In the News

According to a new study by Vanderbilt researchers, normal brain aging patterns in patients with a psychotic disorder occur at an accelerated rate, impacting the patient’

Paul Newhouse, M.D., Jim Turner Chair in Cognitive Disorders, professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Pharmacology, and Medicine, and director of the Vanderbilt Center for Cognitive Medicine, recently contributed an opinion piece to the Tennessean titled "A cure for Alzheimer’s is not possible without you." Click here to view the opinion piece.

On Halloween morning, a patient nervously listened to Greg Fricker, fourth-year medical student from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, as he explained the importance of receiving an influenza vaccine. Fricker told the patient that roughly 80,000 people died last year due to complications from the flu and confidently reassured him that getting the vaccine could in no way make him sick.  

Using data from the UK Biobank and Vanderbilt’s BioVU, a new study in the journal Molecular Psychiatry finds that approximately 4 percent of suicide attempt risk is captured by genotype data. “Heritability estimates of this sort try to quantify the portion of a given trait that is contributed by genetics,” said Douglas Ruderfer, PhD, MS, the Vanderbilt University Medical Center geneticist who led the study.

A new study examining stress and arousal across pubertal development in youth with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is now enrolling participants, thanks to a $2.3 million, five-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

Adolescents who are struggling with intense emotional, behavioral and social difficulties may find an alternate care path to an inpatient stay through Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital’s Adolescent Partial Hospitalization Program. The program, which runs weekdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., is a group-based model designed to provide comprehensive evaluation and treatment services for patients who would normally be admitted to an inpatient unit.  

An Addiction Consultation Service, specialized training for physicians and changes in the language used in addiction cases are the first of many in a series of new clinical approaches being offered around addiction care as Vanderbilt University Medical Center — and the rest of the country — see an increased demand for such services.

Jeffrey Stovall, M.D., associate professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and affiliate of the Vanderbilt Institute for Global Health, was invited by Physicians for Human Rights to travel to the federal detention center in Dilley, TX, to provide psychiatric evaluations for women who have fled Central America and who are applying for asylum in the U.S.. These women had been recently reunited with their children from whom they were separated at the U.S. border. 

David Marcovitz, Ph.D., assistant professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences and medical director, Addiction Consult Team, is co-directing a four-hour course at the national meeting of the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry titled "Practical Guide to Offering Office-Based Opioid Treatment." In addition, he is one of the co-authors for the paper " Correlates of Opioid Abstinence in a 42-Month Post-Treatment Naturalistic Follow-up Study of Prescription Opioid Dependence," currently in press for the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.