In the 1990′s a man by the name of Robert Dewey Hoskins, 54, threatened to slit Madonna’s throat and in 1996 he attempted to follow through on that promise by climbing the wall around her Hollywood home and then jumping in her pool. Luckily for Madonna her security guard saw the man and shot him twice.

Now after being sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1996 and then eventually entering into to a mental health facility Mr. Hoskins has fled from a Los Angeles mental health facility where he was being held since 2011.

The shooting at Madonna’s home, which she wasn’t home for, wasn’t the only time Robert was spotted following Madonna, she had reported him to police earlier in the year. Madonna later testified that he told her bodyguard she was suppose to be his wife and that “he was going to slice my throat from ear to ear.”

While Hoskins was eventually released from prison he was arrested again in 2011 and sent to a new mental health facility where last Friday he simply walked off the hospitals premises.

Police warn that the patient is highly psychotic and when taken off his medications is prone to extreme violent tendencies.

Anyone who sees Robert Dewey Hoskins is urged to phone local authorities immediately and stay away from the man. In the meantime I have a feeling Madonna will be paying for an even bigger security detail then she normal has with her in public and at home.

Do you think the mental health facility should have had a better watch on such a dangerous person?

[Update: Robert Dewey Hoskins, 54 was arrested by Long Beach police about 8 miles from the hospital.]

Madonna’s Homicidal Stalker Escapes From Mental Health Facility is a post from: The Inquisitr

Autism is affecting an ever growing number of children it seems and one set of researchers have discovered an interesting link between the number of nerve cells found in some children and autism.

In some research that has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have found that autistic children have about 67% more nerve sells in a part of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex than children without autism.

The prefrontal cortex is that part of the brain that is responsible for processing things like social skills, communication, cognitive functions, and language; which are all the areas in which autistic children show abnormal development.

This came as a surprise as scientists have assumed that deficits in the social skills of autistic children are typically linked to less nerve cells, or tissue. Instead they found that after studying the brains of seven autistic boys, between the ages of 2 and 16, who had passed away the opposite was the case.

As well the researchers found that the excess of neurons in the prefrontal cortex were not formed after birth but rather during early development in utero. What this suggests to scientists is that the changes responsible for autism are happening a lot sooner than they thought.

The lead researcher Courchesne concluded, “Knowing that we have a specific type of defect that occurs very early in development really helps us to focus and sharpen the next steps in research to determine what caused the excess and hopefully find new treatments that can help children and their families cope better with the symptoms of autism.”

via Know About Health.

Autistic children might have too many nerve cells is a post from: The Inquisitr

If you live just outside an urban center and feel like sometimes life passes you by due to your suburban locale, you should know it’s not all indie shows and carefree nights full of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Over the course of their lives, city dwellers have a higher risk of mood disorders and anxiety due to the long-term effects of dwelling in an urban center on two of the regions of the brain that regulate “emotion and stress.” The findings, detailed in an international study, found city dwellers have a 21% higher increased risk of anxiety and that that risk jumps to 39% for mood disorders. Scarily, city people have “nearly twice” the rate of schizophrenia seen in other populaions, the study says.

Researchers published a press release about the study, commenting:

“These findings suggest that different brain regions are sensitive to the experience of city living during different times across the lifespan… These findings contribute to our understanding of urban environmental risk for mental disorders and health in general. They further point to a new approach to interface social sciences, neurosciences and public policy to respond to the major health challenge of urbanization.”

Findings appeared in the most recent issue of the journal Nature.

Mood Disorders, Anxiety Tied To City Life is a post from: The Inquisitr

Fussy babies may be less likely to shake off their “fussiness” as they age, according to a study in the April 20th issue of Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Excessive crying, sleeping or feeding difficulties could be markers of a propensity to develop Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or “externalizing problems” such as tantrums or aggressive behavior. According to the study, the higher instances of regulatory problems were, the more likely children were to present with the behavioral issues later on. The studies authors highlighted early intervention to address the issues in infants and children:

“Our findings highlight the need for prospective follow-up studies of regulatory disturbed infants and require reliable assessments of crying, sleeping or feeding problems… The evidence from this systematic review suggests that those with persisting regulatory problems in families with other problems may require early interventions to minimize or prevent the long-term consequences of infant regulatory problems.”

