Disorder

Tennis star Venus Williams has withdrawn from the U.S. Open shortly before her second-round match, announcing that she has been diagnosed with Sjogren's syndrome, an autoimmune disorder that can lead to dry eyes, dry mouth and painful joint problems. "I am thankful I finally have a diagnosis and am now focused on getting better and returning to the court soon," said Williams, who has spent considerable time off the court for various health issues, from a hip injury to a viral infection.  Sjogren's (pronounced "show-grins")

SEATTLE — In a move to improve treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, the Army is discouraging the use of traditional definitions such as feelings of fear, helplessness and horror — symptoms that may not be in a trained warrior's vocabulary. It also is recommending against the use of anti-anxiety and antipsychotic medications for such combat stress in favor of more proven drugs. The changes are reflected in a new policy document released this month, one that reflects a growing understanding of the "occupational" nature of the condition for many troops.

Alyssa Kitasoe studied herself in the mirror, and the image was shocking. She had been standing near the bathroom sink, vomiting into a plastic container. When she looked up, through eyes blurred with tears, she was disgusted by what she saw. "It was like seeing a ghost of yourself, or a monster," Kitasoe recalled. "I remember just staring at myself. " A year earlier, Kitasoe viewed herself very differently. A striking young woman with long black hair and a radiant smile, she was strong and proud — the UCLA gymnastics logo on her clothes providing instant respect around campus.

April Dunlap was 17 and weighed 165 pounds when she began a diet and exercise regimen. After three months, the 5-foot-5 teen had lost the 20 pounds she had hoped to shed. But she kept going. "It was like a drug," she said. "I always wanted to lose a little more. " When she hit 120 pounds, Dunlap's mother worried that April was losing too much weight. The family's doctor agreed. Four months after Dunlap's diet began, she found herself in a treatment program for anorexia nervosa. After only 10 days, she had gained enough weight to be discharged from the hospital.

Rina Silverman's refrigerator is almost always empty. She keeps it that way to avert episodes of frantic food consumption, often at night after a full meal, in which she tastes nothing and feels nothing but can polish off a party-sized bag of chips or a container of ice cream, maybe a whole box of cereal. The food she's eating at these moments hardly matters. In short order, the nothing that Silverman feels and tastes will give way to nauseating fullness, and a bitter backwash of guilt, shame and self-reproach.

Gordon Monson's feature on liars ("Human Condition," Dec. 8) contained no allusion to the terms psychopath or sociopath . My lay understanding is that chronic lying is a primary characteristic of psychopathic disorder. This personality uses lying as a means to an end on a regular, systematic basis. But the perpetual liar somehow manages to destroy whatever convincing veneer he has constructed. He brings his successful delusion to an end with a finishing stroke that often borders on the bizarre, almost as though he wanted the whole mess to end. I use the male gender as an illustration only because the overwhelming majority of psychopathic personalities are male.

There may be a lot of sleepy police officers out there, a study finds, with about 40% of them having at least one sleep disorder. A study released today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. looked at sleep disorders and how they affected the health and safety of 4,957 police officers in the U.S. and Canada. Among the officers 40.4% were found to have at least one sleep disorder, and 33.6% had obstructive sleep apnea, a condition in which a blocked or narrowed airway causes breathing to stop and start during sleep.

Medications to treat mental health disorders is soaring among U.S. adults, according to data released Wednesday by Medco Health Solutions, a pharmacy benefit manager. Twenty percent of all adults said they took at least one medication to treat a mental disorder. Among women, 25% said they took such medication and 20% said they were using an antidepressant. The survey analyzed prescription drug trends among 2.5 million insured Americans from 2001 to 2010. Medco researchers also found that adults ages 20 to 44 had the greatest uptick in use of anti-anxiety medications, atypical antipsychotics and drugs to treat ADHD.

Picture yourself in a well-kept room — pictures neatly hung on walls, books organized on a shelf, floors clear of junk. Now sit yourself in a room with crooked pictures, scattered books and dirty laundry on the floor. Feeling any different? In the second room, you might be more apt to keep your distance from a person of another race, believe that Muslims are aggressive or think that gay people are creative, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. The idea, said researchers from Tilburg University in the Netherlands, is that people in messy environments tend to compensate for that disorder by categorizing people in their minds according to well-known stereotypes.

Some simply viewed their children as late bloomers. Others refused to discuss or accept the diagnosis. But many of the affected parents in Ilsan seemed to at least have an inkling when they were told for the first time that their son or daughter had a disorder that in South Korea had long been seen as shameful. "They knew from the bottom of their hearts that their children were suffering, struggling," said Dr. Young Shin Kim, a Yale psychiatrist who led a groundbreaking six-year study of autism among children in the middle-class suburb of Seoul.

