International College of Affective NeuroScience
Fiammetta Cosci
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Posts by Fiammetta Cosci
Affective Neuroscience: a new scientific discipline
Jun 11th
Affective Neuroscience is a growing field of clinical and scientific interest. Up to now, there are, to my knowledge, only two scientific societies in this field. The ICANS – International College of Affective Neuroscience that was born in 2009 in Europe and is addressed to clincians and scientists living and working all over the world and the Social & Affective Neuroscience Society that was recently founded in the United States and had the Annual Meeting in October 2009. The surprising and main characteristic of these Scientific Societies is to be really new, growing, and attractive for young people who are looking for a discipline in psichiatry and in psychology really projected to the future. If you want to read more about this, please click here.
ICANS ANNUAL MEETING 2010
May 12th
Subtyping major depressive disorder
May 11th
I just read an interesting paper by P. Lichtenberg and R.H. Belmaker published in Psychotherpay and Psychosomatics on subtypes of depression that seemed to me extremely interesting. The authors suggested that the current definition of depression is too broad and polymorphic to reflect a single process. For this reason, they try to delineate different forms of depression taking into acocunt symtpmatology, childhood trauma, marital and employment stress, medical health. They also suggest that the current diagnostic system does not encourage a reasecrh for subtypes of depression that may require specific treatment. This could be, at least in part, the reason why placebo response rates raise and the number of subjects needed in randomized clinical trials increases. The authors propose an intuition-based proposal for heuristically classifying depression. For more details on the possible subtypes of depression proposed please click here.
APM 57th Annual Meeting
May 11th
The Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine 2010 Annual Meeting “Advancing Psychosomatic Medicine through Excellence in Education” will be in November 10-13, 2010, Marco Island, Folrida. For more details please click here.
The 10th International Forum on Mood and Anxiety Disorders
May 11th
The Forum will be held in Vienna from 17-19 November 2010 at the Hotel Hilton. For more information please click here.
World Congress of NeuroTechnology 2010
Apr 27th
The World Congress of NeuroTechnology 2010 will be taking place from 12 – 14 October 2010 at the Montecitorio Congress Centre in Rome, Italy. To have more details please click here.
European Psychiatric Association 2011
Apr 14th
19th European Congress of Psychiatry, Vienna, Austria, 12-15 March, 2011
All proposals for workshops and symposia must be submitted online via the congress website. The online submission system will close on Saturday, May 15, 2010. For more details plese click here.
20th IFP World Congress of Psychotherapy
Mar 4th
the 20th IFP World Congress of Psychotherapy and FMPP Annual Congress which will be held from June 16–19, 2010, at the Culture and Convention Centre Lucerne (KKL), Switzerland.
The conference will be jointly organized by the International Federation for Psychotherapy IFP and the Foederatio Medicorum Psychiatricorum et Psychotherapeuticorum FMPP, the umbrella organisation that unites the Swiss Societies for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, for adults as well as for children and adolescents. The event is also cosponsored by the World Psychiatric Association WPA. To know more click here
1st International Congress on Borderline Personality Disorder
Feb 10th
if you are interested, in Berlin, from July 1st to July 3rd 2010, there will be the 1st International Congress on Borderline Personality Disorder
The relationship between cigarette smoking and panic disorder according to a recent critical review of the literature.
Jan 19th
In an online recent published paper we made a critical review of the literature on cigarette smoking and panic disorder. The background was that cigarette smoking and panic disorder, with or without agoraphobia, tend to co-occur at a rate that cannot be explained by chance. The more widely accepted hypotheses of the possible etiopathogenesis underlying such a comorbidity are that: 1) cigarette smoking promotes panic by inducing respiratory abnormalities/lung disease or by increasing potentially fear-producing bodily sensations; 2) nicotine produces physiological effects characteristic of panic by releasing norepinephrine; 3) panic disorder promotes cigarette smoking as self-medication; and 4) a shared vulnerability promotes both conditions.
In the review we identified, via Medline, English language articles published from 1960 to 2008 using as key words: “nicotine and panic”, “tobacco and panic”, and “smoking and panic”. We selected 24 studies according to the following criteria: 1) panic disorder with or without agoraphobia and nicotine dependence, when used, diagnosed according to the DSM; 2) no additional co-morbidity or, if present, adjustment for it in the statistical analyses; 3) use of adult or adolescent samples; and 4) comparison with a non-clinical control group or application of a cross-over design.
On the basis of the critical evaluation of the 24 studies selected we found that panic disorder and cigarette smoking each appear to have the capacity to serve as a causal factor/facilitator in the development of the other. Although the temporal pattern and the etiopathogenetic explanations of such a co-occurrence seem still unclear, the review highlighted the evidence that cigarette smoking tends to precede the onset of panic, thus promoting it. We suggested, as concluding remarks, to encourage further studies in order to strengthen and confirm the observation that smoking tends to precede, thus facilitating, the onset of panic. We also pointed out the need to start using the diagnosis of nicotine dependence when studying cigarette smoking to achieve more comparable data results among different studies and awaken researchers and clinicians to use such a diagnosis since cigarette smoking is not an habit of life but a psychiatric disorder.
The article can bee found here .
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