Insight Into Depression

Insight Into Depression | About Us: "Insight Into Depression's mission is to provide non-psychiatry trained health care professionals with high quality, peer-reviewed CME opportunities and comprehensive scientific and clinical information in the specific area of Major Depressive Disorders (MDD) to improve the diagnosis of these disorders commonly overlooked in the primary care setting.
Initiative Overview
Through multi-curricula and multimedia platforms, Insight Into Depression strives to be the source of MDD education and information for primary care, general practice, and family practice physicians, as well as internal medicine specialists. As components of the Insight Into Depression integrated initiative may be of interest to additional health care providers and clinicians, activities will be open to all practitioners involved in the diagnosis and/or treatment of MDD."

Insight Into Depression

Insight Into Depression About Us: "Insight Into Depression's mission is to provide non-psychiatry trained health care professionals with high quality, peer-reviewed CME opportunities and comprehensive scientific and clinical information in the specific area of Major Depressive Disorders (MDD) to improve the diagnosis of these disorders commonly overlooked in the primary care setting.
Initiative Overview
Through multi-curricula and multimedia platforms, Insight Into Depression strives to be the source of MDD education and information for primary care, general practice, and family practice physicians, as well as internal medicine specialists. As components of the Insight Into Depression integrated initiative may be of interest to additional health care providers and clinicians, activities will be open to all practitioners involved in the diagnosis and/or treatment of MDD.
The following goals were developed as guiding objectives for health care practitioners participating in Insight Into Depression continuing medical education activities:
Recognize barriers to the diagnosis of depression in the primary care setting
Identify common medical conditions that can confuse the diagnosis of depression
Develop strategies for communicating with patients about the diagnosis, prognosis, and initiation and duration of therapy
Review the critical importance of compliance with treatment regimens with patients and their families or other support members
Adopt a systematic approach to monitoring patient response and develop strategies, including referral, for dealing with an inadequate response to therapy
Use best evidence available in treating the individual patient as a whole/.../ "

Insight Into Depression

Insight Into Depression
Depression has reached dramatic proportions and represents a national problem that is often ignored, either because it is not recognized, diagnosed properly and/or because of the stigma that is still attached to it. Therefore, Insight Into Depression was founded in 2006 as a joint CME initiative by the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and its educational partner, Atlas Medical Communications to address the current need for additional education about the diagnosis and treatment of major depressive disorders for primary care, general practice, and family practice physicians, as well as internal medicine specialists.

Addiction Relapse Associated with Temptation Brain Chemical - CME Teaching Brief - MedPage Today

Addiction Relapse Associated with Temptation Brain Chemical - CME Teaching Brief - MedPage Today: "Review
ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 13 - A stress-related brain chemical that seems to create a susceptibility to temptation may be related to why alcoholics fall off the wagon or clean drug addicts turn recidivist. The chemical is called corticotropin-releasing factor.
So it appears in rats. Corticotropin-releasing factor has long been known to be involved in aversive behavior, making people or animals shy away from pain or distress. But paradoxically, it also appears to play a role in one of the brain's reward systems, according to Kent Berridge, Ph.D., of the University of Michigan.
'In this one reward-related structure -- the nucleus accumbens -- it seems to be having this paradoxical effect of turning on the desire for a reward,' Dr. Berridge said in an interview from Cambridge, England, where he is a visiting professor.
Corticotropin-releasing factor, which is released during stress, has mostly negative effects, including appetite suppression, Dr. Berridge and colleagues noted in the April 13 online issue of the open access journal BMC Biology. But in the nucleus accumbens of experimental rats, it appears to trigger an increased appetite for a pleasurable reward. /.../"

MRI scans may have antidepressant effect - Mental Health - MSNBC.com

MRI scans may have antidepressant effect - Mental Health - MSNBC.com
(Recomendado por Ana Robinson Achutti)
MRI scans may have antidepressant effect Study suggests electromagnetic fields can affect brain biology
Reuters
Updated: 6:25 p.m. ET March 10, 2005
WASHINGTON - High-speed magnetic resonance imaging scans produce effects in rats similar to the use of antidepressants, confirming observations made in human patients, U.S. researchers reported Thursday.
The finding suggests that electromagnetic fields can affect brain biology, the team at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School reported.
“We found that when we administered the magnetic stimulation to the rats, we saw an antidepressant-like effect, the same effect as seen after administration of standard antidepressant drugs,” said William Carlezon, director of McLean’s Behavioral Genetics Laboratory.
Writing in the journal Biological Psychiatry, Carlezon and colleagues said they tested the rats after another team at the hospital reported a new type of magnetic resonance imaging, called echo planar magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (EP-MRSI), had improved the mood of people in the depressed phase of bipolar disorder.
The new study was designed “to see if we could demonstrate in an animal model what the clinicians thought they were seeing in humans,” Carlezon said.
When repeatedly stressed, rats develop helpless behavior, which may be their version of despair, the researchers said. But in the experiment, the rats that had been exposed to EP-MRSI showed less helplessness during the stress tests.
“They behaved as if they had received an antidepressant,” said Dr. Bruce Cohen, psychiatrist in chief at McLean.
“It’s a non-drug way to change the firing of nerve cells,” Cohen said. “That’s why the implications of this work have the potential to be so profound.”
MRIs more invasive than thought?While this may offer a new way to treat depression, it also suggests that at least some forms of MRI are more invasive than previously thought, the researchers said.
“Renewed caution is warranted when high-speed MRI is used to diagnose or study disorders involving the brain,” the researchers wrote.
“People assume when they are getting an MRI that nothing is happening, that you are simply getting a picture of the brain. But in actuality the body is being exposed to magnetic and electrical fields,” Carlezon said.
“They may cause other effects we don’t understand yet,” he added.