According to the Journal of Sexual Medicine, people who engage in regular sexual activity gain several health benefits, such as longer lives, healthier hearts, lower blood pressure, and lower risk of breast cancer. However, approximately 33 percent of women may not receive these benefits due to low sexual desire. Also, the marriages of women with low sexual desire may also be at risk, given a recent statistic that 25 percent of divorce is due to sexual dissatisfaction.

Some doctors are prescribing testosterone patches for women with low sexual desire. However, research shows that testosterone patches might increase the risk of breast cancer when used for just a year. Researchers are currently testing a new drug, flibanserin, which was developed as an antidepressant and affects neurotransmitters in the brain, to treat women with low sexual desire. However, experts are concerned about the side effects of this possible treatment. Now, a University of Missouri researcher has found evidence that a low-cost, risk-free psychological treatment is effective and may be a better alternative to drugs that have adverse side effects.

“Low sexual desire is the number one problem women bring to sex therapists,” said Laurie Mintz, associate professor of educational, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. “Drugs to treat low sexual desire may take the focus away from the most common culprits of diminished desire in women, including lack of information on how our own bodies work, body image issues, relationship issues and a stressful lifestyle. Indeed, research demonstrates that relationship issues are far more important in predicting women’s sexual desire than are hormone levels. Before women seek medical treatments, they should consider psychological treatment.”

Mintz has authored a book based on this premise. In her book, Mintz suggests a six-step psycho-educational and cognitive-behavioral treatment approach that she based on scientific literature and more than 20 years of clinical knowledge. The treatment plan includes chapters about one’s thoughts about sex, how to talk with your partner, the importance of spending time together, ways to touch each other in both erotic and non-erotic ways, how to make time for sex and different ways to make sexual activity exciting and thus, increase women’s sexual desire.

In a study demonstrating the effectiveness of her treatment, Mintz recruited married women between the ages of 28 to 65, who said they were uninterested in sexual activity. All the women were employed and a majority had children. All participants completed an online survey that measured sexual desire and sexual functioning. Then half of the participants were selected randomly to read her book and perform the exercises outlined in her book. After six weeks, they were emailed the same survey again. The control group did not read the book. Mintz found that the intervention group who read the book made significant gains in sexual desire and sexual functioning, compared to the control group who did not read the book. On average, women who read the book increased their level of sexual desire by almost 30 percent.

“This finding is especially exciting because low sexual desire among women has been not only the most common, but the least successfully treated of all the sexual problems brought to therapists” Mintz said. “Also, although other books have been written on the topic, this is the first to be tested for its effectiveness. In addition, unlike medical treatments such as testosterone, there are certainly no known negative medical side effects associated with the treatment strategies in my book.”

A new randomized trial shows that on average, three months after receiving a series of 10 massage sessions, patients had half the symptoms of anxiety. This improvement resembles that previously reported with psychotherapy, medications, or both. But the trial, published in the journal Depression and Anxiety, also found massage to be no more effective than simple relaxation in a room alone with soft, soothing music.

“We were surprised to find that the benefits of massage were no greater than those of the same number of sessions of ‘thermotherapy’ or listening to relaxing music,” said Karen J. Sherman, PhD, MPH, a senior investigator at Group Health Research Institute. “This suggests that the benefits of massage may be due to a generalized relaxation response.”

Massage therapy is among the most popular complementary and alternative medical (CAM) treatments for anxiety, she added. But this is the first rigorous trial to assess how effective massage is for patients with generalized anxiety disorder.

The trial randomly assigned 68 Group Health patients with generalized anxiety disorder to 10 one-hour sessions in pleasant, relaxing environments, each presided over by a licensed massage therapists who delivered either massage or one of two control treatments:

* Relaxation therapy: breathing deeply while lying down

* Thermotherapy: having arms and legs wrapped intermittently with heating pads and warm towels

All three treatments were provided while lying down on a massage table in a softly lighted room with quiet music. All participants received a handout on practicing deep breathing daily at home. Unlike the two control treatments, massage was specifically designed to enhance the function of the parasympathetic nervous system and relieve symptoms of anxiety including muscle tension.

