Providentia

It's Not Fair!

How much stress do you have to deal with at work?

 While we all have to face a certain amount of stress in most jobs, the physical and psychological costs of too much workplace stress can be enormous.   Stress can occur for many reasons, whether it involves fear of layoffs due to a poor economy, increased workload due to staff cutbacks, or facing greater pressure to perform by employers,  people who are overworked or facing greater uncertainty on the job can find themselves developing health problems that can only get worse without relief.  

According to the allostatic load model of workplace stress, chronic stress can lead to greater "wear and tear" due to frequent activation of the body's natural defenses against acute dangers.   Whenever we are facing a new threat, stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine are released into our systems to prepare us for dealing with the threat.  Ordinarily, our system returns to normal afterward following a period of rest.   But when there is no opportunity for rest or if we are faced with repeated threats with minimal rest periods in between, the body can become overwhelmed as the allostatic load reaches a critical point.  This is when the strain begins to cause significant damage to many of the body's organs, including the heart.    Too much stress in the workplace can result in a significant rise in medical problems, increased absenteeism, increased risk of substance abuse or emotional problems, and can even be life-threatening.   In Japan, there is even a term used for it:  karoshi which literally means "death from overwork."     But there are other factors that come into play with the stress people experience in the workplace.  

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.

What Causes Apathy in Seniors?

Apathy is a common neuropsychiatric symptom in Alzheimer’s disease dementia and amnestic mild cognitive impairment and is associated with cortical atrophy in Alzheimer’s disease dementia. A new study published in The Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences investigated possible correlations between apathy and cortical atrophy in 47 individuals with mild cognitive impairment and 19 clinically normal elderly. Backward elimination multivariate linear regression was used to evaluate the cross-sectional relationship between scores on the Apathy Evaluation Scale and thickness of several cortical regions and covariates. Lower inferior temporal cortical thickness was predictive of greater apathy. Greater anterior cingulate cortical thickness was also predictive of greater apathy, suggesting an underlying reactive process.

For the abstract

Smartphones and The Future of Health Care

Can smartphone technology be used to provide better mental health care for people in crisis?

Part of the difficulty in dealing with people experiencing mental health problems is getting them the help they need when a new crisis develops.   Even for people with chronic mental health problems, there can be long periods when their symptoms are under control, at least as far as living a normal life is concerned.    Though there are often warning signs that can indicate potential problems developing,  spotting these signs can be extremely difficult for mental health professionals who don't see their clients until after their condition has become severe enough for them to need professional help.   By this point, treatment becomes much harder because of the delay involved.   Also, people in clinics or hospitals are usually less comfortable than they would be in more familiar settings such as at home which can also make their condition worse.

But what if there were a way of detecting these warning signs earlier?   If people in crisis can get help sooner then they could potentially avoid going into the kind of downward spiral that can make it so much harder to recover.   And possibly prevent the need for expensive treatment in the first place.    

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.

Bullying and Your Child's Health

Using multilevel modeling,  a new study published in the Journal of School Violence examined how different types of bullying, involving both peers and teachers, relate to psychosomatic health complaints. Data were obtained via the Stockholm School Survey of 41,032 ninth- and eleventh-grade students in the years 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010. Results showed that students involved in bullying as either a bully, a victim, or both a bully and a victim displayed poorer psychosomatic health than those not involved in bullying. Victims of peer-bullying also reported significantly poorer health than perpetrators. Two class-aggregated measures of bullying remained positively associated with ninth-grade student health complaints even when their individual-level analogues were taken into account. Thus, both the proportion of victims of teacher-bullying and peer-bullying in the school class appeared to generate health problems that go beyond the directly exposed students. However, an interaction revealed that the latter association was confined to female students only.

For the abstract

The Road to Happiness

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.  John Barrymore

We all want to be happy.  In fact, "the pursuit of happiness" is one of the fundamental rights demanded in the Declaration of Independence, right along with "life" and "liberty."   But staying happy tends to be difficult as we grow older and we find ourselves wrapped up in all the complex problems we face in our day-to-day lives.    With all the daily hassles, job pressures, financial woes, and the aches and pains that come with being human, happy has a way of being elusive. 

Even defining what we mean by happiness can be tricky.   Depending on what is happening  at any given moment, happiness can range from simple contentment to the kind of joy that only occurs at key points in our lives.   If we simply define happiness in terms of the amount of positive emotion we happen to be feeling at any given moment,  research suggests that happiness tends to increase over time unless health problems develop.   As we grow older, we (usually) become better at regulating our emotions and also acquire more memories of positive moments in our lives.  

Still, research looking at how happiness grows and changes across lifespan has yielded conflicting conclusions about when people are most likely to be happy.  While cross-sectional studies comparing adults in different age groups have suggested that happiness is highest in late adolescence or early adulthood, longitudinal research suggest that happiness is greatest in seniors.   One study using longitudinal data from the Midlife in the United Status research project found that positive affect was relatively stable across adults in their mid-20s to late thirties, declining during the 40s, and slowly rising afterward to hit its peak from 60 to 69.  All of which suggests that those proclaiming "60 is the new 40" may be right after all. 

