A collaborative study from hospitals in Pittsburgh has found that people with depression after coronary bypass recover more quickly, physically and mentally, with a telephone-based therapy regimen provided by nurses than they do with usual care. This was particularly true for men. The intervention required patients to obtain their own medication and outside mental health care, if needed. The authors suggest this model may be useful in other settings, such as for chronically ill people living in rural areas.
RESULT: Telephone-delivered Collaborative Care for Treating Post-CABG Depression
JAMA | Nov 16, 2009
However, sending an e-mail version of postcards to teenagers had no effect whatever on their tendency to seek treatment for depression, according to this study from Australia, which was created to address deficiencies in earlier trials. (The discussion section, pondering what went wrong, may reveal less about the nature of depression than it does about the authors’ misunderstanding of teenagers, communication, and the Internet.)
RESULT: Health e-Cards as a Means of Encouraging Help Seeking for Depression Among Young Adults: Randomized Controlled Trial
Journal of Medical Internet Research | Oct 22, 2009
Search: depression
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OTHER RECENT SEARCHES ON SEARCHMEDICA
Search: social anxiety
RESULT: Guided and unguided self-help for social anxiety disorder: randomized controlled trial
British Journal of Psychiatry | Nov 1, 2009
Even without the help of a therapist, simply reading about cognitive behavior strategies for social anxiety disorder, on the Internet or in a book, can be effective in improving social anxiety disorder when supplemented with an online support group, according to this study from Sweden.
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SEARCH TIP: Quotation marks are useful—but beware
Last week someone achieved less than great results with cognitive “behavior modification” “learning disability“—a carefully crafted search term. It produced only 4 results.
The peril with specifying a phrase using quotation marks is that you may exclude results that use synonymous but different language. (For instance, “behavioral modification” would be excluded.) By removing the quotation marks, we found many interesting articles that used both “behavior” and “modification,” but not adjacent to each other.
It may be useful to try both versions of the query, with and without quotation marks.
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OTHER RECENT SEARCHES ON SEARCHMEDICA
Search: managing autism in children
RESULT: Safety and Efficacy of Oral DMSA Therapy for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Part B – Behavioral Results
BMC Clinical Pharmacology | Oct 23, 2009
Responding to a reported association between high body burdens of toxic metals such as lead and mercury in some children who have autism, researchers tried treatment with oral dimercaptosuccinic acid (DMSA), which binds to these metals so that they are excreted in the urine. The treatment was safe and “possibly helpful in reducing some of the symptoms.”
Search: patient labeling
RESULT: Daily Med (Carvedilol tablet, film coated)
DailyMed | Nov 12, 2009
This search was probably intended to locate articles about the social problems inherent in the fact of a psychiatric diagnosis and the dissemination of that information to the patient and others. Instead it found many results about medications and their printed labels.
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SEARCH TIP: Stop. Sit back. Take a deep breath. Muse.
This search is quite a challenge. We tried clicking around the article categories at the top of the results list. We tried using the All of Medicine tab, rather than Mental/Nervous. We tried putting the query inside quotation marks. Every strategy brought the same result: articles about medications.
If you’re just not able to convey what you mean, try this strategy: Pretend you’re writing an article about the topic in question. Begin to craft the abstract in your mind. Actually key in a sentence or two about the subject on your keyboard.
That’s how the phrase “labeling of patients” came to mind. It worked.
