Here are a disparate pair of subjects for a research update.  One is the recent NICE guideline on " ...

Here are half a dozen studies that one could loosely put under the broad umbrella of positive psychology.  Zorba the Greek said "Take what you want and pay for it, says God." and Niemiec et al's study, on the effects of achieving different kinds of goal, supports this statement (for all six research studies mentioned in this blog post see below for abstracts and links).  Quoting Niemiec et al's somewhat awkward language: "The relation of aspiration attainment to psychological health was found to differ as a function of the content of the goals. Attainment of the intrinsic aspirations for personal growth, close relationships, community involvement, and physical health related positively to basic psychological need satisfaction and psychological health.

Here are half a dozen studies on the long-term effects of various forms of abuse & deprivation.  Paras et al systematically reviewed the association between a history of sexual abuse and a lifetime diagnosis of a somatic disorder.  They found significant links with functional gastrointestinal disorders, nonspecific chronic pain, psychogenic seizures, and chronic pelvic pain.  When analysis was restricted to studies where sexual abuse was defined as rape, they also found an association with fibromyalgia.  Abstracts and links, for this research paper and the further papers described, can be found lower down this page.   

I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 13,000 abstracts. 

Here are half a dozen studies on diet (see below for all abstracts and links).  The first three are about the benefits of healthy lifestyle.  Trichopoulou & colleagues evaluated the contribution of nine widely accepted components of the Mediterranean diet (high intake of vegetables, fruits and nuts, legumes, fish, and cereals; low intake of meat and dairy; high ratio of monounsaturated to saturated lipids; and moderate intake of ethanol) in the inverse association of this diet with all cause mortality.  They concluded that "The dominant components of the Mediterranean diet score as a predictor of lower mortality are moderate consumption of ethanol, low consumption of meat and meat products, and high consumption of vegetables, fruits and nuts, olive oil, and legumes.

Here are three studies (for all abstracts & links see below) highlighting the increasingly encouraging results being reported for internet-delivered psychological interventions.  Van't Hof, Cuijpers et al report on " ... a systematic review of meta-analyses on the efficacy of self-help interventions, including internet-guided therapy, for depression and anxiety disorders". They conclude that the 13 meta-analyses indicate "self-help methods are effective in a range of different disorders, including depression and anxiety disorders. Most meta-analyses found relatively large effect sizes for self-help treatments, independent of the type of self-help, and comparable to effect sizes for face-to-face treatments" (see below for abstracts and links to the six research papers mentioned).  Riper, Kramer et al describe how an experimental internet-delivered self-help alcohol reduction intervention transferred well to being made more generally available.  The authors conclude that " ...

Here are six research articles (see below for abstracts and links) loosely falling into the overall area of wellbeing.  Boyle, Barnes et al report on the association between purpose in life and mortality in older people.  They found that greater purpose in life was associated with considerably reduced mortality even when allowing for a series of possible confounders like depressive symptoms, disability, neuroticism, the number of chronic medical conditions, and income.  Also showing benefits for purpose and meaning, Maselko, Gilman, et al looked at religious involvement in the USA and and its associations with psychological health - specifically links between high, medium and low tertiles (dividing the study population into thirds) of spiritual well-being and religious service attendance and lifetime risk of depression. They found that "Religious service attendance was associated with 30% lower odds of depression. In addition, individuals in the top tertile of existential well-being had a 70% lower odds of depression compared to individuals in the bottom tertile. Contrary to our original hypotheses, however, higher levels of religious well-being were associated with 1.5 times higher odds of depression".

I read a lot of research.  When I find an article of particular interest I download it to my bibliographic database - EndNote - which currently contains over 13,000 abstracts. 

Every few weeks I scan through all the articles I've found interesting in the previous month (in the general areas of stress, health & wellbeing) and then filter them into three narrower, more specific mailings.  One is to the British Association for Behavioural & Cognitive Psychotherapies (BABCP) communal email list.  This set of abstracts focuses particularly on cognitive therapy in its many applications (anxiety, depression, psychotic disorders, etc).  Click on BABCP mailing to see the 26 papers (mostly from June journals) that I recently sent out.

The June edition of the journal "Clinical psychology: science and practice"  focused on bipolar disorder.  This is very valuable and the fact that all the articles are freely viewable in full text makes the publication even more helpful.  As Youngstrom & Kendall write in their introductory article (see below) "Knowledge about bipolar disorder is rapidly advancing. One consequence is that current evidence about the diagnostic definitions, prevalence, phenomenology, associated features and underlying processes, risk factors and predictors, and assessment or treatment strategies for bipolar disorder is often markedly different than the conventional wisdom reflected even in recent textbooks and clinical training."  Karam & Fayyad (see below for all articles mentioned, with abstracts and links) discuss diagnosis and the boundaries of the bipolar spectrum.  Merikangas & Pato review recent research on bipolar epidemiology and write "During the past decade, there has been increasing recognition of the dramatic personal and societal impact of bipolar disorder I and II (DSM-IV).

Here are six recently published research papers.  Barnhofer and colleagues report on encouraging results using mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) for sufferers from chronic-recurrent depression while they are still depressed.  The three major studies published already have used MBCT for recurrent depression while the sufferers are reasonably well.  The next step will clearly be a fuller randomized controlled trial.  Heeren and colleagues report on the how MBCT acts to reduce overgeneral autobiographical memoriy in formerly depressed patients. 

Archer and colleagues describe the successful development and assessment of a group-based cognitive behavioural intervention for sleep problems.  Participants' satisfaction ratings with the training were very high and there were very encouraging reductions in their sleep problems and depressive symptoms.  Morin and coworkers also report on CBT for sleep problems, this time singly or combined with sleep medication.  They concluded that "In patients with persistent insomnia, the addition of medication to CBT produced added benefits during acute therapy, but long-term outcome was optimized when medication is discontinued during maintenance CBT."