Using a standard rating scale in interviews, the researchers asked the patients about the psychological and physical effects of their anxiety right after the 12-week treatment period ended and three months later, Dr. Sherman said.

All three of the groups reported that their symptoms of anxiety had decreased by about 40 percent by the end of treatment – and by about 50 percent three months later. In addition to the decline in anxiety, the patients also reported fewer symptoms of depression and less worry and disability. The research team detected no differences among the three groups; but the trial did not include a control group that got no treatment at all.

“Treatment in a relaxing room is much less expensive than the other treatments (massage or thermotherapy), so it might be the most cost-effective option for people with generalized anxiety disorder who want to try a relaxation-oriented complementary medicine therapy,” Dr. Sherman said.

Common wisdom tells us that for a successful relationship partners shouldn’t go to bed angry. But new research from a psychologist at Harvard University suggests that brain activity – specifically in the region called the lateral prefrontal cortex – is a far better indicator of how someone will feel in the days following a fight with his or her partner.

Individuals who show more neural activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex are less likely to be upset the day after fighting with partners, according to a study in this month’s Biological Psychiatry. The findings point to the lateral prefrontal cortex’s role in emotion regulation, and suggest that improved function within this region may also improve day-to-day mood.

“What we found, as you might expect, was that everybody felt badly on the day of the conflict with their partners,” says lead author Christine Hooker, assistant professor of psychology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “But the day after, people who had high lateral prefrontal cortex activity felt better and the people who had low lateral prefrontal cortex activity continued to feel badly.”

Hooker’s co-authors are Ozlem Ayduk, Anett Gyurak, Sara Verosky, and Asako Miyakawa, all of the University of California at Berkeley.

Research has previously shown that the lateral prefrontal cortex is associated with emotion regulation in laboratory tests, but the effect has never been proven to be connected to experiences in day-to-day life.

This study involved healthy couples in a relationship for longer than three months. While in an fMRI scanner, participants viewed pictures of their partners with positive, negative, or neutral facial expressions and their neural activity was recorded while reacting to the images. While in the lab, participants were also tested for their broader cognitive control skills, such as their ability to control impulses and the shift and focus of attention.

For three weeks, the couples also recorded in an online diary their daily emotional state and whether they had had a fight with their partners.

Hooker found that participants who displayed greater activity in their lateral prefrontal cortex while viewing their partners’ negative facial expressions in the scanner were less likely to report a negative mood the day after a fight with their partners, indicating that they were better able to emotionally “bounce back” after the conflict.

She also found that those who had more activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex and greater emotional regulation after a fight displayed more cognitive control in laboratory tests, indicating a link between emotion regulation and broader cognitive control skills.

“The key factor is that the brain activity in the scanner predicted their experience in life,” says Hooker. “Scientists believe that what we are looking at in the scanner has relevance to daily life, but obviously we don’t live our lives in a scanner. If we can connect what we see in the scanner to somebody’s day-to-day emotion-regulation capacity, it could help psychologists predict how well people will respond to stressful events in their lives.”

There’s no doubt that meeting partners on the Internet is a growing trend. But can we trust the information that people provide about themselves via online dating services? And why is depression so dissatisfying in relationships? These two questions are explored in articles appearing in the latest issue of the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, published by SAGE. The authors also discuss their findings in a new podcast series: Relationship Matters.

Jeffrey Hall of the University of Kansas is lead author of the paper on internet dating, which shows that people looking for romance online actually behave very much as they do in face to face dating and relationships. “Our findings dispel the myth that people using online dating are that different than any one else who might find a relationship through friends, school or work,” Hall explains.

His team investigated over 5000 individuals dating online in search of long-term partners, from all walks of life and over a wide age range (18 to over 60). The survey included questions on personality traits such as openness, extroversion, education and income. “We also asked a series of questions on an important trait that we call self monitoring,” Hall says. “Self monitoring is about how we try to present ourselves in a favourable light to others, to make people like us.” Someone who scores as ‘low’ on self monitoring is extremely authentic when describing themselves in all circumstances, and those who score ‘high’ are more prone to so-called white lies.