Between 1987 and 2006, the study measured more than 16,000 children, 1,935 of whom had regulatory problems.

[Image]

Baby fussiness linked to ADHD, behavioral problems is a post from: The Inquisitr

Earlier this week: too much work can kill you.

Middle of the week- no work can also kill you. Researchers have found a “causal link” between unemployment and early or premature death, in a study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine. Unemployed individuals are “less likely to have good health care, and less likely to have healthy eating habits,” two circumstances which may exacerbate the risk.

Conclusions were drawn from a large scale study of over 20 million people in over a dozen countries. Interestingly, people in countries with more comprehensively available medical resources for the uninsured did not fare better than those in countries without. McGill Sociology professor Eran Shor said the link likely stems from financial stress itself:

“This probably has to do with unemployment causing stress and negatively affecting one’s socioeconomic status, which in turn leads to poorer health and higher mortality rates.”

Men are far more likely to die after job loss than women, at a 78% increase versus the increase in females at just 37%. Shor explains:

“We suspect that even today, not having a job is more stressful for men than for women,” Shor said. “When a man loses his job, it still often means that the family will become poorer and suffer in various ways, which in turn can have a huge impact on a man’s health by leading to both increased smoking, drinking or eating and by reducing the availability of healthy nutrition and health care services.”

Shor suggests more aggressive public health initiatives to address the issue.

‘Casual relationship’ found between unemployment and early death is a post from: The Inquisitr

One of the defining employment statistics of the Great Recession seems to be that a growing and large number of workers are staying in undesirable work situations, waiting for an uptick in the economy to escape the hellish doom of a bad job.

Hey, it’s better than nothing at all, right? Maybe not. It appears the mental toll a job with poor compensation, conditions or other trying circumstances takes on individuals can actually be worse for you than the crushing horror of unemployment in a down economy. A new study, published in the journal Occupational & Environmental Medicine, interviewed just over 7,000 workers to reach the surprising conclusion:

Finding a high-quality job after being unemployed improved mental health by an average of 3 points on the researchers’ scale. But getting a poor quality job was more detrimental to mental health than remaining unemployed; people in this category showed a loss of 5.6 points.

Researchers say the cost of sucky jobs could be higher than one might initially assume:

“Our study indicates that the erosion of work conditions may incur a health cost, which over the longer term will be both economically and socially counterproductive,” the researchers write.

They concluded:

“Work of poor psychosocial quality does not bestow the same mental health benefits as employment in jobs with high psychosocial quality.”

[WebMD, Baltimore Sun]

Sucky job could be worse for mental health than no job at all is a post from: The Inquisitr

This article was written by Alok Jha, for guardian.co.uk on Monday 5th July 2010 15.40 UTC

An EEG test could one day be used to identify people at risk of developing mental illnesses such as schizophrenia before they show any symptoms.

Scientists have found that a type of EEG (electroencephalography) brain wave is slightly different in people who have siblings with schizophrenia, compared with that seen in the general population. The researchers believe the information could be used to identify those at highest risk and pre-emptively treat them before they develop a full-blown mental disorder.

“Unlike in general medicine where we have lots of reliable [biological] markers, such as blood sugar for diabetes, in psychiatry we still rely very much on the behaviours and symptoms a person reports when they go to see a clinician,” said Maddie Groom of the University of Nottingham, who led the work.

She said markers of mental illness would not only help predict who was likely to be at risk but also how severe someone’s condition is and how well they are responding to medication. “[Markers] would give us a really big handle not only on what’s causing the disorder but also how best to treat and diagnose it,” she said.

In her study, she took EEG recordings from 30 teenagers whose siblings had developed schizophrenia and compared these with EEGs from 36 controls. Schizophrenia is thought to be at least partly inherited, so the siblings of people who have the condition have a slightly increased risk of also developing the disorder.

