Whether alcohol withdrawal rates among hospitalized patients with alcohol use disorder increased during the COVID-19 pandemic was examined in this study.
E-Mail
A detailed analysis of mental health treatment trends during the COVID-19 pandemic found a 7% increase in visits during the initial shelter-in-place period in 2020, compared with the same 3-month period in 2019.
The study, published in
The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry March 3, examined patient visits for psychiatric diagnoses among members of Kaiser Permanente in Northern California.
The greatest increases in visits were for substance use (up 51%), adjustment disorder (up 15%), anxiety (up 12%), bipolar disorder (up 9%), and psychotic disorder (up 6%). Adjustment disorder is diagnosed when someone responds to a stressful life event with symptoms such as sadness and hopelessness. The increases we found in patients seeking care for substance use and anxiety are consistent with other data showing the pandemic and shelter-in-place orders were difficult for many people, said lead author Kathryn Erickson-Ridout, MD, a psychiatrist with Kaiser Permanente in Northern Ca
E-Mail
IMAGE: fMRI activity during pain is reduced in the areas shown in blue. Many of these are involved in constructing the experience of pain, including the feeling of suffering, and motivating. view more
Credit: Image provided by M.Zunhammer et al.
A large proportion of the benefit that a person gets from taking a real drug or receiving a treatment to alleviate pain is due to an individual s mindset, not to the drug itself. Understanding the neural mechanisms driving this placebo effect has been a longstanding question. A meta-analysis published in
Nature Communications finds that placebo treatments to reduce pain, known as placebo analgesia, reduce pain-related activity in multiple areas of the brain.
Eighty percent of Americans over 50 say their primary care doctor hasn t asked about their hearing in the past two years, and nearly as many - 77% haven t had their hearing checked by a professional in that same time, according to a new national poll report.
E-Mail
IMAGE: Antibiotic-resistant bacteria, such as Staphylococcus aureus, abound in our wastewater effluents where they could be spreading the resistance gene to other (pathogenic) bacteria. Scientists have now begun to explore ways. view more
Credit: Environmental Science and Technology
For nearly a century, improvement in human healthcare has depended heavily on the efficiency with which we can treat bacterial diseases. But today, antibiotic resistance the ability of certain mutant super-bacteria to block out antibiotics poses a major threat to healthcare, food security, and overall social development worldwide, threatening to upend much of the progress our civilization has achieved.
Scientists are now urgently attempting to tackle this problem from various angles. Professor Yunho Lee at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), Korea, whose contribution is published in the American Chemical Society s