Self-monitoring scores turned out to be a major factor in the likelihood of people changing their presentation to others across all dating indicators (topics such as previous relationships, likes, dislikes, appearance, etc).

Whether a person is likely to lie about themselves online also depends on what kind of person they are: Someone who is very open to new experiences (e.g. foreign travel) is highly unlikely to misrepresent themselves about their experiences – because they are naturally interesting people. On the other hand extroverts are more likely to misrepresent themselves when describing past relationships. Extroverts tend to have many past relationships because they meet new people easily, but may play this down when looking for a new relationship.

The good news, according to Hall, is that the likelihood of people misrepresenting themselves overall is actually very low. The research also showed that not all men are from Mars and Women from Venus – the differences between individuals was far greater than any difference between the sexes. However women were somewhat more likely to fib about their weight, whereas men were more prone to tell white lies on other subjects, such as how many previous partners they had had, or how serious they were about finding a long-term relationship. “Men and women aren’t as different from one another as we might believe,” Hall says. Next up – Hall and his team are developing an inventory of flirting styles, which they aim to publish later this year.

Meanwhile twin sisters Leanne Knobloch of the University of Illinois, US and Lynne Knobloch-Fedders from The Family Institute at Northwestern University, US put their heads together to look at a longstanding question about what explains the association between depressive symptoms and relationship quality.

Over three decades of research have shown that people with depression are less satisfied in their romantic relationships. But questions remain about exactly why these go together. Now the sisters’ research shows that relational uncertainty could be one explanation.

Relational uncertainty is how sure individuals are about their perceptions of involvement in a relationship. It has three sources. Self uncertainty is the questions people have about their own relationship involvement, such as, “how certain am I about my view of this relationship?” Partner uncertainty involves questions about a partner’s relationship involvement, such as, “how certain am I about where my partner wants this to go?” Finally relationship uncertainty involves questions about the relationship status, such as “How certain am I about the future of this relationship?”

There were three main findings from the study of couples experiencing depressive symptoms or relationship problems: Those with more severe depressive symptoms reported more relationship distress; people experiencing more relational uncertainty were less satisfied with their relationship; and finally, women’s depressive symptoms predicted all three sources of their relational uncertainty, which in turn predicted both men’s and women’s relationship quality. For men, only the self source of relational uncertainty acted as a mediator.

This finding could suggest treatment options. For example, working through relational uncertainty issues in psychotherapy may help alleviate depressive symptoms. Alternatively treating depression might help individuals achieve more relational certainty, leading to more satisfying relationships.

“People suffering from depressive symptoms may wrestle with more questions about their romantic relationship, which may be dissatisfying,” says Knobloch. “If we find ways to help people address their uncertainty about their relationship, then their depressive symptoms might not be so debilitating for their romantic relationships.”

With the new health care IT technology already in use, preparation for the accompanying consequences should be on every family’s mind, advises Martine Ehrenclou, author of the multiple award-winning, self-help guide Critical Conditions: The Essential Hospital Guide To Get Your Loved One Out Alive (Lemon Grove Press).

The FDA has received 260 reports in the last two years submitted voluntarily about health IT malfunctions that had the potential to cause harm to patients, including reports of 44 injuries and six deaths. The problems include accessing the wrong patient’s record; overwriting one patient’s information with another’s; loss, corruption or errors in vital patient data; errors in data analysis, such as listing of medications at incorrect doses; and incompatibility in vendor software systems.

As the system moves towards a paperless state, errors will result from medical professionals having to scan multiple pages of electronic data instead of going directly to the area in question, according to a Wellsphere study. Currently, the FDA has authority to regulate health IT software as a medical device but has not fully exercised that authority. “To date, FDA has largely refrained from enforcing our regulatory requirements with respect to health IT devices,” said Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health.

