Study: Children of suicide more likely to take own lives

By Elizabeth Landau, CNN

April 21, 2010 3:42 p.m. EDT

Previous research found strong indications of a genetic component to suicide.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Researchers looked at data about Swedish children who lost parents
• Between 7,000 and 12,000 children lose a parent to suicide each year in U.S.
• Developmental, environmental, genetic factors are involved in suicide, experts say
• Studies have found that there may be predisposition toward suicidal behavior in families

(CNN) -- Poet John Berryman. Sylvia Plath's son, Nicholas Hughes. These are prominent examples of people who whose parents died by suicide when they were children and also took their own lives as adults.

A large study has found that people who as children or adolescents lost a parent to suicide are more likely to die the same way. The research will be published in the May issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

"It appears from our results that all factors -- developmental, environmental and genetic -- are important," said lead author Holly Wilcox of Johns Hopkins Children's Center.

Researchers looked at data from Sweden's population registry, examining records of more than 500,000 children, teens and young adults who lost a parent to suicide, illness or accidents. They compared those against nearly 4 million children, teens and young adults with living parents.

They found that Swedes who were children or adolescents when a parent took his or her own life had a three-fold increased risk of dying by suicide themselves. But young adults, in the 18 to 25 age bracket, did not have this higher risk.

"The disruption associated with parental suicide, we think, is greater when someone loses a parent during childhood and adolescence," Wilcox said.

Although the risk of suicide went up for children of people who had taken their own lives, suicide itself is still a relatively rare event, Wilcox said.

In the United States, between 7,000 and 12,000 children lose a parent to suicide each year, the researchers said.

The findings have the caveat that they are attached to a country that provides universal health care and has a higher economic status than many others, Wilcox said.

Still, the study is important in confirming the hereditary risk of suicidal behavior, said Dr. Maria Oquendo, a psychiatrist atColumbia University Medical Center who was not involved in the research.

A study in the same journal in February found that suicide attempts also run in families. In some cases, the children had attempted suicide before the parents did, said Oquendo, co-author of that study.

Oquendo and colleagues found that exposure to suicide -- that is, knowing about a parent's suicide attempt -- could not account for the pattern. This suggests that family members do not imitate suicidal behavior but that there may be predisposition toward it, Oquendo said.

Previous research also has found indications of a genetic component to suicide.

A 2009 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found biological markers for depression. Researchers found that the cortex, the brain's outermost surface, tended to be thinner in people at high risk of developing depression.

Participants had this brain surface thinning before they developed mental problems, the study said. Both children and grandchildren of depressed people had these structural differences in their brains.

Researchers believe that the thinning interferes with the processing of emotional stimuli, meaning people with these abnormalities may benefit from therapy specifically addressing how to respond to social stimuli, co-author Dr. Bradley Peterson, a psychiatrist at Columbia University Medical Center, said when the study was published.

Screening may one day become available for this cortical thinning and may help doctors determine depression risk early on, he said.

Many people mistakenly believe that stress is at the root of suicides; stress can play a role, certainly, but the familial component can determine how people respond to stress, Oquendo said.

"Unless there's something that predisposes you to react to stress in that way, the stress won't precipitate a suicide," she said.

There are opportunities for young people who lose a parent to suicide to be recognized in primary care, Wilcox said. Early identification and treatment of depression could help in suicide prevention, she said.

The surviving parent should also be more sensitive to any psychiatric problems that come up, Wilcox said.

Wilcox's study also found that a child's risk of committing a violent crime went up if he or she had lost a parent, regardless of cause.

Citation: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/21/suicide.children.hereditary/index.html?npt=NP1

Naps boost memory, but only if you dream

By Denise Mann, Health.com

April 22, 2010 12:56 p.m. EDT

A new finding underscores just how important sleep is to memory and mental function.

(Health.com) -- Sleep has long been known to improve performance on memory tests. Now, a new study suggests that an afternoon power nap may boost your ability to process and store information tenfold -- but only if you dream while you're asleep.

"When you dream, your brain is trying to look at connections that you might not think of or notice when [you're] awake," says the lead author of the study, Robert Stickgold, the director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, Massachusetts. "In the dream...the brain tries to figure out what's important and what it should keep or dump because it's of no value."

In the study, Stickgold and his colleagues asked 99 college students to memorize a complex maze on a computer. The researchers then placed the students inside a virtual, 3-D version of the maze and asked them to navigate to another spot within it. After doing this several times, half of the participants took a 90-minute nap while the other half stayed awake and watched videos.

When the students were given the maze test again five hours later, the nappers did better than the students who had stayed awake, even those who had reviewed the maze in their heads. However, the nappers who dreamed about the maze -- one described being lost in a bat cave -- performed 10 times better than the nappers who didn't.

The students who dreamed about the maze did poorly on the test the first time around -- which may not be a coincidence, the researchers say. If a task is difficult for you, your brain seems to know it, and you may be more likely to dream about it than if the task were easier.

"If you're not good at something, and you dream about it, you seem to get better at it -- especially if the information can be used in different situations," says Michael Breus, the clinical director of the sleep division for Arrowhead Health, in Glendale, Arizona, who was not involved in the study.

"The sleeping brain seems to be processing information on one level, but on a higher level it helps evolve your memory network if the information is relevant or helpful in your life experience," adds Breus, who is also the author of "Beauty Sleep."

The study's findings, which appear in the journal Current Biology, underscore just how important sleep is to our memory and mental function.

It doesn't even need to be a deep sleep, as the researchers found when they monitored the brain activity of the students while they slept. Although the deep slumber known as rapid eye movement (REM) is most closely associated with dreaming, the students' dreaming and learning occurred after as little as one minute of non-REM sleep.

Health.com: Turn your bedroom into a sleep haven

The type of learning that occurs while you dream can be illustrated by the classic dream that many people have in which they show up for an exam that they haven't studied for, Stickgold says.

"When you're in school -- especially college -- there's this ongoing sense that you haven't done enough," he says. "Maybe you didn't make it to a lecture, or you had a paper due in three days that you hadn't started, so you're laying down memories that say, 'I haven't done anything that I need to do.'"

When someone has the exam dream (or nightmare), he says, "Your brain is taking the knowledge of what happened to help you behave differently in the future."

You may be able to harness the dream power displayed in the study to perform better in your everyday life, Breus says.

"If you're studying something tough, get the basics down and take a nap. If you dream about it, you will probably understand it better," he says. "Or, go to bed a little earlier the night before, wake up early, review the material, and then take a quick nap to solidify your understanding."

That's good advice, says Dr. Rafael Pelayo, an associate professor of sleep medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, in Palo Alto, California.

"Instead of cramming, study intensely, catch a nap, and then maybe do some more studying," he says. "A nap may be a good tool to enhance your ability to remember information."

Citation: http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/22/naps.memory.dream.brain/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn