Does testosterone supplementation help older men with low testosterone improve their quality of life, mood and energy? Some of the “low T” advertisements on TV made it seem like the magic hormone that conquered aging. More recently the FDA has been expressing its concern about over-prescribing by, among other things, adding black box warnings on the labels of gel formulations of …
Pregnancy and Mental Health
This past week, a colleague at UCSF, Dr. Anna Glezer, wrote to let me know about a new patient-centered informational website she is launching focused on issues related to pregnancy and mental health. It’s called Mind Body Pregnancy, and she started it because in her reproductive psychiatry practice she was finding many patients asking similar questions. She wanted to reach beyond just those she is able to see in clinic and …
Body Mindfulness and Peak Performance
Research from the UCSD Center for Mindfulness suggests that what distinguishes people who are resilient in the face of physical challenges from others may be a natural capacity for the kind of self-awareness that mindfulness teaches, in other words, that body mindfulness and peak performance may be inextricably linked. Psychologist Lori Haase, and her colleagues at UCSD, have conducted a series of …
Escitalopram Reduces Inflammation in Depression
Escitalopram reduces inflammation in depression and potentially reduces neurotoxicity according to an article just published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. A pro-inflammatory tendence has previously been noted in patients with depression, and this seems to be associated strongly with increases in kynurenine (see below for more information on how exercise counteracts this tendency). Kynurenine is the first step in …
Lithium and Kidney Damage – Updated 2/2025
Lithium may be effective as a mood stabilizer, but questions often come up about its safety, particularly with regard to kidney or renal effects. A very large study published in November 2015 in JAMA Psychiatry looked at a huge dataset from Denmark in order to provide us with information about these risks. The study consisted of records from 1.5 million …
Natural Isn’t Necessarily Safe
23,000 emergency room visits per year are the result of taking “natural supplements.” Natural does not mean safe. In 1994, Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), with heavy backing from industry. By defining herbal supplements and botanicals as dietary supplements, DSHEA exempted them from the more rigorous standards used by the FDA in regulating food, drugs, and …
Weight Loss Updated
Inspired by our work with a few patients who have lost weight successfully, we just updated the weight loss page. See the links below to find the updated page and some other relevant information. And please let us know if you have resources and suggestions to share. Resources Weight Loss Treatment of Weight Gain Weight Loss Medications
MIND Diet Prevents Cognitive Decline
Researchers at Rush University have developed a diet (the MIND diet) that appears to be associated with significantly reduced cognitive decline in aging. The diet was developed from three sources of information: the Mediterranean diet (as elsewhere on this blog), the DASH diet for the prevention of hypertension, and a review of the literature on the effects of specific dietary …
SSRI Antidepressants and Pregnancy – 2015
A recent study concludes that there may be some good news about the impact of SSRI antidepressants on the fetus in women who are pregnant. The authors used national registry data to examine the relationship between pre-birth SSRI treatment and pregnancy complications while controlling for the effects of the psychiatric diagnoses related to SSRI use. Some previous studies had just compared people who took …
Mediterranean Diet Improves Cognitive Function
Many of our patients are concerned about cognitive function, and there is evidence that people with recurrent episodes of depression may be at higher risk of cognitive decline. But what can be done about this? A just published study in JAMA Internal Medicine suggests that a Mediterranean diet enhanced with either olive oil or nuts may prevent and perhaps even …