High Prevalence of Psychotropics Overdose among Suicide Attempters in Korea

OBJECTIVE: The availability of suicide methods affects the risk of suicide attempts. This study examined the patterns of substances ingested by suicide attempters (SAs) and the characteristics of SAs using psychotropic overdoses. METHODS: Data for 384 of the 462 eligible SAs who used self-poisoning were analyzed. Demographic variables, clinical characteristics, and factors related to the suicide attempts were examined. RESULTS: There were 256 (66.7%) females and 128 (33.3%) males. Roughly half the SAs ingested psychotropics (n=179, 46.6%). Agricultural chemicals (n=84, 21.9%) were the second most frequently ingested substances, followed by analgesics (n=62, 16.1%), household products (n=27, 7.0%), and other prescribed medications (n=23, 6.0%). Among psychotropics, the most frequently overdosed drugs were sedative-hypnotics, including hypnotics (n=104) and benzodiazepines (n=78). SAs favored Z-drugs and alprazolam. When compared with SAs with non-psychotropic overdoses, significantly more SAs with psychotropic overdoses were female (76% vs. 58.5%, p<0.001) and had a psychiatric history (59.8% vs. 29.8%, p<0.001). They had significantly more previous suicide attempts (0.52+/-1.02 vs. 0.32+/-0.80, p<0.05) and lower risk (7.96+/-1.49 vs. 8.44+/-1.99, p<0.01) and medical severity (3.06+/-0.81 vs. 3.37+/-0.93, p<0.005) scores. CONCLUSION: Psychotropic overdose, especially with sedative-hypnotics, was a major method in suicide attempts. It is important that psychiatric patients are carefully evaluated and monitored for suicidality when prescribing psychotropics.

Updates on Neuroimaging of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Focused on Responses to Fearful Facial Expression / 대한정신약물학회지

The neurobiological basis of emotional recognition, processing and regulation has been extensively studied over the past years. Especially, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be conceptualized as a dysfunction of fear circuit, thus, many studies focused on neural substrate of fear using functional neuroimaging. Neuroimaging studies of PTSD have suggested that the amygdala is hyperresponsive to fearful stimuli, which may be related to hyperarousal or reexperience symptoms of PTSD. The medial prefrontal cortex is hyporesponsive and fails to inhibit the amygdala. Researches also have acknowledged that abnormal activities in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus might be associated with impairment of extinction of traumatic memory. Recent researches using facial emotional stimuli have suggested that PTSD involved not only dysfunction of fear circuit but also dysregulation of basic emotional processing. Despite the progress, many points are left which are yet to be clarified. Fear conditioning, contextualization, habituation and extinction should be investigated using novel paradigms that can explain the complexity of PTSD.

Understanding of Neural Mechanism of Mood Disorders: Focused on Neuroimaging Findings

Mood disorder is unlikely to be a disease of a single brain region or a neurotransmitter system. Rather, it is now generally viewed as a multidimensional disorder that affects many neural pathways. Growing neuroimaging evidence suggests the anterior cingulate-pallidostriatal-thalamic-amygdala circuit as a putative cortico-limbic mood regulating circuit that may be dysfunctional in mood disorders. Brain-imaging techniques have shown increased activation of mood-generating limbic areas and decreased activation of cortical areas in major depressive disorder(MDD). Furthermore, the combination of functional abnormalities in limbic subcortical neural regions implicated in emotion processing together with functional abnormalities of prefrontal cortical neural regions probably result in the emotional lability and impaired ability to regulate emotion in bipolar disorder. Here we review the biological correlates of MDD and bipolar disorder as evidenced by neuroimaging paradigms, and interpret these data from the perspective of endophenotype. Despite possible limitations, we believe that the integration of neuroimaging research findings will significantly advance our understanding of affective neuroscience and provide novel insights into mood disorders.