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About eight p.c of the inhabitants may have PTSD sooner or later of their lives. Wherever from 11 to 20 p.c of U.S. veterans have PTSD in any given 12 months. Credit score: © Voyagerix / Fotolia Experiments in mice by researchers at Johns Hopkins counsel that if the aim is to ease or extinguish fearful emotional recollections like these related to post-traumatic stress dysfunction, alcohol might make issues worse, not higher. Outcomes of their research reveal, they are saying, that alcohol strengthens emotional recollections related to fearful experiences and prevents mice from pushing apart their fears. In a abstract of their findings, printed on-line Jan. three in  Translational Psychiatry , the researchers say their experiments additionally recognized what they consider is the molecular mechanism chargeable for alcohol-related concern relapses and efficiently used a drug, perampanel -- at the moment used to deal with epileptic seizures...

Over a two-year period, high-dose opioid prescribing declined by 16 percent, and very-high-dose opioid prescribing dropped by 24 percent. The number of patients receiving both opioids and sedatives, which can be lethal when combined, dropped by 21 percent. The study, published in the journal  Pain , looks at the effect of the Opioid Safety Initiative rolled out by the Veterans Health Administration in late 2013 to promote safer opioid prescribing. The study examines implementation of the OSI across all of the nation's 141 VA hospitals. Under the OSI, the VHA created a "dashboard" tool using its national computerized medical record system to allow local VA clinical leaders to systematically review opioid prescribing and give physicians feedback. The researchers hope their findings could help other large health systems use their own electronic medical systems as part of a larger initiative to address a key aspect of the nation's epidemic of painkiller overdose...