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CDC researchers report that adults with disabilities had higher rates of hypertension compared to adults without disabilities.

Researchers combined data from the 2001-2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to obtain estimates of hypertension prevalence by disability status and type and assess the association between disability and hypertension. They found that overall, 34 percent of adults with disabilities had hypertension compared with 27 percent of adults without disabilities; and adults with mobility limitations were more likely to have hypertension than adults without disabilities.

Researchers say the prevalence of hypertension among people with disabilities is not well understood and say that study results suggest that adults living with disabilities are an important subpopulation to include in hypertension reporting and intervention efforts.

Research: Hypertension Among US Adults by Disability Status and Type, National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2001-2010, Alissa Stevens, MPH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Preventing Chronic Disease, published 14 August 2014.

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The first effective web-based treatment for Bipolar Disorder based on the latest research evidence has been developed by psychologists.

People with Bipolar Disorder have problems getting access to psychological therapy and this online intervention, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, may offer a round the clock solution at a reduced cost to the NHS.

It was developed as part of the ‘Living with Bipolar’ project led by Dr Nicholas Todd under the supervision of Professor Fiona Lobban and Professor Steven Jones at the Spectrum Centre for Mental Health Research, Lancaster University.

92% of the participants in the trial of the online intervention found the content positive – and one said it had changed her life.

“I have encountered insights in the modules that have significantly helped me to survive the blackest moments. I cannot measure the value of this, as it has contributed to their difference between life and death. My husband and I are sincerely grateful for the immeasurable impact this has had on our family.”

Therapeutic gains for the participants included improved stability, accessing additional help from friends and family, less reliance on services and more likely to turn to self-management.

One described the online help as “…a practical intervention…very positive, empowering, recovery orientated, fostering personal responsibility. It is not patronising at all…”

Focussed on recovery, supporting people to live a fulfilling and meaningful life alongside their symptoms, the programme includes elements of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Psycho-education delivered via ten audio-visual modules with a mood checking tool, interactive worksheets and worked examples. The intervention is supported by a peer support forum moderated by a member of the research team and motivational emails.

Dr Todd said the online intervention may be a way of overcoming the difficulties of enabling people with a severe mental illness to manage their condition.

“The intervention was most useful for improving non-symptomatic outcomes such as quality of life, recovery and wellbeing. These packages may therefore provide a useful alternative to the symptom focussed approaches.”

Further research trials are required before this intervention can be made available within the NHS.

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A computer science and engineering associate professor and her doctoral student graduate are using a genetic computer network inference model that eventually could predict whether a person will suffer from bipolar disorder, schizophrenia or another mental illness.

The findings are detailed in the paper “Inference of SNP-Gene Regulatory Networks by Integrating Gene Expressions and Genetic Perturbations,” which was published in a recent edition of Biomed Research International. The principal investigators were Jean Gao, an associate professor of computer science and engineering, and Dong-Chul Kim, who recently earned his doctorate in computer science and engineering from UT Arlington.

“We looked for the differences between our genetic computer network and the brain patterns of 130 patients from the University of Illinois,” Gao said. “This work could lead to earlier diagnosis in the future and treatment for those patients suffering from bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. Early diagnosis allows doctors to provide timely treatments that may speed up aid to help affected patients.”

The UT Arlington researchers teamed with Jiao Wang of the Beijing Genomics Institute at Wuhan, China; and Chunyu Liu, visiting associate professor at the University of Illinois Department of Psychiatry, on the project.

Gao said the findings also could lead to more individualized drug therapies for those patients in the early stages of mental illnesses.

“Our work will allow doctors to analyze a patient’s genetic pattern and apply the appropriate levels of personalized therapy based on patient-specific data,” Gao said.

One key to the research is designing single nucleotide polymorphism or SNP networks, researchers said.

“SNPs are regulators of genes,” said Kim, who joins the University of Texas-Pan American this fall as an assistant professor. “Those SNPs visualize how individual genes will act. It gives us more of a complete picture.”

The paper is a culmination of four years of work.

Khosrow Behbehani, dean of the College of Engineering, said the research merges the power of computer science and engineering, psychology and genetics.

“This research holds a lot of promise in the area of genetic expression,” Behbehani said. “If successful, it opens up the possibility of applying the method to other pathological conditions.”

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Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most commonly diagnosed – and misdiagnosed – behavioral disorder in children in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unfortunately, there are currently no reliable physiological markers to diagnose ADHD. Doctors generally diagnose the disorder by recording a medical and social history of the patient and the family, discussing possible symptoms and observing the patient’s behavior. But an incorrect evaluation can lead to overmedication with Ritalin (methylphenidate), which has parents everywhere concerned.

Now a new study from Tel Aviv University researchers may provide the objective tool medical professionals need to accurately diagnose ADHD. According to the research, published in Vision Research, involuntary eye movements accurately reflect the presence of ADHD, as well as the benefits of medical stimulants that are used to treat the disorder.

