There is a write-up here of a study in which Anaemia was associated with a higher risk of incident Dementia in a cohort of 2552 older adults. The paper was published in the Journal Neurology.
A recent meta-analysis of treatments for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry looking at the results of 112 studies. The researchers concluded that there were many effective treatments but a direct comparison was difficult because of the characteristics of the patient populations in the different studies.
Digital tablets are used to see if medication is taken as well as to examine associated physiological parameters. In a recent study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry researchers investigated the use of digital tablets in 27 people who had completed the study. Interestingly the researchers found that 67% of medication was taken within 2 hours of the scheduled dosing time. The tablets also provided information on postural changes during sleep. There is a good write-up here.
Neuroscience
There is a write-up here of an interesting development in sleep research where applications have been developed for smart watches to facilitate research.
There is a write-up here of a Japanese study in which researchers ran a large scale neural network simulation. Neural networks represent a perspective on how collections of neurons work together and are based on fundamental biological properties of neurons. The researchers simulated 1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses. This type of analysis is dependent on the contents of the simulation although in this case it was a technical exercise to see if the hardware could effectively simulate such large networks. The researchers suggest that it may be possible to simulate networks equivalent to the size of the human brain with exa-scale computers.
Evolutionary Psychiatry, Evolution & Culture
In a study published in the Journal Science, Poznik and colleagues at Stanford University have analysed the genomes of 49 ethnic groups from across the world. They used this data to estimate the age of the parents of all humans alive today. The mother (mitochondrial Eve) and father (Y Chromosome Adam) are most likely to have lived at different times and places. In previous analysis these time periods have been significantly different. In the analysis by Poznik and colleagues they estimated that mitochondrial Eve lived between 120,000 and 156,000 years ago whilst Y Chromosome Adam lived between 99,000 and 148,000 years ago. There were other interesting findings and there are good write-ups here, here and here.
Appendix
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The Amazing World of Psychiatry: A Psychiatry Blog 