June 21, 2010 (Boca Raton, Florida) — Adding an abbreviated version of Tai Chi to antidepressant therapy with escitalopram improved resilience, quality of life, and cognitive function in adults with major depression 60 years and older, according to new research presented here at the New Clinical Drug Evaluation Unit (NCDEU) 50th Anniversary Meeting.

“Fewer than half of elderly depressed patients respond to first-line antidepressant pharmacotherapy,” Helen Lavretsky, MD, from the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in her poster presentation here. “There is some information in the literature about the benefits of tai chi in older adults, but this relates to their balance and their physical functioning. We wanted to see whether tai chi would be helpful in improving depression.”

The study recruited 112 adults with major depression and treated them with 10 mg of escitalopram daily for 6 weeks. The 70 subjects who partially responded to escitalopram continued to receive 10 mg of escitalopram per day. In addition, they were randomly assigned to receive either 10 weeks of tai chi chih for 2 hours a week or to a lecture on health education for 2 hours a week.

“Tai chi chih is a shortened form of tai chi that has only 20 movements and is easier to remember over the course of 10 weeks,” Dr. Lavretsky explained.

Most of the patients (62%) were women, and their mean age was 70 years.

The patients were evaluated for depression, anxiety, resilience, health-related quality of life, psychomotor speed, and cognition.

Both tai chi and health education patients showed similar improvement in the severity of depression, with mean Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression scores of 6.0 in both groups, Dr. Lavretsky reported. However, subjects in the tai chi group showed significantly greater improvement in resilience than did subjects in the health education group (70.2% vs 65.0%; P < .05).

The tai chi group also had better health-related quality of life, with mean well-being scale scores of 80 on the 36-Item Short Form Health Survey vs 66 for the health education group (P < .05), and measures of executive cognitive function, as shown by Stroop mean error scores of 0.03 vs 0.4 errors in the health education group (P < .05).

“Patients who were in the Tai Chi arm had a greater resilience to stress, and I thought the improvement in cognitive measures, such as memory and executive function measures, with tai chi was particularly impressive,” Dr. Lavretsky said in an interview.

“I’m in Los Angeles, so people tend to like alternative medicine interventions,” she added. “The limiting measure was the degree of arthritis that patients had. The patients who were in the education group liked that intervention, too, but it was very interesting to me to see that this gentle form of exercise had these superior results. Even C-reactive protein levels in the tai chi group were improved.”

Commenting on this poster for Medscape Medical News, Craig Nelson, MD, division chief of the Department of Geriatric Medicine at University of California, San Francisco, noted, “The interesting thing about this study was that it showed that the effect of tai chi was greater than that of the education program. That is impressive, because older depressed patients tend to have more of a benefit from a group effect, which an educational program would provide.”

He suggested that tai chi may be different in its effects than other exercise. “Looking at such a comparison might be the subject of another study,” he said.

It’s a good thing though. We need to bring people together to remove stigma related to HIV. China authority said this change won’t have a significant impact on the HIV epidemic in China. Yes and No. In China, the most serious problem is internal migration. It benefits the economic development a lot but inevitably causes problems such as prostitution, education, transportation, pollution etc etc. Most international population movement is actually emigration instead of immigration. Because of the small proportion of HIV positive individuals of the whole immigration population, it probably won’t make a big difference. However, in an other hand, several factors may effect the epidemic, for example, short-term visitors are likely to engage in risky behaviour, condom use is still not very common in China despite of free provision, many young girls favour foreigners for various reasons, HIV testing requests a lot a lot more efforts to promote, Chinese hold very different attitudes toward testing, treatment, sex and HIV compared to Britain and Americans. ….

If let the whole nation vote, the proposal might wouldn’t get passed. Thanks we are not a democracy country! pros and cons.

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the following informaiton is from http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100428/ap_on_re_as/as_china_aids

China lifts travel ban against people with HIV/中国不再禁止国外艾滋病等患者入境.

BEIJING – China has scrapped a 20-year travel ban that barred people with HIV and AIDS from entering the country, just days ahead of the opening of the Shanghai Expo, which hopes to welcome millions of overseas visitors.

The decision announced by China’s Cabinet, the State Council, follows similar moves by the United States and South Korea to eliminate travel restrictions for people with the HIV virus. Both lifted their bans on visitors with HIV on Jan. 1.

China’s ban had been launched based on “limited knowledge” of HIV at the time and had proven inconvenient for the country when hosting international events, the official Xinhua News Agency quoted the Cabinet as saying. The Shanghai Expo begins Saturday and runs for six months.

The State Council said in a statement posted to its website late Tuesday that the government passed amendments on April 19, revising the Border Quarantine Law as well as China’s Law on Control of the Entry and Exit of Aliens. The changes were effective immediately.

The move also includes scrapping entry restrictions for people with leprosy and sexually transmitted diseases.

The State Council said that the government realized such restrictions had limited effect on preventing and controlling the spread of diseases in the country, according to Xinhua. The Cabinet did not immediately respond to faxed questions.

AIDS was the top killer among infectious diseases in China for the first time in 2008, a fact that may reflect improved reporting of HIV/AIDS statistics in recent years. Despite greater openness, the government remains sensitive about the disease, regularly cracking down on activists and patients who seek more support and rights.

Government statistics show that by the end of October 2009, the number of Chinese confirmed to be living with HIV-AIDS was 319,877, up from 264,302 in 2008 and 135,630 in 2005. But Health Minister Chen Zhu has said the actual level of infections is probably near 740,000.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed China’s decision and urged other countries that still bar people with HIV to change their laws as soon as possible. “Punitive policies and practices only hamper the global AIDS response,” he said in a statement.