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Suicides among people with schizophrenia are a major public-health concern in China, according to a new report. One-tenth of all Chinese people who kill themselves suffer from this severe mental disorder, say psychiatrist Michael R. Phillips of Beijing Hui Long Guan Hospital and his coworkers. In most other countries with suicide statistics, schizophrenia accounts for a smaller proportion of the deaths.

China is the only nation studied in which a larger proportion of women than men develops schizophrenia and commits suicide, the researchers report in the Sept. 18 Lancet. People with schizophrenia in China's rural villages kill themselves far more frequently than do those in the cities, the team notes.

Schizophrenia-related suicides in China often involve married women with no previous psychiatric treatment. In Western countries, it's more common for men with schizophrenia to kill themselves shortly after being admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

About 1 in 250 Chinese citizens develops schizophrenia, compared with approximately 1 in 100 U।S. residents, the investigators say. http://louis-j-sheehan.info

The team's portrayal of schizophrenia and suicide in China derives from analyses of a 1993 national psychiatric survey, a national review of suicides recorded between 1995 and 2000 that included psychiatric interviews of surviving families and friends, and government data on mortality trends.http://louis-j-sheehan.info

collaberaTION

Older adults often find that their memories betray them. A team of Canadian psychologists, led by Michael Ross of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, offers this advice to elderly individuals with memory concerns: Don't go it alone.

Talking about recent memories with someone else, such as a spouse, works like a cognitive vacuum cleaner, in Ross' view. It sucks up many mistakes that litter memory, leaving behind a relatively clean core of accurately recalled information.

"Collaboration could help to reduce the frequency of older people's false recall in many everyday contexts," Ross says. Few researchers have examined collaborative remembering (SN: 9/13/97, p. 174).

Ross and his coworkers devised two memory tasks for 59 married couples, ages 68 to 78. The researchers randomly assigned 29 couples to collaborate on their choices and 30 to deliberate individually.

The first task involved list memory. Each couple jointly circled 25 items for purchase in a 70-item grocery catalog. About an hour later, participants were taken to a supermarket where they attempted to remember items from their shopping lists and put them into a cart. After returning home, volunteers again tried to recall items on their shopping lists.

On the second task, participants tried to name 14 highlighted but unlabeled landmarks on a map of their community.

Individuals correctly recalled about two or three more shopping items and landmarks than couples did, the researchers report in the September Applied Cognitive Psychology. However, couples usually made four or five fewer memory errors on these tasks than individuals did.

Collaborators challenged each other's mistakes, Ross theorizes. Consistent with that scenario, individuals working alone rarely picked the same wrong grocery items or made the same landmark errors as their spouses did.

Not surprisingly, when working individually, people with either lots of shopping experience or community familiarity remembered more material on these respective tasks than their less-knowledgeable spouses did. Yet the "experts" and "nonexperts" committed the same number of memory errors, Ross says.

Experts in each area drew on a rich store of memories that generated both hits and misses, he proposes. So, even for an expert, a collaborator can help weed out mistakes.

Collaboration represents a "manageable and realistic solution to a memory problem that gets increasingly onerous as we age," remarks psychologist William von Hippel of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

Fears of forgetfulness contribute to memory errors by the elderly, von Hippel suggests. In Ross' shopping study, for instance, such concerns might have impelled individuals to grab any plausible or familiar item.

Although people commonly shop with a list, the new study applies to many memory challenges faced by older people, comments psychologist D। Stephen Lindsay of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Consider having to remember to stop by the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, check your blood pressure while there, and then get cash at the bank before getting a haircut. लुईस जे SHEEHAN

smokers

Smokers hoping to curb health risks by turning to light cigarettes are less likely to quit smoking than people who smoke regular cigarettes, according to an analysis of census data.

Although they have been marketed as delivering less tar and nicotine to smokers, light cigarettes have been shown to offer no health advantage over regular cigarettes. Nevertheless, "lights" make up 85 percent of all cigarettes sold in the United States.

To study the use of light cigarettes and their impact on smoking cessation, researchers analyzed a 2000 U.S. Census Bureau survey of more than 32,000 people, 12,000 of whom were smokers. The researchers took into account such factors as socioeconomic status, sex, and health history.

More than one-third of the smokers reported that they had regularly smoked light cigarettes to reduce health risks, says study leader Hilary Tindle of the University of Pittsburgh. These people were about 54 percent less likely to have quit smoking than were people who had smoked regular cigarettes, Tindle's team reports in the August American Journal of Public Health.

