French Fries Cause Depression? Night Shifts and Distress; Athletes Turn to Shrooms

Can french fries make you sad? A new study linked the comfort food with a higher risk of anxiety and depression, likely due to acrylamide exposure. (PNAS)

Managing depression with psychotherapy may also help protect against new-onset cardiovascular disease. (European Heart Journal)

The 10% of most socially vulnerable people in the U.S. had an 82% higher suicide rate than the least socially vulnerable people from 2016 to 2020. “If you can stratify risk and know that people in a community are going to be that much more at risk, that’s huge because you can target interventions to those communities,” said senior study author Robert Gibbons, PhD, of the University of Chicago, in a statement. (JAMA Network Open)

Compared with day shift work, evening/night shifts or rotating shifts were associated with higher rates of serious psychological distress in adults, according to a CDC survey.

About 11% of young people with sudden cardiac death also had schizophrenia — a percentage more than 11-fold higher than their share of the general population. (JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology)

A phase II/III clinical study testing ulotaront — a TAAR1 agonist with 5-HT1A agonist activity — for the treatment of generalized anxiety disorder is now underway, said developers Sunovion and Otsuka. The investigational drug is also currently being tested for schizophrenia and as an adjunct for major depressive disorder.

People with binge eating disorders might have altered neural circuits that form certain habits. “Telling someone with binge eating disorder to not eat so much would be like telling a patient with epilepsy to simply stop having seizures,” said study author Casey Halpern, MD, of Penn Medicine, in a statement. (Science Translational Medicine)

Former professional athletes are turning to psilocybin — aka magic mushrooms — to alleviate chronic pain and mental health issues. (KFF Health News)