“Their risk is still very small but, nonetheless, when you compare them with people with siblings who don’t have schizophrenia, their risk is still greater than in the general population,” said Groom.

The volunteers were asked to perform a task where they had to press a button every time they saw a particular image on a computer screen. They then had to inhibit that response and not press the button when a different stimulus appeared on the screen in its place.

“This is a really difficult test to do and people without any mental health problems find it difficult,” said Groom. “But when we measured the brain activity of the siblings of the people with schizophrenia, their brain activity was reduced at the time when they needed to pay attention towards the stimulus and also when they needed to inhibit their response to that stimulus.”

While they performed the task, a particular electrical signal known as the P300 wave was significantly reduced in the siblings of schizophrenia patients and in the patients themselves whenever the stimulus they had to ignore appeared on the screen.

The p300 marker is thought to reflect attentional and inhibitory control aspects of brain processing. When someone needs to focus on something that is particularly important, and when that something requires an inhibition of a motor response, the P300 marker tends to be larger in people with good mental health.

However, Groom stressed that the brain activity of the siblings was not radically different from healthy people and that the marker may be related to the risk of the disorder rather than the disorder itself.

“The difference on a case-by-case basis from our healthy group was very small and you wouldn’t be able to pick them out from a crowd, measure their P300 and say that this person is related to someone with schizophrenia,” said Groom.

The researchers are also investigating P300 in people with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Groom presented her work today at the Forum of European Neuroscience (Fens) conference in Amsterdam.

Barbara Sahakian, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the University of Cambridge, said: “If we could identify [people at risk of mental disorders] early with biomarkers and treat them early, we could probably get in there before any damage is done and they become relapsing and chronic.”

In a separate study, also presented today at Fens, Seth Grant of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge created a catalogue that linked brain disorders to malfunctions in genes involved in making synapses, the junctions between nerve cells.

“What we found, in terms of disease, was quite striking – defects in the genes that encode these human synapse proteins are really a major cause of disease,” he said. “There are over 135 nervous system diseases, psychiatric and neurological, that arise because of defects in these synaptic proteins. These are common and rare diseases – schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism.”

He added: “We recognise that these synapse proteins are the molecular basis for many brain diseases. We know no other molecular structure that is responsible for more brain diseases … Clinically, there is a wide spectrum of brain diseases and it is unclear how some of those are related to one another and if they are related at all. We can now see that many of them are related to one another because the molecular underpinnings of those diseases are in the synapse proteins which are physically binding to one another. There is a unifying mechanism that underpins a large number of brain diseases.”

The findings will help target drugs for mental conditions more accurately in future, said the scientists. When the synapses and their role in disease are fully understood, said Grant, scientists will have scores of new targets to develop drugs against. In addition, a drug would no longer be used to treat, say, only schizophrenia or autism, but would instead treat individual characteristics related to the malfunction of particular genes, which might be common to several diseases.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

EEG test may help predict who will develop schizophrenia, claims scientist is a post from: The Inquisitr

Amy Winehouse has done it again, running around Camden last night off her face on god knows what, and for the amusement/pity of the rest of us its all been caught by the paps.

The Mirror is reporting that Winehouse went on a rampage, screaming for her husband and banging on the door of her old flat, which is just 100 metres from her current home.

The photos are awful, she is wearing that same strange string vest top she was wearing the other day. I suppose with that on if she spills anything she can just be wiped down. Whilst she doesn’t look as emaciated as those photos which appeared before she stopped saying no to rehab, she needs to switch out the meth/crack/smack for a sandwich, stat.

Obviously yelling for her husband means she intends to hook up with Blake Fielder, now that he is out of the slammer. Can’t wait for those pictures.

One day, if she doesn’t die like next week, she is going to do a vanity google, see these pics and be mortified. Its a train wreck, you won’t be able to look away.

Amy Winehouse: Train wreck, you know you have to look. is a post from: The Inquisitr