In addition, the likelihood that light-cigarette smokers would report having permanently quit shrank with age. For example, light-cigarette smokers age 65 or older were 76 percent less likely to have quit than their regular-cigarette-smoking peers.

"Some research reveals that light cigarettes were put on the market to target health-conscious smokers, and if they hinder quitting, [as] our study supports, that's a big problem," Tindle says. More than 30 million adults in the United States have switched to light cigarettes under the false belief that the move would reduce their health risks, she estimates.

The assumption that light cigarettes are low in tar and nicotine is misguided, says Peter Shields of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington, D.C. Smokers who switch to light cigarettes compensate for the reduced amount of nicotine by smoking more often, inhaling more smoke per draw, or smoking past the filter. Light cigarettes actually produce more carcinogens than regulars, and that difference has changed the type of lung cancer smokers have acquired in the past 20 years, Shields says.

Still, most smokers believe that light cigarettes are a healthy alternative to regular ones, says Andrew Hyland of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N।Y. "There's not a shred of evidence here that suggests that lights are good for you," he says. "If anything, they can be extraordinarily bad for people trying to quit." http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.wordpress.com

The new research doesn't show that smoking light cigarettes causes the failure to quit, but such a study would be almost impossible to conduct because it would require smokers to randomly switch cigarettes over time, Tindle says। http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.wordpress.com

The study does show that some groups of people with high rates of having quit—those with higher socioeconomic status and a history of cardiovascular disease, for instance—were more likely than other groups to have cited health reasons for smoking lights. This overlap might mean some potential quitters instead keep smoking lights, and "that's a concern," Tindle says.

vril Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

The novel centres on a young, independently wealthy traveler (the narrator), who accidentally finds his way into a subterranean world occupied by beings who seem to resemble angels, who call themselves Vril-ya. The hero soon discovers that they are descendants of an antediluvian civilisation who live in networks of subterranean caverns linked by tunnels. There they live in their technologically supported Utopia, chief among their tools being the "all-permeating fluid" called "Vril", a latent source of energy which his spiritually elevated hosts are able to master through training of their will, to a degree which depends upon their hereditary constitution, giving them access to an extraordinary force that can be controlled at will. The powers of the will include the ability to heal, change, and destroy beings and things--the destructive powers in particular are awesomely powerful, allowing a few young Vril-ya children to wipe out entire cities if necessary. The narrator suggests that in time, the Vril-ya will run out of habitable spaces underground and will start claiming the surface of the earth, destroying mankind in the process, if necessary.

The uses of Vril in the novel amongst the Vril-ya vary from an agent of destruction to a healing substance. According to Zee, the daughter of the narrator's host, Vril can be changed into the mightiest agency over all types of matter, both animate and inanimate. It can destroy like lightning or replenish life, heal, or cure. It is used to rend ways through solid matter. Its light is said to be steadier, softer and healthier than that from any flammable material. It can also be used as a power source for animating mechanisms. Vril can be harnessed by use of the Vril staff or mental concentration.

A Vril staff is an object in the shape of a wand or a staff which is used as a channel for Vril. The narrator describes it as hollow with 'stops', 'keys', or 'springs' in which Vril can be altered, modified or directed to either destroy or heal. The staff is about the size of a walking stick but can be lengthened or shortened according to the user's preferences. The appearance and function of the Vril staff differs according to gender, age, etc. Some staffs are more potent for destruction, others for healing. The staffs of children are said to be much simpler than those of sages; in those of wives and mothers the destructive part is removed while the healing aspects are emphasized. The destructive force is so great that the fire lodged in the hollow of a rod directed by the hand of a child could cleave the strongest fortress or cleave its burning way from the van to the rear of an embattled host. http://louis1j1sheehan1.blogspot.comIt is also said that if army met army and both had command of the vril-force, both sides would be annihilated.

Interestingly, the Vril-ya also use Vril to take baths: It is their custom also, at stated but rare periods, perhaps four times a-year when in health, to use a bath charged with vril. They consider that this fluid, sparingly used, is a great sustainer of life; but used in excess, when in the normal state of health, rather tends to reaction and exhausted vitality. For nearly all their diseases, however, they resort to it as the chief assistant to nature in throwing off the complaint.

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