Category Archives: Mental Health

Calgary Depression Scale for Schizophrenia, in Arabic

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Scientists from Qatar and the United States have managed to validate an Arabic version of the Calgary Depression Scale for Schizophrenia (CDSS) among patients with schizophrenia.

Schizophrenics commonly show both depressive and negative symptoms that can affect the prognosis and course of their treatment. Negative symptoms are disabling symptoms that have a major impact on the quality of life of patients, more so than positive symptoms, which are thought patterns and behaviors that patients acquire after they become ill.

Tests such as CDSS are designed to distinguish between depression, and negative symptoms that are distinctive of schizophrenia.

These tests are not diagnostic per se, “but they are mainly there to asses the severity of psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia and the possible associated depressive symptoms (using CDSS),” explains Hassen Al-Amin, professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar and corresponding author of the study that validated the psychiatric test.

“They are significant because they can help us know how sick these patients are and also to monitor how they are responding to treatment with time,” he says.

These types of tests have been used worldwide and their validity is established.

In order to make them work for Arab populations, experts and researchers had to translate the material thoroughly and decide the appropriate cultural equivalents in Arabic. “We then test the Arabic versions with Arab patients with schizophrenia and compare them with those obtained internationally to make sure that we have a valid scale that is culturally acceptable also,” says Al-Amin.

You’re as happy as your genes allow you to

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Or so claims a new study in the Journal of Happiness Studies, by two researchers from the Varna University of Management in Bulgaria, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The researchers believe they have established a link between genetic make-up and how happy certain populations are.

The happier nations are more likely to have within their DNA an allele, the A allele, involved in regulating sensory pleasure and in helping reduce pain.

For instance, the study finds that Arab nations like Iraq and Jordan, which had the lowest prevalence of this allele, were least likely to classify themselves as “very happy”.

The researchers used data from three waves of World Values Survey, in addition to population genetic data from an allele frequency database compiled by a geneticist from Yale, in addition to climate information, history of pathogenic prevalence, plus World Bank economic data on the nations under scrutiny.

The findings heavily factor in genetic data, but recognized from the onset that genetics may not be the only determinant to happiness. Politics, economics, laws governing nations, and disease patterns can affect how happy certain nations are, perhaps prevalence of the A allele in the genes notwithstanding. Testing this however, they conclude that, besides genes, climatic difference is one other thing that can very significantly affect happiness levels, more strongly than any of the other factors.

These measures however are not absolute, the researchers admit.

“We have not shown that a nation’s genetic and climatic heritage doom a particular country to a specific happiness score, but that it can still rise and fall because of situational factors,” says Hong Kong Polytechnic University professor and co-author Michael Bond.