I know I've had plenty of patients on mechanical ventilator, but I never really considered whether they were traumatized by the experience.

Courtesy of Gary Schwitzer's Health News Review:

February 23, 2010

Summary 

This was all the better for the fact that the reporter had a personal stake in this: his brother is autistic.  I thought the piece took a critical look at what McCarthy and Co. are saying, and what's harmful about it.

It was a small study, but researchers have shown that an oxytocin nasal spray seems to help autistic adults' behavior.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield acted unethically in his research linking MMR vaccines to autism, a UK regulatory agency has found. Lancet retracted his paper in 2004, and most of the authors have disavowed the findings reported there.

Imagine getting the privilege of a Lancet publication, only to have to recant a few years later? Must have been some major impropriety. Wakefield stuck by his paper, evidently.

Podcast file: 

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1-24-10.mp3

This podcast covers the landscape, from the latest findings in PTSD diagnosis, the use of supercomputers in clinical medicine, and tantalizing ovarian cancer screening test results that turned out not to be reproducible.

A study published this week reports that a machine known as magnetoencephalography can correctly identify PTSD 90% of the time.  Researchers at the VA in Minneapolis, Minnesota used technology that has been studied for years: imaging the activity of the brain using magnetic sensors.  Wikipedia has a nice article about the technique, but it should be noted that the Wikipedia article about Magneto the comic book character is probably longer.»

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100113/ap_on_he_me/us_med_preventing_ptsd;_...

NEJM reports study showing early pain medicine cuts PTSD rates in half?

I said Wow out loud for this one. Researchers speculate that autism is caused by antibodies the mother makes against the fetus' brain that then circulate enter the placenta and damage the brain of the unborn child leading to autism. The details are that the researchers took antibody samples from women with autistic kids and control kids and gave these to pregnant mice. The offspring of these mice then displayed behavioral changes. The results were published in Journal of Neuroimmunology April 2009.

Something I didn't realize--autistic kids don't sleep well. Add this to the other difficulties parents of these children face and you have numerous serious disruptions to family life. Looks like melatonin works to improve sleep patterns in these children at least in a small randomized trial. The researchers used a dose of 3mg per day. Now there might be unknown long-term side effects to melatonin supplementation in kids but for families at the end of their rope this might be something to discuss with a pediatrician. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090420/hl_nm/us_melatonin_autistic