The official MedZine Blog

Mindfulness training is an effective way to prevent depression relapses. That is the conclusion of a meta-analysis that was carried out by Dutch, British, Canadian and Swiss researchers. According to them, mindfulness training can be a good addition to or replacement for antidepressants Continue reading

What deep brain stimulation can accomplish, has become apparent in the treatment of Parkinson patients. As soon as the electrode in the brain is switched on, all involuntary movements disappear immediately. According to some scientists, the same therapy applied to another part of the brain could be effective in people suffering from depression. Scientists of the Maastricht University Medical Centre (MUMC) presume to have found the right spot in the cortex. These findings were published in Translational Psychiatry. Continue reading

The use of antipsychotics leads to a higher mortality rate among dementia patients than previously estimated. This was the result of a retrospective study with 91.000 dementia patients which was recently published in JAMA Psychiatry. The associated scientists hope that these insights will initiate a shift to non-medical therapies. Continue reading

The unified and coherent preattentive perception of facial and vocal emotions is disturbed in schizophrenia patients, in comparison with non-schizophrenic psychotics and healthy persons. This is shown by psychiatrist dr. Sjakko de Jong in his dissertation ‘Seeing Voices and Hearing Faces, Multisensory Emotion Perception in Schizophrenic and non-Schizophrenic Psychosis Patients’. De Jong defended this thesis on February 12th, 2014 at Tilburg University. Continue reading

Also this week MedZine brings you the latest medical news on various medical specialisms. In this editorial two striking studies are highlighted. The first describes a tool to measure quality and outcomes in colorectal surgery. The second describes how viral infections in the mother can affect the neuronal development in the baby. Continue reading

Three American ethics and psychiatry experts from Johns Hopkins University argue that the social media guidelines for physicians lead to an identity crisis. This viewpoint was published online on August 13, in the journal of the American Medical Association. Continue reading

Also this week MedZine brings you the latest medical news on various medical specialisms. In this editorial two striking studies are highlighted. The first describes a method to track transplanted stem cells to repair injured knees. The second shows that the incidence of psychiatric illness is strikingly high in gang members. Continue reading

Also this week MedZine brings you the latest medical news on various medical specialisms. In this editorial some striking studies are highlighted. This week we have selected two studies, both concerning serious hazards. The first is the hazard of sugar-sweetened drinks. Everybody likes a soda now and then, but perhaps it's time to start worrying about the effects of these sugar-sweetened beverages. According to researchers, sugar sweetened drinks may be associated with about 180,000 deaths around the world each year. Another association that warrants serious attention, is that between heart failure, depression and death. According to new research, heart failure patients who are moderately or severely depressed have four times the risk of dying and double the risk of having to go to the em Continue reading