New technology brings new problems and although the solution is complex, prevention is readily available in Ms. Ehrenclou’s award-winning book. In its fact-filled pages, you learn how to become an advocate for the hospital-bound family member or friend and not only diminish the chance of needless medical mistakes, but assure yourself and them that they will not only enter the hospital confident, but return home safely after their stay.

Among the quarter million annual medical mistakes Ehrenclou’s book will help you avoid are: redundant care, patient name mistakes, wrong-site surgery, medication errors, and the spread of hospital-acquired infectious diseases. You’ll also learn the secrets that hospitals never reveal such as when staffs are low, times when doctors are generally not available and how to be certain you can reach physicians when you need to.

The new decade will bring health care to millions more needy Americans and with the addition of Critical Conditions to your arsenal of health care tools, you’ll make sure that whatever the final form of the health care bill is, your loved ones are protected.

Research published in the March edition of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology (JTO) explored the importance of a patient’s outlook as it relates to health behavior and health status. Researchers focused on lung cancer patients and discovered that those who exhibited an optimistic disposition experienced more favorable outcomes than those with a pessimistic disposition.

Previous research into how the body communicates with the mind has demonstrated a connection between pessimistic outlook and negative health behaviors. The examination of a possible relationship between patient outlooks and survivorship in oncology populations is a relatively new and provocative area of investigation, and such studies have yielded mixed results. Some suggest that having a pessimistic personality before receiving a cancer diagnosis might be predictive of survival time and immune function; whereas, others have not found such an association. This newly released study builds on the existing research to gain knowledge specifically toward the effect of attitudes on lung cancer patients.

Utilizing the Optimism – Pessimism scale (PSM) of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the study investigators identified pessimistic and non-pessimistic or optimistic personality styles among patients. Researchers performed a retrospective evaluation of 534 adults diagnosed with lung cancer who had completed a MMPI about 18 years before receiving their lung cancer diagnosis between 1997 and 2006. Patients (both women and men) classified as having an optimistic attitude survived an average of six months longer compared with the patients with a pessimistic attitude. Five-year survival rates for the two groups were 32.9 percent for non-pessimists and 21.1 percent for pessimists. Furthermore, the relationship was independent of smoking status, cancer stage, treatment, comorbidities, age and gender.

Median survival:

* Overall 14.8 months

* Non-pessimistic 19.2 months

* Pessimistic 13.1 months

Five-year survival:

* Overall 27.8%

* Non-pessimistic 2.9%

* Pessimistic 21.1%

“This six-month potential benefit related to an optimistic attitude is more impressive when one considers that the median survival time for this patient population with lung cancer is less than one year,” explains the study’s lead investigator Paul Novotny, MS of the Mayo Clinic. “Despite limitations, the results may provide insights for advancing patient care in cognitive therapy, one of the many treatment dimensions. This may ultimately aid in enhancing current approaches to patient care, such that clinicians may improve survival not only by developing new medical treatments but also by targeting patient’s psychosocial characteristics most likely to negatively affect cancer treatment decisions and ultimate outcomes.”

People who have gastric band surgery to lose weight are at risk of low self-esteem, relationship problems and being dissatisfied with their body image, according to new research being presented at the Diabetes UK Annual Professional Conference (APC).

Researchers from the University of the West of England and Southmead Hospital, Bristol, followed 25 patients aged from 30 to 58 years and recorded their experience 12 months after receiving a post-laparoscopic gastric banding operation. 64 per cent of the participants had Type 2 diabetes.

Health benefits versus negative psychological effects

Although the people who took part in the study reported significant health benefits such as improved blood glucose levels and lower cholesterol and blood pressure levels, they also found that living with the gastric band had a strong, negative psychological impact on their daily lives.

The majority reported that having a gastric band was as hard as having to diet and that losing the opportunity to eat as a coping strategy left them struggling to cope with distressing life events.

“Losing weight not only reduces your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes but also significantly improves management in people who have the condition,” said Simon O’Neill, Director of Care, Information and Advocacy Services at Diabetes UK.

