January is a weird month in our house. All the holiday bustle and travel are behind us, and the kids are as bored as if they hadn’t just unwrapped a big-box store’s worth of toys, books, and electronics. It’s the time of year when we eye the Crock-Pot and say to ourselves, “Tomorrow, we’re going to get that thing down and find a really good recipe.” It’s the time when I pretend to take an interest in football, faking it like a student who has been snoozing through the entire class and just woke up when called on: “Peyton Manning! Richard Sherman! Snow! Defense! What was the question?” Alas, this month, too, shall end, right after I bring the plants inside. And take them back out. And bring them in again....
©Evan Sharboneau
C'mon, Dad! How can you say I'm watching too much TV?
Downer
Is it just me, or do I sense a little judgment in the new Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics article about depression treatment in teens? Lead author Dr. Ana Radovic of Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and her colleagues presented 58 primary care providers with two hypothetical cases describing 15-year-old girls and asked participants what they would do as part of their initial treatment regimen. One of the girls met criteria for moderate depression, while the other was severely depressed; neither was suicidal.
Even for the severely depressed patient, less than a third of providers said they would prescribe an antidepressant, which the authors apparently found ... depressing. On the bright side, around 90% of providers would send the severely depressed girl to a psychiatrist, which in my community means she would be receiving appropriate care in a quick 6 to 9 months.
Most perplexing were the results for the moderately depressed patient. Not only did just a quarter of respondents say they’d prescribe medication for her, but only 60% wanted to send her to a psychiatrist. Presumably the other 40% simply felt she should maybe put on some sweatpants and watch a Lifetime movie with a bowl of butter brickle.
Providers who were more educated about depression and those with co-located mental health providers scored much better than their peers did on providing appropriate care, suggesting ways mental health care might be improved. But unless there’s some kind of massive invasion of psychiatrists on the way, primary care providers are going to have to overcome our anxiety about treating depression, or the outcomes are going to be sad.
Head of programming
When my parents told me that watching too much television would rot my brain, boy were they wrong! Thanks to a new study correlating kids’ TV viewing with MRI results and IQ scores, we now know that watching television increases the regional gray matter/white matter volume index of the frontopolar and medial prefrontal areas, the hypothalamus/septum and sensorimotor areas, and the visual cortex, leading to measurable comparative deficits in language processing. I could have told my folks all that, but I was too busy watching The Dukes of Hazzard.
The part of this report that trips people up is that, among the 133 boys and 143 girls whose brains were scanned over time for the study, those who watched the most television (up to 4 hours a day) actually had larger volumes in the affected brain areas. Lead author Ryuta Kawahima of Tohoku (Japan) University explains that the increased gray matter volumes reflect a failure of dendritic pruning, or in my parents’ terms, brain rot. The regions of bushy neurons correspond with brain areas responsible for verbal competence, aggression, and physical activity, all shown in the past to be affected by prolonged TV viewing.
Unlike my parents, I’m now armed with a critique of my kids’ TV viewing that’s informed by modern neuroscience. Next time I see them glued to the tube, I’m going to say, “Turn that thing off, or I swear I’m going to come in there and trim those frontopolar and medial prefrontal dendrites myself!”
Buzz kill
Do you find it a little disturbing that food manufacturers are now adding caffeine to all sorts of products where it doesn’t belong? I know to look for it in coffee, tea, even chocolate, because, you know, that’s where it grows. But when my youngest son couldn’t sleep, I had to consider his love of Perky Turkey Jerky, a healthy-sounding, high-protein snack that for no apparent reason includes caffeine (I have no idea how they got the turkeys to drink that much coffee!). Caffeine has made its way into cookies, graham crackers, puddings, chewing gum, and -- I kid you not -- pie crust. Because the first thing I ask when I eat a slice of pie is, “Wouldn’t this be better if I were having palpitations?”
Apparently some of the scientists at the Institute of Medicine are just as perplexed, at least according to the proceedings of a recent workshop they held on the issue. The timing was not a coincidence; the Food and Drug Administration is starting to consider whether pumping large doses of a stimulant into kids’ favorite foodstuffs is actually a good idea. Personally, I’m not a fan. Unless, of course, it could make January go by faster.