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.

 

Does GPS Help Drivers in the Early Stages of Dementia?

The initial symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) include attention deficits, memory loss and deficiencies in topographic and spatial orientation. People with AD may have way-finding difficulties in driving due to the deterioration of their navigation ability. Although the use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) has been proven to be a useful aid for older people in driving, there is no evidence to suggest that the benefit could extend to drivers with AD. A new study published in the journal Gerontology aims to investigate the effectiveness of the GPS in assisting drivers with mild AD in finding their destination safely.   Twenty-eight drivers with mild to very mild AD, diagnosed by a general practitioner or a psychogeriatrician, completed all clinical and psychometric assessments including the Mini Mental State Examination, Trail Making Test B and Doors and People Test. During the driving assessment, 3 driving trials with different settings (normal, visual only and audio-only) of the GPS were administered to all participants. The participants were required to follow instructions from the GPS and perform a variety of driving tasks on a driving simulator. The driving performances of participants were assessed by criteria specific to AD drivers. The driving assessment criteria were first combined to form the overall driving performance score: a higher score indicated a better overall driving performance. The other outcome of this study was the success of participants to navigate to a predetermined destination. Results showed that the driving performance of participants was different among the 3 settings (F = 72.8, p < 0.001) and the pairwise comparison between the 3 settings was significant (p < 0.001). The driving performance score was highest in the audio-only setting (mean: 20.0, SD: 2.2), moderate in the normal setting (mean: 16.7, SD: 2.6) and lowest in the visual-only setting (mean: 14.3, SD: 3.3). When compared with the visual-only setting, drivers using the audio only setting (OR: 37.2, 95% CI: 9.2–151.2) and normal setting (OR: 37.2, 95% CI: 4.8–286.9) were more likely to successfully find their destination (p < 0.05).  The researchers conclude that  using single, simple auditory instructions with the absence of the visual output of the GPS could potentially help people with mild AD to improve their driving ability and reach their destination.

For the abstract

"Demon Attack" Blamed for South African Riot

It was meant to be a colourful ceremony presided over by South Africa's president, Jacob Zuma.   Instead it turned into a bizarre spectacle with hundreds of women screaming and crying uncontrollably over hallucinations of being attacked by demons.  

Every year in September, the Umkhosi woMhlanga or "Royal Reed Dance" is held at the Enyokeni Royal Palace in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa.   Thousands of young women come from all over Zululand and Swaziland to take part in the eight-day event.   Dressed in traditional beads which leave most of the body uncovered, the participating women are obliged to undergo "virginity testing" before the ceremony begins to ensure their eligibility.   

They then dance bare-breasted for the current Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, who presides over the ceremony and each woman then deposits a reed in front of the king as they pass before him.  As in previous years,  President Zuma (himself a Zulu) attends the ceremony to show support for Zulu customs.  Long practiced in Swaziland, the Reed Dance was only introduced to South Africa in 1991 as a way to discourage young women from becoming sexually active too early.   Whenever a young woman is declared ineligible whether due to pregnancy or failing to pass the virginity test, the woman's family is fined a cow.  

While it is still uncertain what went wrong at the ceremony, guards were forced to escort the president from the palace as many of the women began pushing each other towards the area where Zuma and the king were sitting.   Some were crying and rolling on the ground and later needed medical treatment.    Though President Zuma later returned to his seat after ordered was restored, he was unable to give his planned speech since it was late in the evening.   The Zulu king was visibly upset by the incident and blamed what happened on "evil spirits."  

An investigation determined that some women had begun hallucinating at the very start of the festival, possibly due to the poor weather conditions that the thousands of women in attendance needed to endure.   Along with being unusually cold and damp for this time of year,  the women had little shelter despite being forced to listen to the king's lengthy speech.    There were also allegations that the disruption had been started when some women saw a snake or a large frog though this has been disputed. 

Religious leaders were later called in to chase away evil spirits and to help reassure authorities that the crowd was under control.

Whether or not this latest incident was caused by a form of mass hysteria,  the annual Reed Dance continues to be marked by controversy and tragedy.  Last year, nine women returning from the Reed Dance were killed in a bus accident caused by the unsafe transportation that many participants are forced to use.   To prevent further accidents the government has arranged a crackdown on all buses found to be unsafe.

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Can Speech Analysis Predict Schizophrenia in Young People?

A new research study published in the journal Schizophrenia suggests that a computerized speech-analysis program can predict likelihood of young people developing schizophrenia later in life.  Developed by a team of researchers at Columbia University, the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, the program looks fordisjointed speech patterns and other language problems that can suggest the kind of thought disturbances often found in young people in the very early stages of schizophrenia.   Based on their analysis of the speech of thirty-four at-risk youths, the researchers have concluded that their speech analysis program is 100 percent effective in detecting psychosis.    

“In our study, we found that minimal semantic coherence—the flow of meaning from one sentence to the next—was characteristic of those young people at risk who later developed psychosis,” said Guillermo Cecchi, a biometaphorical-computing researcher for IBM Research and one of the authors of the study, in an interview with The Atlantic magazine.  "“It was not the average. What this means is that over 45 minutes of interviewing, these young people had at least one occasion of a jarring disruption in meaning from one sentence to the next. As an interviewer, if my mind wandered briefly, I might miss it. But a computer would pick it up.”

