Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Each year, approximately 1 in 20 teenagers experiences the anguish of major depression. Schoolwork and social life suffer as these youngsters grapple with feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, often topped by suicidal thoughts or behaviors.

There's uplifting news for depressed teens, though. Many feel markedly better after completing a relatively brief course of treatment that includes both an antidepressant medication and talk therapy, according to a team led by psychiatrist John S. March of Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C.

In the largest-ever study of treatments for teen depression, this combination of drug and talk therapies alleviated the disorder's symptoms in a larger proportion of youngsters than either treatment did alone, March and his coworkers report in the Aug. 18 Journal of the American Medical Association. The antidepressant-psychotherapy mix also showed superiority to placebo pills, the researchers say.

Few of the 439 depressed teens in the study reported that they had contemplated suicide or tried to kill themselves after beginning any of the treatments. No one carried out a suicide during the study.http://louis-j-sheehan.info

March cautions, however, that the investigation wasn't designed to address whether antidepressant drugs foster suicide (SN: 7/24/04, p. 51: http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20040724/fob1.asp).

The researchers recruited adolescents ages 12 to 17, all with a current diagnosis of major depression. About half the volunteers had received another psychiatric diagnosis as well, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Participants were randomly assigned to receive 12 weeks of treatment with fluoxetine (Prozac), cognitive-behavioral therapy, a combination of the two, or placebo pills.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression entails therapist-patient discussions about overturning negative ways of thinking, developing social skills, and setting goals to pursue pleasurable activities. In the new study, this talk treatment consisted of 15 sessions, each lasting about 50 minutes.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy exerted a complementary effect on drug treatment, the researchers say. After 12 weeks, substantial improvement had occurred for

71 percent of the youngsters given the combination treatment, compared with 61 percent of those given fluoxetine alone, 43 percent of those who received only the talk therapy, and 35 percent of those taking placebos.

Suicidal thoughts, present in nearly one-third of these depressed adolescents at the study's start, declined substantially in each treatment group. Only the combination treatment proved superior to placebos in this respect.

More participants receiving fluoxetine alone cut themselves or attempted suicide than did peers in the other groups. However, a total of only 33 such incidents occurred in the study, too few for the researchers to draw any firm conclusion.http://louis-j-sheehan.info

A 6-month follow-up of the adolescents will examine whether the benefits of cognitive-behavioral therapy alone become more apparent over time, as earlier studies of teens with less-severe depression have suggested.

"At this point, [March's] study shows that fluoxetine works as a treatment for adolescent depression and that its effectiveness is increased by adding cognitive-behavioral therapy," remarks psychiatrist Grayson S. Norquist, director of the division of services and intervention research at the National Institute of Mental Health in Rockville, Md. Norquist's division funded the new investigation. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

legs

rom Milwaukee, at a joint meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society and American Association of Physical Anthropologistshttp://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

Human ancestors that lived in Africa around 3 million years ago possessed backbones like those of people today and thus walked much as we now do, says Carol V. Ward of the University of Missouri-Columbia.http://louis-j-sheehan.info

Ward and Bruce Latimer of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History analyzed the anatomy of spinal columns from the 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton known as Lucy and a pair of roughly 2.5-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus specimens.

As in modern people, the spines of the three australopithecines bend inward at the middle of the back and curve outward at the lower back. A bony column angled in this fashion positions the torso directly over the hip joints, fostering erect posture and a two-legged gait, Ward says. The shapes of australopithecine vertebrae also correspond closely to those of modern humans, the researchers found.http://louis-j-sheehan.info

Even with an upright stance, Lucy and her kind may have spent much time in trees. A. afarensis' short legs, relative to its upper body, drained energy during walking or running but boosted climbing power, contends Karen Steudel-Numbers of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Climbing skill must have been crucial to A. afarensis, she proposes, because the species retained short legs throughout its 1-million-year evolutionary history.

In laboratory studies, her team found that short-legged people consume substantially more oxygen while walking or running than long-legged people do. Steudel-Numbers estimates that australopithecines required an average of 30 percent more energy to walk a given distance than people do today.Louis J. Sheehan

megiddo

Archaeological excavations at a prison near Megiddo, Israel, have uncovered remains of what may have been one of the region's oldest Christian churches. The mosaic floor of the 6-meter-by-9-m structure, uncovered in the past 2 weeks, bears Greek inscriptions and a medallion decorated with drawings of fish, an ancient Christian symbol.http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us

The style of letters, the wording of the inscriptions, and other features date the floor to the 3rd or 4th century A.D., says Yotam Tepper of the Israel Antiquities Authority in Jerusalem. "It's an extraordinary find if it's third century," says religion scholar Eric M. Meyers of Duke University in Durham, N.C. However, he adds that it's extremely unlikely that a major Christian church existed in the area before Roman Emperor Constantine legalized the fledgling religion in A.D. 313.