Addiction psychiatry training in rural Australia: a Victorian initiative.

OBJECTIVE: The shortage of addiction psychiatrists in Australia results in poor access to specialist care. This is most evident in rural Australia, a population experiencing significant issues related to drugs, alcohol and mental illness. This problem is exacerbated by the lack of addiction psychiatry training in rural Australia. Purposeful and well-coordinated educational opportunities for health professionals in rural settings can assist in recruitment and retention. This report will describe the establishment of an addiction psychiatry training programme in regional Victoria. CONCLUSION: Rural addiction psychiatry training programmes that ensure trainees meet the competencies required of an addiction psychiatrist can be established. Key components in establishing programmes are: collaboration between a breadth of local services; provision of quality supervision; support of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP), senior psychiatrists and managers; provision of assistance to trainees and their families; and appropriate selection of trainees.

Thinking about worry: Investigation of the cognitive components of worry in children.

BACKGROUND: Despite being extensively studied in adults, investigation of worry and it's associated cognitive variables remains in its infancy in paediatric samples. AIMS: This study aimed to investigate 1) whether the child cognitive variables of intolerance of uncertainty (IU), positive beliefs about worry (PBW), negative beliefs about worry (NBW), negative problem orientation (NPO) and cognitive avoidance (CA) were associated with child worry, 2) whether parental worry and cognitive variables were associated with child worry, 3) whether the relationship between child and parent worry was mediated by child cognitive variables and 4) whether the relationships between specific parent cognitive factors and child worry were mediated by specific child cognitive factors. METHOD: Participants were 114 children plus one of their parents. Parents and children completed questionnaires assessing each of the five cognitive variables and worry. RESULTS: When examined together, child NBW and CA significantly predicted child worry. Parent worry, IU and CA were significantly and positively related to child worry. The relationship between parent worry and child worry was mediated by child NBW and CA. The relationship between parent IU, NPO and CA and child worry was mediated by child IU, NPO and CA respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Child NBW and CA may be particularly important to child worry and may represent potential treatment targets. Parental worry and cognitive variables may play a role in the development and / or maintenance of child worry.

Loss of forebrain cholinergic neurons and impairment in spatial learning and memory in LHX7-deficient mice.

The identification of the genetic determinants specifying neuronal networks in the mammalian brain is crucial for the understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms that ultimately control cognitive functions. Here we have generated a targeted allele of the LIM-homeodomain-encoding gene Lhx7 by replacing exons 3-5 with a LacZ reporter. In heterozygous animals, which are healthy, fertile and have no apparent cellular deficit in the forebrain, b-galactosidase activity reproduces the pattern of expression of the wild-type Lhx7 locus. However, homozygous mutant mice show severe deficits in forebrain cholinergic neurons (FCNs), while other classes of forebrain neurons appear unaffected. Using the LacZ reporter as a marker, we show that in LHX7-deficient mice FCN progenitors survive but fail to generate cholinergic interneurons in the striatum and cholinergic projection neurons in the basal forebrain. Analysis of behaviour in a series of spatial and non-spatial learning and memory tasks revealed that FCN ablation in Lhx7 mutants is associated with severe deficits in spatial but only mild impairment of non-spatial learning and memory. In addition, we found no deficit in long-term potentiation in mutant animals, suggesting that FCNs modulate hippocampal function independently of its capacity to store information. Overall our experiments demonstrate that Lhx7 expression is required for the specification or differentiation of cholinergic forebrain neurons involved in the processing of spatial information.