Author: bkellaway

Backed by a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Pradeep Garg, Ph.D., and research colleagues at Wake Forest Baptist and Duke University Medical Center are conducting research to improve the effectiveness of nicotine vaccination for cigarette smokers.

Behavioral healthcare systems are playing a major role in responding to the needs of the millions of Americans of all ages who experience psychiatric and substance use conditions each year, according to the latest annual survey from the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems (NAPHS).

Worldwide, an estimated 340 million people suffer from an episode of major depression every year. About 20 percent of patients fail to respond to a combination of psychotherapy and medication. Research studies the role of the ventral striatum in processing rewards and its potential for targeting treatment in patients with major depression.

Health educators nationwide who run youth smoking cessation programs now have access to a free toolkit to evaluate their programs at www.HYSQ.org.

Four unhealthy behaviors–smoking, lack of physical activity, poor diet and alcohol consumption–appear to be associated with a substantially increased risk of death when combined, according to a report in the April 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Genetics, a UNC team reported that three genetic regions were associated with the number of cigarettes smoked per day, one region was associated with smoking initiation and one variant was associated with smoking cessation.

White House and U.S. Department of Education representatives will join addiction researchers and recovery program administrators participate in nation’s first conference promoting recovery communities on college campuses.

New research finds any beneficial effect of drinking moderate amounts of alcohol on stroke may be counteracted by cigarette smoking, according to research that will be presented as part of the late-breaking science program at the American Academy of Neurology’s 62nd Annual Meeting in Toronto, April 10 – 17, 2010.

In a newly published study, scientists from The Scripps Research Institute have shown for the first time that the same molecular mechanisms that drive people into drug addiction are behind the compulsion to overeat, pushing people into obesity.

Recent studies have shown that behaviors such as happiness, obesity, smoking and altruism are “contagious” within adult social networks. In other words, your behavior not only influences your friends, but also their friends and so on. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Harvard University have taken this a step farther and found that the spread of one behavior in social networks influences the spread of another behavior, adolescent drug use.