AJP Editors Highlight Favorite Articles of 2018

Improving outcomes in patients with depression and posttraumatic stress disorder, drug development, and psychotherapy were among the topics of the seven articlesselected as favorites of 2018 by the editors of theAmerican Journal of Psychiatry. The articles are listed below in the order they appeared in the print issue of the Journal:Adjunctive Bright Light Therapy for Bipolar Depression: A Randomized Double-blind Placebo-controlled Trial: Dorothy Sit, M.D., and colleagues randomly assigned adults with bipolar I or II disorder with symptoms of major depression who were on stable concomitant medications to either a 7,000-lux bright white light or 50-lux dim red light (placebo) for six weeks. Compared with the dim light group, the group treated with bright white light experienced a significantly higher remission rate (68.2% compared with 22.2%) after four weeks and significantly lower depression scores by the end of the study. No mood polarity switches were observed.Role of Complex Epigenetic Switching in Tumor Necrosis Factor- α Upregulation in the Prefrontal Cortex of Suicide Subjects: Qingzhong Wang, Ph.D., and colleagues examined the expression of the pro-inflammatory cytokine gene tumor necrosis factor –alpha (TNF-α) in the postmortem brains of people with and without major depressive disorder who died by suicide and of people with major depressive disorder who died of causes other than suicide. They found TNF-α expression was significantly higher in the dorsolateral p...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: aging American Journal of Psychiatry bipolar disorder bright light therapy depression methylation propranolol psychotherapy PTSD suicide TNF- α Source Type: research