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Intrusive memories often spring to mind without warning after someone has experienced some form of trauma and they can bring back specific sights, sounds and emotions attached to the original incident. In some cases, intrusive memories go hand in hand with the development of acute stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as with conditions such as depression and severe grief. Iyadurai and her colleagues used their insights into neuroscience and findings from previous experimental research to test whether one dose of a brief psychological intervention including playing a highly visual-spatial computer game such as Tetris could prevent intrusive symptoms building up. The participants were 71 patients waiting in the emergency department at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford who all experienced a traumatic motor vehicle accident. Participants in the intervention group were asked to bring the memory to mind, given specific instructions of how to play the game, and then...

New research indicates that mothers with a history of mental health disorders feel less ready for discharge from the NICU than with mothers without a mental health history. The research, entitled "Maternal Mental Health and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit Discharge Readiness in Mothers of Preterm Infants," has been published in  The Journal of Pediatrics . The research team was led by Elisabeth C. McGowan, MD, a neonatologist at Women & Infants Hospital of Rhode Island, a Care New England hospital, and assistant professor of pediatrics at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, and also includes Women & Infants/Brown University colleagues Katheleen Hawes, PhD, RN; Richard Tucker, BA; Melissa O'Donnell, MSW; and Betty Vohr, MD; as well as Nan Du, BS, MD, from Yale New Haven Children's Hospital. "Our primary objective was to evaluate the association between maternal mental health disorders and discharge readiness," said Dr. McGowan. ...

The findings in a mouse model could have broad implications for the potential treatment and prevention of mood and anxiety disorders, including major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), they reported in the journal  Nature Communications . "The study suggests that deficiencies in natural cannabinoids could result in a predisposition to developing PTSD and depression," said Sachin Patel, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Division of Addiction Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and the paper's corresponding author. "Boosting this signaling system could represent a new treatment approach for these stress-linked disorders," he said. Patel, the James G. Blakemore Professor of Psychiatry, received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers last year for his pioneering studies of the endocannabinoid family of signaling molecules that activate the CB1 and CB2 cannabinoid receptors in the brain. Tetrahydrocan...