PARENTING AT THE PROM: It’s an important consideration, according to Laura Kastner, a UW psychiatry professor who says intensely ritualized events like the prom put kids at risk. She recently told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that parenting strategies run the full range from protective to freedom. “Some parents tend to be the ‘Hey, they’re just going to have fun’ type, where anything goes, while others need to nail down every piece of every hour of prom night from start to finish. Still others are in the middle, understanding that kids will need more freedom, with some control. They negotiate the limousine, which they hate because it’s so pretentious and expensive, but it keeps their kids out of cars and off the roads.”
MONEY, MIND & MRI: MRI, the technology commonly used to diagnose everything from brain tumors to back problems, can also be used to assess mental health. But routine use of MRI to scan the brain for signs of depression, schizophrenia and other mental illnesses is not likely anytime soon. Stephen Dager, a professor of radiology and psychiatry at the UW, knows at least one reason why MRI remains the second choice behind psychotherapy. “It’s still a heck of a lot cheaper to talk to a person than run an MRI,” Dager told the Wall Street Journal. And in fact, insurers won’t pay for the relatively expensive procedure unless the scans are necessary to rule out the possibility of a psychiatric illness being caused by a tumor, stroke or gross abnormality in the brain, according to the report in the Journal.
HELLO GHRELIN: The hormone that scientists believe may be responsible for people getting hungry at mealtime has been in the news a lot lately. So has the UW’s David Cummings, an endocrinologist and first author of the ghrelin study that has gotten so much attention. His report leads to speculation that drugs could be developed that would help people lose weight by decreasing ghrelin levels in the blood or by blocking its action. “It would be interesting to know what would happen if we could block the rise of ghrelin,” Cummings told The New York Times. Would it facilitate weight loss, or make it easier to lose weight through dieting or exercise? He’s not sure, but he thinks it might be easier to use ghrelin to help people who need to gain weight. He believes the hormone is a key to helping the body defend against starvation. “A powerful mechanism to increase appetite and decrease metabolism when weight loss occurs is likely to have evolved because our species was subjected to periods of famine, and the threat to survival came from starvation, not overnutrition.”
Newsmakers is a periodic column reporting on coverage of the University of Washington by national press services.