“We always advise people wanting to lose weight to try to do so by following a healthy, balanced diet high in fruit and vegetables and low in fat, sugar and salt, combined with physical activity.”

“Weight-loss surgery can be a way of losing significant amounts of weight for people who are obese. However, surgery does have serious associated risks and should only be considered if sustained attempts to lose weight through diet and lifestyle changes have been unsuccessful.

“This new research also shows that there might be psychological consequences to having the procedure and patients should be made aware of these when considering the surgery.”

Not the easy option

Lead researcher Dr Andrew Johnson from Southmead Hospital said “Our findings show that having a gastric band fitted should not be seen as the easy option when it comes to losing weight.

“This operation has a strong psychological impact as well as a physical one, and we found that regular psychological support is needed to help people cope with the realities of having the device fitted.”

55 per cent jump in weight-loss operations

The NHS Information Centre recently released figures showing a 55 per cent increase in the number of people having weight-loss surgery, such as stomach stapling or having a gastric band fitted, between 2006/07 and 2008/09, from 1,950 to 4,220.

Psychosurgery is making a comeback. Recently published case series have shown encouraging results of so-called deep brain stimulation (DBS) in treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressive disorders, and Tourette syndrome. In the current issue of Deutsches Ärzteblatt International, authors Jens Kuhn (University of Cologne) and Theo P J Gründer (Max Planck Institute, Cologne) and their co-authors provide an introduction to the method (Dtsch Arztebl Int 2010; 107(7)105-13).

In order to determine the clinical utility of DBS in psychiatric disorders, the authors evaluated therapeutic studies from 1980 to 2009. They found improvement rates of between 35% and 70% in treatment-resistant obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, and Tourette syndrome. The rate of side effects associated with DBS was usually low and mostly reversible by modulating the stimulation parameters.

This favourable side effect profile is not all that surprising because DBS is a procedure that is well known; it has been in use for 20 years. In Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor, the method has proved to be so effective that it has been licensed as a therapeutic option for many years. To administer DBS, two electrodes are implanted into the patient that deliver continuous, high frequency, short electrical impulses, enabling modulation of the functional neuronal circuits. The electrodes are connected via a cable to an impulse generator, which is usually implanted below the collarbone.

Although DBS seems to offer new perspectives for the treatment of psychiatric disorders, further studies into its efficacy, mechanisms of action, and side effect profile and especially its long term course are needed.

Many people feel insecure when they drive in tunnels. However, their anxiety can be reduced.

“Driving in tunnels is actually twice as safe as driving in the open air, when all factors are taken into account,” says SINTEF scientist Gunnar Jensen.

However, a rough estimate suggests that as many as 10 – 20 percent of the population feel uncomfortable or very uncomfortable driving in tunnels. Older people in particular tend to feel insecure.

In a previous study carried out by SINTEF, as many as 40 percent of the older age-group said that they felt extremely insecure driving in tunnels. They spoke of walls and road lanes that seemed to shrink, and of a feeling of being completely exhausted when they eventually reached the end of the tunnel.

Gunnar Jenssen believes that this may be due to the fact that elderly people tend to have poorer vision than younger people. This means that lighting conditions in tunnels play a decisive role in determining how people experience tunnels, he believes.

Design can reduce discomfort

On this background, SINTEF transport researchers have been studying the use of various ranges of colour, lighting and patterns, as well as the use of cavern spaces in tunnels. The group’s driving simulator has been and still is a very aid in testing out lighting designs.

“The cavern in the tunnel is one measure that is high on our list. The trumpet-like widenings of the caverns’ entrances and exits are a way of breaking up the impact of long tunnels. The 24.5 km-long Lærdal Tunnel has three well-lit caverns designed according to proposals submitted by the Kadabra Produktdesign company, researchers and the artists Arild Juul and Brit Dyrnes.