Just before noon on a December morning in 1988, a magnitude 6.8 earthquake shook over 40% of the territory of Armenia, centered in the northern city of Spitak. The temblor leveled entire towns and cities, killed an estimated 25,000 Armenians - two-thirds of them children trapped and crushed in their crumbling schools - and hastened the dissolution of the Soviet Union, of which Armenia was then a part. But the Spitak disaster was more than a geopolitical milestone. The earthquake was, in the words of one researcher, a "psychiatric calamity" that has yielded a trove of knowledge aboutpost-traumatic stress disorder.

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details. The Israeli Parliament's move to ban skinny models from appearing in that nation's media may be less momentous than its efforts to thwart Iran's bid to build nuclear weapons. But to the Israeli politicians who sponsored the measure, which won approval in Tel Aviv on Monday, and to American experts on eating disorders, the measure is a clear step toward a key goal: promoting more realistic body images among girls and women.

Cyclist Anthony Zahn of Riverside, winner of a bronze medal in the individual time trial road event at the 2008 Beijing Paralympics, is accustomed to racing the clock. But he's also engaged in a bigger and unwinnable race, a battle he's facing with humor and courage. Zahn, 37, has Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a hereditary disorder that affects the nerves in the arms and legs and leads to loss of sensation and atrophied muscles. It has no cure and Zahn said Friday there are correlations between high-intensity activity — such as cycling — and an acceleration of the disease.

Question: For several years I have been undergoing psychotherapy for a nervous illness, which has now been diagnosed as a general anxiety disorder. I live at an apartment complex that does not allow pets, but my psychiatrist has recently urged me to get a companion animal, which she thinks would give me a positive relationship that would alleviate my anxiety. A friend helped me find a very nice cocker spaniel puppy that was up for adoption. I asked my community manager to allow me to adopt this dog and bring him to live with me. The manager refused, telling me that he was only obligated to allow a service animal such as a guide dog. He said he did not have to accommodate a pet that merely kept me company.

Erin Brockovich has announced she'll be looking into an outbreak of Tourette's-like symptoms among a group of high school students in western New York, to see if they have any environmental causes. Around 15 girls at Le Roy High School have developed strange symptoms since last fall: uncontrollable verbal outbursts and physical twitches so debilitating that one student interviewed by ABC has to use a wheelchair .  New York Department of Health authorities looking into the matter reportedly found no sign of environmental causes or infectious agents.

Reporting from San Diego -- The Pentagon is spending hundreds of millions of dollars searching for a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, the overarching term for the nightmares, flashbacks, anxiety and restlessness suffered by many troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly all of the dozens of research projects involve long-term counseling and prescription drugs. But researchers at the Naval Medical Center San Diego believe that something as seemingly simple as injections of an anesthetic given to women during childbirth may be effective in alleviating the symptoms associated with PTSD.

Tourette syndrome, a bizarre genetic disorder, may be far more widespread than once believed and may account for a significant portion of reading disabilities, panic attacks, phobias and other seemingly psychological ailments, two City of Hope researchers announced Thursday. At its worst, Tourette is identified with violent, involuntary twitching and uncontrollable utterings of obscenities, and involuntary mimicking of the movements and words of others.

Autism symptoms can appear in babies, however some children with the disorder develop normally until about age 2 when they suddenly regress. A new study has linked this second type of autism -- regressive autism -- with larger brain size in boys. Other studies have suggested some association between overgrowth of the brain and autism. The new study, led by researchers at the UC Davis MIND Institute, demonstrates that there are multiple biological subtypes of autism including likely differences between males and females.

There may be a lot of sleepy police officers out there, a study finds, with about 40% of them having at least one sleep disorder. A study released today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. looked at sleep disorders and how they affected the health and safety of 4,957 police officers in the U.S. and Canada. Among the officers 40.4% were found to have at least one sleep disorder, and 33.6% had obstructive sleep apnea, a condition in which a blocked or narrowed airway causes breathing to stop and start during sleep.

"Homeland," "The Vest" 10 p.m. Dec. 11 Showtime The premise Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) returns as a hero to the U.S. after spending eight years as a prisoner of war in Afghanistan. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is a mentally unstable CIA officer who is convinced that Brody is an agent of Al Qaeda. She gets antipsychotic medication and lithium from her sister, psychiatrist Maggie Mathison (Amy Hargreaves), but she fears she'll lose her job if she gets medical treatment through normal channels.