Talk therapy for depressed teens

LONDON: A Mediterranean diet can greatly increase a woman’s chances of having a baby through in vitro fertilisation (IVF), scientists say.

Adopting the healthy diet – loaded with fruit and vegetables, whole grains, olive oil and fish – boosted the chances of successful fertility treatment by almost 70% for some women.

Researchers from Harokopio University of Athens believe antioxidants in fruit and vegetables improve the quality of a woman’s eggs and also protects the womb, as when its lining is damaged it can be harder to become pregnant.

The diet contains only a small amount of red meat, which has been found to cut the chances of pregnancy, and is rich in whole grains, which can boost embryo quality.

Dr Nikos Yiannakouris, co-author of the study, said: “Women attempting fertility treatment should be encouraged to eat a healthy diet, such as the Mediterranean diet, because this may help increase the chances of successful pregnancy. Our results suggest the beneficial effect of the Mediterranean diet could be through increasing embryo survival.”

The effect was particularly strong for women under the age of 35 who ate in this way for six months before having fertility treatment.

Dr Jane Stewart, chairperson of the British Fertility Society, said: “A Mediterranean diet has long been thought of as a healthy approach to eating.

“For good reproductive health, an appropriate well-balanced diet should be recommended, and it is perhaps not surprising that there is some benefit seen from following this example.”

The Greek researchers assessed the diets of 244 childless women aged from 22 to 41 who were not obese.

Participants were asked 79 questions about how often they ate foods such as fruits, vegetables, cereals, fish and meat, as well as their eating habits in the six months before trying to have a baby, and given a ranking.

Half of the women in the highest ranked group, who stuck closest to the Mediterranean diet, became pregnant, but the pregnancy rate fell to less than a third of those in the lowest-ranking group. The highest-scoring group had significantly higher rates of live births – 48.4% compared with 26.6%. – Daily Mail NEW YORK: Talk therapy can be a cost-effective way to treat teens with depression who don’t take or stop using antidepressants, a new study finds.

Antidepressants are typically used to treat depression, but up to half of families with a depressed child decide against using these medications, according to the researchers.

Nearly half of teens who start taking antidepressants stop taking the drugs because of side effects, cost or lack of benefit.

“Untreated or under-treated depression is a serious burden for many adolescents and their families, and the impact is often felt for many years after diagnosis,” said the study’s lead author John Dickerson.

He’s a health economist at the Kaiser Permanente Centre for Health Research in Portland, Oregon.

Dickerson and his colleagues examined the cost-effectiveness of talk therapy – called cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) – among 212 depressed teens in Oregon and Washington state.

Over a two-year period, depression-related health-care costs for those who received CBT averaged about $5 000 (R59 549) less than for those who received usual care without the talk therapy.

In addition to the actual cost of delivering the therapy, the researchers included such things as the cost of medical and mental health services, hospitalisation and costs related to the time parents spent taking their children to treatments.

“Now we have evidence that CBT is not only clinically effective, but cost effective as well. This is good news for patients, their families and health-care systems,” Dickerson said.

“Most other studies of CBT for depressed youths… involved a much longer treatment programme than the one we tested,” he noted.

“We chose to test a ‘lean’ model with a smaller number of CBT sessions because such a model is more likely to be adopted by health care organisations,” Dickerson said.

The findings were published on January 19 in the journal Pediatrics. – New York Times