Norwegian breathing spaces in Chinese tunnel

In 2007, the lighting design from Trondheim was exported to China, and Gunnar Jenssen was project manager for “Safety and Lighting Design” when that country inaugurated the world’s longest twin-tube tunnel, the Qinling Zhongnan Mountain Tunnel, in which the monotony is broken by huge caverns excavated at intervals of three to seven kilometres.

“The tunnel is 18×2 kilometres long, and to begin with it was a dry, monotonous tunnel, which was then developed in collaboration with Norwegian artists and designers into an oasis with palm-trees and clouds on the roof ,” says Jenssen.

Lighting for safety

The main point is to obtain a good distribution of light, in conjunction with the use of artistic lighting, which turns out to give drivers a feeling of space and of greater security. Modern lighting systems, with two rows of lamps, light sources that illuminate the opposite direction and driving lane, are beginning to be quite common in new Chinese tunnels, and they have also been installed in the tunnel that forms part of the Øresund Link between Denmark and Sweden.

Scientists are beginning to find out why people with Parkinson’s disease often feel socially awkward. Parkinson’s patients find it harder to recognize expressions of emotion in other people’s faces and voices, report two studies published by the American Psychological Association.

One of the studies raises questions about how deep brain stimulation, the best available treatment for patients who no longer respond to medication, more strongly affects the recognition of fear and sadness.

A neurodegenerative disorder, Parkinson’s causes tremors, stiffness and balance problems, as well as fairly frequent depression and dementia.

In the March issue of Neuropsychology, Heather Gray, PhD, and Linda Tickle-Degnen, PhD, report that people with Parkinson’s disease, compared with matched controls, often have difficulty discerning how others are feeling.

Their meta-analysis of 34 different studies using data from 1,295 participants shows a robust link between Parkinson’s and specific deficits in recognizing emotions, especially negative emotions, across different types of stimuli and tasks.

The meta-analysis, conducted at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University, found that patients typically had some degree of problem identifying emotion from faces and voices.

Further clarification is provided in a second study that showed that deep-brain stimulation, compared with medication, caused a consistently large deficit in the recognition of fear and sadness two key facial expressions that, when understood, aid survival. That study is published in the January issue of Neuropsychology.

Researchers led by Julie Péron, PhD, at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Rennes in France, compared the ability of people with Parkinson’s in three different groups to recognize facial emotions: 24 advanced patients implanted with deep-brain stimulators after they didn’t respond or were sensitive to oral levodopa (the usual drug for the disease); 20 advanced patients given apomorphine hydrochloride by injection or infusion pump while they waited an implant; and 30 healthy controls.

Researchers tested all participants using standard photographs of facial expression before and three months after they were treated. Before implantation of the stimulators, all participants read facial expressions equally well.

Patients in the surgical group were implanted with stimulators, electrical devices that prod the brain’s subthalamic nucleus, a small, lens-shaped structure, to normalize the nerve signals that control movement. This nucleus is part of the basal ganglia system, which is thought to integrate movement, cognition and emotion.

Three months after treatment, only the patients with stimulators not the drug-treated patients or the healthy controls were significantly worse at recognizing fear and sadness. Patients with stimulators confused those expressions with others, such as surprise, or even no emotion. Medicated patients and healthy controls were either accurate about fear and sadness or occasionally mistook them for other negative emotions, such as disgust.

“Having Parkinson’s predisposes an individual to errors in emotion recognition,” said Gray. “The research in France, along with previous studies, indicates that deep-brain stimulation produces an even more severe deficit.”

Why would treating a movement disorder affect the perception of emotions? Implants affect a part of the brain that reaches across functions, so the authors suggested that the same electrical stimulation that calms over-excited motor activity may also somehow inhibit emotional processing.

Although the impact of Parkinson’s and deep-brain stimulation varies by patient, it’s important to understand. “The first step is to educate patients and their close associates about the potential for emotion recognition difficulties, so they can learn to manage some of the social consequences, such as misunderstanding and frustration,” said Gray and Tickle-Degnen. The next step might be training in emotion recognition, which they said has shown promise.