HEADLINES

• Why physical wellbeing is the forgotten casualty of mental illness
• USA: Minnesota's anti-tobacco policies reap benefits
• USA: Workplaces turning to tobacco-free hiring
• Australian study links smoking with memory loss

• Why physical wellbeing is the forgotten casualty of mental illness

  On average, people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder die 10 to 20 years before the rest of the population; they die of diabetes, heart disease, cancer or respiratory problems.

  In the words of consultant psychiatrist Matthew Hotopf: “Having a major mental illness is as big a killer as cancer”.

  Antonia Borneo, policy manager of the mental health charity Rethink, explains: “Over 60 per cent of people with schizophrenia smoke compared with a third of the general population.”

  Guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence recommend people with severe long-term mental illness should have an annual physical health check.  A Rethink survey of 450 patients last year revealed fewer than half had been for such a check in the past two years.

  
  To try and alleviate some of these problems, Professor Hotopf is helping to pioneer a service bringing together Europe’s biggest mental health unit, the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, with two of the country’s leading hospitals: King’s College and Guy’s and St Thomas’s. Under the new partnership psychiatric patients will receive better screening and treatment for physical illness, and medical patients will be screened and get speedy help with emotional problems that arise from, or exist with, physical illness.

   

  Professor Hotopf also hopes to be able to use talking therapy to tackle the high level of smoking that takes such a toll on people with schizophrenia.
   
  Source: The Times, 11 February 2011 (subscription required)
  Link: http://thetim.es/nkn61J

• USA: Minnesota's anti-tobacco policies reap benefits

  Sustained tobacco-control efforts in Minnesota have led to a 27.1 percent decrease in adult smoking rates, from 22.1 percent of the population in 1999 to 16.1 percent in 2010.

   During that same period the adult smoking rate in the United States declined only 15 percent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

  
  Between 1999 and 2010, Minnesota implemented a number of anti-tobacco measures, including a comprehensive statewide smoke-free law, higher cigarette taxes, public education campaigns, and quit-line services for tobacco users without health insurance.

   

  In addition to a fall in the number of smokers, the daily average number of cigarettes smoked by current smokers also decreased and the proportion of  current smokers smoking more than 25 cigarettes a day fell by more than half. More adults in the state also said they restricted smoking in their homes, and fewer adults said they were being exposed to secondhand smoke.

  
  The study  is based on the findings from a survey that involved 7,057 telephone interviews.

   

  The authors emphasised that continued investment in state tobacco control efforts is essential for widespread social benefits.
   
  Source: US News, 10 February 2010
  Link: http://bit.ly/hUUfbs

• USA: Workplaces turning to tobacco-free hiring

  Smokers in America face another risk from their habit: It could cost them the chance of a job.

  More hospitals and medical businesses in many US states are adopting strict policies that make smoking a reason to turn away job applicants, in order to increase worker productivity, reduce health care costs and encourage healthier living. The policies reflect a frustration that softer efforts, such as banning smoking on company grounds, offering cessation programs and increasing health care premiums for smokers, have not been powerful-enough incentives to quit.

   

  Job seekers must submit to urine tests for nicotine and new employees caught smoking face termination. This shift from smoke-free to smoker-free workplaces, has prompted sharp debate, even among anti-tobacco groups, over whether the policies establish a troubling precedent of employers intruding into private lives to ban a legal habit.

   

  "If enough of these companies adopt theses policies and it really becomes difficult for smokers to find jobs, there are going to be consequences," said Professor Michael Siegel, from the Boston University School of Public Health, who has written about the trend.

   

  Smokers have been turned away for jobs in the past -- prompting more than half the states to pass laws rejecting bans on smokers, but the growth in companies adopting no-smoker rules has been driven by a surge of interest among health care providers, according to academics,human resources experts and anti-tobacco advocates.
  Source: New York Times, 10 February 2011
  Link: http://bit.ly/gszeix

• Australian study links smoking with memory loss

  An extensive Australian study has linked long-term smoking to an increased rate of memory loss later in life.

  However the study also showed that smokers who quit can reduce the risk to that of a non-smoker within a year and-a-half of stopping.

  
  The study was carried out over two years by Prof Osvaldo Almeida, at the Western Australian Centre for Health and Ageing at the University of Western Australia.

   

  It was based on the assessment of brain scans of 229 elderly smokers who were trying to give up and 98 non-smokers. People who took part in the study were all aged 68 or over.

  
  “We have shown that if people quit smoking later in life, the rate of memory decline is arrested in people,” Prof Almeida told The Manly Daily.
   
  Source: The Manly Daily, 11 February 2011
  Link: http://bit.ly/gukEEN