Keeping an eye on the eyes

Dr. Moshe Fried, Dr. Anna Sterkin, and Prof. Uri Polat of TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Dr. Tamara Wygnanski-Jaffe, Dr. Eteri Tsitsiashvili, Dr. Tamir Epstein of the Goldschleger Eye Research Institute at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, and Dr. Yoram S. Bonneh of the University of Haifa used an eye-tracking system to monitor the involuntary eye movements of two groups of 22 adults taking an ADHD diagnostic computer test called the Test of Variables of Attention (TOVA). The exercise, which lasted 22 minutes, was repeated twice by each participant. The first group of participants, diagnosed with ADHD, initially took the test un-medicated and then took it again under the influence of methylphenidate. A second group, not diagnosed with ADHD, constituted the control group.

“We had two objectives going into this research,” said Dr. Fried, who as an adult was himself diagnosed with ADHD. “The first was to provide a new diagnostic tool for ADHD, and the second was to test whether ADHD medication really works – and we found that it does. There was a significant difference between the two groups, and between the two sets of tests taken by ADHD participants un-medicated and later medicated.”

Foolproof, affordable, and accessible diagnosis

The researchers found a direct correlation between ADHD and the inability to suppress eye movement in the anticipation of visual stimuli. The research also reflected improved performance by participants taking methylphenidate, which normalized the suppression of involuntary eye movements to the average level of the control group.

“This test is affordable and accessible, rendering it a practical and foolproof tool for medical professionals,” said Dr. Fried. “With other tests, you can slip up, make ‘mistakes’ – intentionally or not. But our test cannot be fooled. Eye movements tracked in this test are involuntary, so they constitute a sound physiological marker of ADHD.

“Our study also reflected that methylphenidate does work. It is certainly not a placebo, as some have suggested.”

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The researchers are currently conducting more extensive trials on larger control groups to further explore applications of the test.

The pursuit of happiness is an inherent and inalienable right, but how exactly is it acquired? A group of scientists has analyzed how people’s happiness is affected by making decisions and their consequences; from their research, they have come up with an equation that can calculate how happy people will say they are, based on their rewards and expectations.
The research project of the team from University College London (UCL) in the UK involved over 18,000 participants from around the world and found that moment-to-moment happiness was more likely to be predicted by a person’s recent history of expectations, with regard to whether choices could lead to good or bad outcomes.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research team focused on how the decisions that people make and the outcomes resulting from those decisions affected how happy people said that they were, moment by moment.

Finding out precisely what impacts the most on happiness could lead to more effective treatments for people with mood disorders, as well as helping governments such as the UK’s, who are currently measuring the well-being of the public in order to inform policy.

The accumulation of wealth was found to not be a good predictor of happiness. The authors write, “our computational model suggests momentary happiness is a state that reflects not how well things are going but instead whether things are going better than expected.”

‘The Great Brain Experiment’Happy nerd
An equation to predict happiness could help improve the treatment of various mood disorders, as well as governments who measure well-being to inform policy.
The research began with asking 26 participants to complete a decision-making task, where the choices could lead to monetary gains and losses. During the task, the participants were repeatedly asked the question, “how happy are you right now?”

The neural activity of the participants was also observed during this investigation using functional MRI, and the data were used by the scientists, along with the answers given to the question, to create a computational model that related self-reported happiness to recent rewards and expectations.

The next stage of the study involved testing this model on 18,420 participants with a smartphone app, a game called “The Great Brain Experiment.” The game replaced winning and losing money with a point-scoring system.

The scientists found that the equation they had built during the study’s initial decision-making task to predict how happy participants were still worked during the second stage.

Lead author of the study Dr. Robb Rutledge is pleased with how effective the smartphone app was in conducting the research. He says the fact that their happiness equation worked for both the app users and those examined in the initial experiment demonstrated “the tremendous value of this approach for studying human well-being on a large scale.”

Happy expectations
Dr. Rutledge was surprised that the study found expectations to have such an important role in determining happiness, observing that “the rewards associated with life decisions […] are often not realized for a long time, and our results suggest expectations related to these decisions, good and bad, have a big effect on happiness.”

“Expectations also affect happiness even before we learn the outcome of a decision. If you have plans to meet a friend at your favorite restaurant, those positive expectations may increase your happiness as soon as you make the plan. The new equation captures these different effects of expectations and allows happiness to be predicted based on the combined effects of many past events.”

The functional MRI utilized by the team observed that neural signals made in an area of the brain called the striatum during the decisions and outcomes of the task could be used to predict changes in momentary happiness.

The signals in this area of the brain are believed to be partially reliant on the neurotransmitter dopamine, suggesting that it could be possible that dopamine plays a part in determining happiness.

Taking the equation out of the rigid structure of a game would be a way of finding out whether the research adds up, but if these findings can make the treatment of mood disorders and certain government policies more effective, they could make a great number of people very happy indeed.

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