One youth in ten who becomes addicted to nicotine gets hooked within two days of first inhaling a cigarette, says a four-year study of 1,246 senior school students by Massachusetts University researchers in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine (June). The report also found that a quarter of the students become addicted within a month of their first drag on a cigarette, and those who smoke only a few cigarettes a month suffer withdrawal symptoms.
People with epilepsy are three times more likely to commit suicide, says an article in The Lancet Neurology (Aug) online. The highest epilepsy-related risks for suicide were women and those in whom the affliction had been diagnosed within the past six months, says the 16-year study of 21,169 patients by doctors at Denmark’s Aarhus University Hospital. Patients most recently found to have epilepsy had a five times greater than average incidence of suicide.
About half of all cases of children with autism can be diagnosed as early as their first birthday, says a report in the Archives of General Psychiatry (June). Repeated use of standardised developmental tests for social, communication and play development are an accurate way to provide early diagnosis, say researchers at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, Maryland.
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People with schizophrenia are significantly more likely to become violent if they had conduct problems in childhood, say Duke University researchers. They report in Law and Human Behavior (June 30) that people with youthful conduct problems such as antisocial behaviour are twice as likely to be violent, and also more likely to be violent when not high on drugs or alcohol.
Adolescents from low-income families are far more likely to suffer migraines than those from middle-class backgrounds, says a study report in Neurology (July 3) by Yeshiva University investigators. The findings suggest that factors such as stress, poor diet and limited access to medical care seem to be the main reasons for this increased incidence.