well-established model for human hearing," says coauthor Kevin K. Ohlemiller, Ph.D., research associate professor of otolaryngology. "They possess similar inner ear anatomy and physiology and similar patterns of age-related, noise-induced and drug-related hearing loss."
Ohlemiller worked with Elizabeth A. Fernandez, then a doctoral student in the Program in Audiology and Communication Sciences, to see if loud noise and a low dose of kanamycin would exacerbate each other's effects. Because the first month of life is when mice are most vulnerable to noise and drugs that damage hearing, 20- to 30-day old mice were injected with either kanamycin or saline solution twice a day for 11 days. They were then exposed to 110 decibels of noise for 30 seconds.
Two surprising
findings arose.
First, this particular strain of mice was very
sensitive to noise-induced hearing loss. Significant loss of some
sensory cells in the ear resulted in permanent hearing damage, even
over the short time span.
Second, a regular, low dose of kanamycin completely protected the mice against this sensory cell damage and hearing loss. The protective effect of repeated doses persists for at least two days after the last injection, the scientists noted.
Researchers
plan to use these hearing research findings in a number of ways.
They can map
the genes in this strain of mice to determine what makes them so
noise-sensitive and possibly figure out how kanamycin protects sensory
cells in the ear.
In addition, the findings open up new possibilities
for clinical research.
Learning how kanamycin protects the ear's sensory cells could help scientists develop drugs with similar effects. Medications that protect the ears from damaging noise levels could benefit a wide range of groups, from soldiers to airline workers to premature babies.
Basic Science Research PLUS Clinical Problem & Practice
"This very dramatically points out the benefits
of having basic scientists who can take a clinical problem and find a
result opposite of what we expected," Clark says. "These results not
only energize laboratory scientists and begin new lines of research,
but they also have implications for clinical practice. This has been an
amazing sequence of events, to start a project in a helicopter and end
up under a microscope."
Fernandez EA, Ohlemiller KK, Gagnon PM, Clark WW. Protection against noise-induced hearing loss in young CBA/J mice by low-dose kanamycin. Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. Jan. 22, 2010 (advance online publication).
Funding from National Institutes of Health and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis Department of Otolaryngology supported this research.
For 40 years in this country we've been trying to get individuals to reduce the amount of sodium we consume and it hasn't worked.
The report found that certain core needle biopsies could distinguish between malignant and benign lesions approximately as accurately as open surgical biopsy, which is commonly considered the "gold standard" method of evaluating suspicious lesions.
Core needle biopsies have a much lower risk of severe complications than open surgical procedures, researchers found in a report published this month in Annals of Internal Medicine.
The report also found that women who are initially diagnosed with breast cancer by surgical biopsy are more likely to undergo multiple surgical procedures during treatment than women who are initially diagnosed with breast cancer by core needle biopsy.
"One challenge of providing appropriate care for patients is finding balance between the accuracy of a test or procedure and causing the least harm and burden to patients," said AHRQ Director Carolyn M. Clancy, M.D. "This report indicates that core needle biopsy may strike that balance in many instances. Patients should continue to speak to their doctor when making important decisions about testing, and use all available information to make the decision that is right for them."
Open surgical biopsies, which involve removing a sample of tissue from the suspicious area through a surgical incision, are highly accurate. The procedure may be performed under general anesthesia, sedation plus local anesthesia, or local anesthesia only. But, while generally considered safe, open surgical biopsies are surgical procedures that, like all surgeries, carry a small amount of risk. Given that only a fraction of women who undergo breast biopsy procedures are diagnosed with cancer, use of traditional biopsy leads to large numbers of women who do not have cancer undergoing an invasive surgical biopsy.
By contrast, a core needle biopsy is a procedure that removes breast tissue through a hollow core needle inserted through the skin. The procedure is usually performed under local anesthesia. Multiple core-needle samples may be taken from the suspicious area.
Because it is less invasive, core-needle biopsy costs less than open surgical biopsy, consumes fewer resources, and generally is preferred by patients, according to the report.
The report found that recent technological improvements to core needle biopsy, including stereotactic guidance, ultrasound guidance and vacuum assistance, have improved the method's accuracy.
AHRQ's new report, Comparative Effectiveness of Core Needle and Open Surgical Biopsy for the Diagnosis of Breast Lesions, is the newest analysis from the Agency's Effective Health Care program. That program, authorized by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act, represents an important Federal effort to compare alternative treatments for health conditions and make the findings public. The program is intended provide information in order to help patients, doctors, nurses, and others choose the most effective treatments. Information, including the new report and summary guides for clinicians and patients, can be found at http://www.effectivehealthcare.ahrq.gov.
Of those treated with cognitive behavior therapy, only 7% had a recurrence compared to 36.7% of people treated with light therapy.
The recurrence rate for the combination group was 5.5 percent.
When Rohan looked at the
severity of the depression that did occur, however, CBT was associated
with less severe depression than those treated with either light
therapy or a combination of both.
The researchers see implications for workplaces, retail stores and other organizations that have relied on traditional surveillance and security measures to enforce rules.
"Companies often employ heavy-handed interventions to regulate conduct, but they can be costly or oppressive," said Liljenquist, whose office smells quite average. "This is a very simple, unobtrusive way to promote ethical behavior."
Perhaps the findings could be applied at home, too, Liljenquist said with a smile. "Could be that getting our kids to clean up their rooms might help them clean up their acts, too."
The study titled "The Smell of Virtue" was unusually simple and conclusive.
Participants engaged in several tasks, the only difference being that some worked in unscented rooms, while others worked in rooms freshly spritzed with Windex.
The first experiment evaluated fairness. As a test of whether clean scents would enhance reciprocity, participants played a classic "trust game." Subjects received $12 of real money (allegedly sent by an anonymous partner in another room). They had to decide how much of it to either keep or return to their partners who had trusted them to divide it fairly. Subjects in clean-scented rooms were less likely to exploit the trust of their partners, returning a significantly higher share of the money.
· The average amount of cash given back by the people in the "normal" room was $2.81. But the people in the clean-scented room gave back an average of $5.33.
The second experiment evaluated whether clean scents would encourage charitable behavior. Subjects indicated their interest in volunteering with a campus organization for a Habitat for Humanity service project and their interest in donating funds to the cause.
· Participants surveyed in a Windex-ed room were significantly more interested in volunteering (4.21 on a 7-point scale) than those in a normal room (3.29).
· 22 percent of Windex-ed room participants said they'd like to donate money, compared to only 6 percent of those in a normal room.
Follow-up questions confirmed that participants didn't notice the scent in the room and that their mood at the time of the experiment didn't affect the outcomes.
Cleanliness is next to godliness? Was Granny right?
"Basically, our study shows that morality and cleanliness can go hand-in-hand," said Galinsky of the Kellogg School. "Researchers have known for years that scents play an active role in reviving positive or negative experiences. Now, our research can offer more insight into the links between people's charitable actions and their surroundings."
While this study examined the influence of the physical environment on morality, Zhong and Liljenquist previously published work that demonstrated an intimate link between morality and physical cleanliness. Their 2006 paper in Science reported that transgressions activated a desire to be physically cleansed.
Liljenquist is now researching how perceptions of cleanliness shape our impressions of people and organizations. "The data tell a compelling story about how much we rely upon cleanliness cues to make a wide range of judgments about others," she said.
Katie Liljenquist is assistant professor of organizational leadership at BYU's Marriott School of Management, and the lead author on the piece in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. Co-authors are Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management and Adam Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Source: Newswise
Studies indicate that MEB disorders are a major health threat and are as commonplace today among young people as a fractured limb---not inevitable but not at all unusual.
Clear windows of opportunity are available to prevent MEB disorders and related problems before they occur.
And because mental health and physical health problems are interwoven, improvements in mental health will undoubtedly also improve physical health. Yet the nation's approach to MEB disorders has largely been to wait to act until a disorder is well-established and has already done considerable harm. All too often, opportunities are missed to use evidence-based approaches to prevent the occurrence of disorders, establish building blocks for healthy development in all young people, and limit the environmental exposures that increase risk--approaches likely to be far more cost-effective in addressing MEB disorders in the long run.
Interventions before a disorder manifests itself offer the best opportunity to protect young people. Such interventions can be integrated with routine health care and wellness promotion, as well as in schools, families, and communities.
A range of policies and practices that target young people with specific risk factors; promote positive emotional development; and build on family, school, and community resources have proven to be effective at reducing and preventing MEB disorders.
Making use of the evidence-based interventions already at hand could potentially save billions of dollars by preventing or mitigating disorders that would otherwise require expensive treatment.
A recent study by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine recommended multiple strategies for enhancing the psychological and emotional well-being of young people.
RESOURCE: Download the executive summary or complete research report at the National Academies Press:
Preventing Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Disorders Among Young People:
Progress and Possibilities
This study is a project of the Board on Children, Youth, and Families (BCYF) within the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education of the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine.
www.bocyf.org
202-334-1935