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Posts by Nestor:

Does your child know you’re sad? Facial expression recognition in kids of depressed mothers

29.05.2010 by Nestor Lopez-Duran PhD Category All Posts, Depression, Parental Depression No Comments →

BRIEFS from APS:

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, during the next few days I’ll be summarizing research presented at the Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science. I’ll start today with a non-so-brief report of a study I know very well, mostly because it’s a study I presented yesterday morning.

For the last few years, I’ve been interested in exploring why children of depressed parents ( those at ‘familial-risk’) are more likely than their peers to become depressed. In fact, up to 50% of these children will develop depression by the end of their teen years. If we understand why these kids develop depression, we could create preventive intervention for these children. In our research, we have focused our efforts on examining factors that keep these children from regulating their emotions effectively. For example, we are interested in whether kids at familial risk for depression have biases in their attention and perception  of emotions, which may lead to lower levels of happiness (positive affect) and higher levels of sadness. Read More



Child-Psych.org blogging from APS in Boston this weekend

26.05.2010 by Nestor Lopez-Duran PhD Category All Posts 2 Comments →

Hello everyone, I’m sorry that I haven’t been posting as frequently during the last month, but I’m about to make it up to you. This weekend I will continue a tradition that I started last year by posting daily from the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. I will be arriving to Boston tomorrow and every afternoon I hope to post short reviews of the research that is presented during the conference. Expect updates throughout the day. Also, I will be posting frequent twitter updates, so feel free to follow child-psych @childpsychology.

Thank you all for your patience! Nestor.



Antidepressant medications and risk for suicide in children and adolescents: all drugs are created equal.

12.05.2010 by Nestor Lopez-Duran PhD Category All Posts, Depression, Medications, Suicide, Teens 3 Comments →

In my clinical work, I often encounter parents who are concerned about putting their kids on psychiatric medications. In the case of anti-depressants, such concerns are grounded on a large literature that has linked anti-depressant use by adolescents with a mild increase in the risk of suicide. Contrary to some common explanations, it is not simply that kids who are more likely to attempt suicide (those who are clinically depressed) are also more likely to receive anti-depressant medication, since the increased risk for suicide has been observed during randomized clinical trials (RTCs). That is, in many RTCs, those clinically depressed kids who are randomly assigned to a medication have been found to be more likely to attempt suicide than their equally depressed peers who happened to be randomly assigned to a placebo. It is indeed the exposure to the active treatment that leads to the increase risk for suicide. Although there are some questions still being debated (e.g., effect of age, type of medication, type of disorder, etc), there is a general agreement that anti-depressant medication use during adolescence leads to a mild but real increase in the risk for suicide. The more pertinent questions are 1) why is this the case? And more importantly… 2) what are the implications for clinical practice ? I’m going to touch on these two questions during the next few weeks. Today, I want to discuss a recent article published in the Journal Pediatrics that examined the risk of suicide among adolescents taking anti-depressant medications in Canada. The main goal of the study was to examine whether the kind of medication (brand or type) resulted in different levels of risk. In other words, are all medications created equal in terms of their effects on suicide risk for adolescents? Read More



Maternal infection during pregnancy and autism: The “flu hypothesis” revisited.

28.04.2010 by Nestor Lopez-Duran PhD Category Autism, Causes, Pregnancy 7 Comments →

BRIEFS

The last issue of the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders included one of the largest examinations of the association between maternal infection during pregnancy and risk for autism. The study was conducted in the Denmark where researchers examined the maternal infection rates during pregnancy and autism diagnoses for all children born in Denmark between 1980 and 2005. ASD diagnosis was calculated by examining the Danish Psychiatric Central Registry, which includes information of all children who received outpatient or inpatient treatment with a diagnosis of ASD during those years. The researchers also examined the Danish National Hospital Registry, which includes information about all hospital admissions in the entire country during that time. Read More



Kids with Oppositional Defiant Disorder respond to frequency but not intensity of consequences!

14.04.2010 by Nestor Lopez-Duran PhD Category All Posts, Behavior Problems 2 Comments →

Today I wanted to write about a study published recently in the journal Biological Psychiatry, which surprisingly didn’t get much press coverage. The study examined the way that rewards and consequences affect how kids with oppositional defiant disorder make decisions. Previous studies suggest that kids with ODD and conduct disorder have a reduced physiological response to aversive conditions, such as punishment. This is often used to explain why these kids don’t respond well to discipline styles that relay solely or mostly on punishment. But few studies have examined how different types of rewards and consequences actually affect the way these kids make decisions. Read More





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