NICE is the UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - "the independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and treatment of ill health." Although their guidance applies particularly to England and Wales, the opinions they come up with are very carefully weighed and can be of use to health (and education) professionals wherever they work.

Here are a disparate pair of subjects for a research update.  One is the recent NICE guideline on " ...

Emotional reappraisal (changing the way we see a situation) and emotional suppression (inhibiting our already present emotional response) have very different effects on our feelings, relationships and wellbeing.  As a generalisation, reappraisal tends to work well, while suppression comes at higher cost.  I wrote about this last month  in a first post on James Gross's Psychophysiology Lab at Stanford . I went on, in a subsequent post, to put together a handout on reappraisal entitled Getting a better perspective.

Because there is so much interesting research being conducted at the Stanford Lab, I thought it worthwhile to write a further post mentioning some of this other work.  The webpage detailing their current research projects mentions nine different areas.  These include the following descriptions:

Here are half a dozen papers on helping kids and adolescents.  The Fuligni et al paper found that adolescents experiencing frequent interpersonal stresses tended to have increased levels of C-reactive protein, " ... an inflammatory marker that is a key indicator of cardiovascular risk ... ".  Jackson et al showed that in preschool kids each extra hour of regular TV viewing is associated with an extra 1 kg of body fat.  This appeared to be due to increases in calorie intake rather than reduction in physical activity.  Decreased family accommodation is associated with improved outcome in paediatric OCD, Merlo et al found.  Naylor et al found that a six lesson teaching block on mental health benefitted young teenagers.  Proctor et al provide a free full text overview of teenage life satisfaction assessment measures, while Wilkinson and colleagues report on 28 week follow-up in a treatment trial for depressed adolescents.  The authors found "Depression at 28 weeks was predicted by the additive effects of severity, obsessive-compulsive disorder and suicidal ideation at entry together with presence of at least one disappointing life event over the follow-up period.

Here are five papers on difficulties experienced by adolescents.  A couple of the papers are follow-up studies.  Colman et al looked at the multiple negative personal & relationship outcomes in a UK national cohort of adolescents with conduct problems followed over 40 years.  Wentz et al studied the somewhat more encouraging 18 year outcomes of a group of adolescents suffering from anorexia. 

A couple of the papers are about depression.  Kennard and colleagues report again on the well-known Treatment for Adolescents with Depression Study (TADS) comparing antidepressants, cognitive-behavioural therapy and combined treatment.  By about six months there was little difference between the three forms of treatment.  At nine months the remission rate for intent-to-treat cases was 60% overall.  Primack et al investigated the association between electronic media use in adolescence and subsequent depression in young adulthood.  They reported "Controlling for all covariates including baseline Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale score, those reporting more television use had significantly greater odds of developing depression."

Yesterday NICE - the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in England & Wales - published guidance on a diverse range of fifteen clinical, technology, interventional and public health subjects.  Their clinical guidance on Medicines Adherence  interested me, as too did their public health guidance on Promoting Physical Activity for Children and Young People.  The subject of this post is the clinical guidance on Antisocial Personality Disorder and in my next post, I'll talk about their guidance on Borderline Personality Disorder.  As Dr Tim Kendall, Joint Director, National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health, states: "Approximately 2 million people in the UK have personality disorders, with antisocial and borderline disorders being the most common.

There are a series of interesting recent research studies here highlighting the drastic reduction in physical exercise taken by young people as they move into their teenage years, the fascinating pro