Through automatic language analysis, the program can look at the sentence length, use of modifiers, and speech disruptions often seen in  mental illness.   Speech analysis can also be used in a variety of different settings with fewer mistakes than existing methods.   At present, psychiatrists who interview people suspected of being at-risk for mental illness are only able to identify future schizophrenia cases with seventy-nine percent accuracy.   By measuring the kind of syntax and semantic problems seen in people who are particularly vulnerable to mental illness, the researchers hope to provide preventive treatment which could delay or even prevent the onset of more serious symptoms.

Schizophrenia usually begins in young adults and can affect around one percent of the population.  There are believed to be over twenty million schizophrenics worldwide and the majority are able to be functioning members of society with proper medication.    Since people with schizophrenia are frequently misdiagnosed or are unable to receive necessary treatment due to financial or limited access to health care,  they often experience significant problems living in the community and can become homeless or enter the criminal justice system.      The life expectancy for people with schizophrenia is often twenty years less than in the regular population since they are more vulnerable to serious health problems due to being unable to care for themselves.  Treatment that begins earlier can lead to patients having a greater chance of avoiding many of the life problems linked to schizophrenia.

While speech analysis appears to be a promising tool in providing high-risk young people with specially tailored treatment programming, more research is needed to see how effective it is in diagnosing schizophrenia in different treatment settings.  

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The Problem With Solvents

According to a new review article published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, both the substance abuse and occupational health literatures confirm that with extensive exposures, individuals can acquire a solvent-induced encephalopathy. Although predictable CNS deficits for each individual type of solvent exposure and amount of exposure time are not yet clear,common themes have emerged. To date, occupationally acquired chronic solvent encephalopathy (CSE) is not thought to be progressive once exposure ceases. However, evidence suggests that heavy exposures even early in life might affect cognitive function decades later.  With better personal protective equipment (PPE) in the workplace incident cases are on the decline. Nevertheless, it continues to be imperative for clinicians to include questions on poison/ toxin exposure, particularly solvents, in initial diagnostic examinations, especially for those patients with cognitive deficits.   If solvent induced deficits are a possibility, recent summaries of examination strategies and tools can be referenced. As additional studies are completed and the neuropathological effects of solvents on CNS structures become clearer, criteria for formal diagnosis of CSE may need to be reexamined. In addition, as both structure and functional neuroimaging techniques become more sophisticated, additional contributions from imaging may further contribute to understanding CSE.

For the abstract

Will Solar Cells Become the Latest Health Panic Target?

Can solar energy plants become health hazards due to "high levels of ultrasound and low-frequency noise"?    Among the hundreds of research papers presented at the Internoise conference recently held in San Francisco is one that has may well mark the next crusade for environmental activists already concerned about the impact of noise on human health.     Internoise is sponsored by the International Institute of Noise Control and the annual conference allows the best and brightest acousticians in the world to gather and discuss research into the different ways that noise pollution can be controlled.   The new paper, titled Infrasound and low-frequency noise measurements at a solar plant, is written by Mike Greene, an acoustic engineer working in San Juan Capistrano, California.though it  seems like an odd addition given the otherwise serious nature of other papers being presented.

In presenting his paper,  Greene stated that the idea for his research came from comments describing the health concerns that apparently occur with people living in neighbourhoods with soclar power projects.  Greene describes potential environmental problems reported by people living near solar power facilities and takes a hard look at the possible role of psychogenic illness in causing the various reported symptoms.   He specifically examines two proposed concentrator voltaic solar power facilities (CPV) to be based in southern California due to concerns that the sound of these plants in operation are at a specific frequency that was particularly hard on some humans.  

We are all bombarded by background sounds all the time though we are typically unaware of them.  This includes the sound of our own breathing, traffic noises, heating fans, etc.   Even people living out in the country usually learn to ignore any background noises.   Still, the rise of windmill farms has generated a new paranoia about the health hazards associated with the noise generated by the windmills in operation.   Despite research showing that most of these health complaints are psychogenic in nature and can occur whether or not the windmills are even operational, some health crusaders have raised the same concerns about the health hazards coming from solar facilities. 

According to Greene's research, infrasound frequencies resulting from CPV operation typically ranges from fifty-five decibels at fifty feet to sixty-two decibels at twenty-five feet.   Even at extremely close range (far closer than any neighbour could reasonably be expected to be), noise levels fell well below the audibility threshold.     By comparison, noise generated by wind was far higher and could be heard from much further away than CPV noise could.  

While complaints about CPV noise are still relatively rare, the active campaigning of wind-farm critics due to perceived health risks has acted as a major barrier against the widespread implementation of wind farms around the world.    Research studies such as the one by Mike Greene can help prevent similar hysteria from damaging the rise of solar power facilities around the world.  For now though, we can only wait and watch to see whether solar phobia with replace wind phobia as the newest health craze. 

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