The October medical specialty journals are just out and they include plenty of practical advice.

Here are several items that caught my eye.

Playing with toy building blocks seems to promote language development in toddlers. That is the conclusion of research published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine. The study involved 175 youngsters between ages 18 and 32 months who lived in middle- or low-income households.

About half the families received two sets of building blocks along with suggested activities for using them. Parents completed diaries about how they used the blocks. The others received the blocks when the study ended.

Six months later toddlers in families who received blocks scored an average 15 percent higher on language assessment than youngsters who did not, wrote the researchers, who are based at the University of Washington, Seattle, and Seattle Children’s Hospital Research Institute. The investigators described the difference as significant.

They speculated that block play might have replaced other activities, like TV viewing, which don’t encourage language development. The study was funded by a children’s toy company.

The next two items are from the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Folks who are self-disciplined, goal-directed and purposeful appear less likely to develop Alzheimer disease. Those are the findings from a study of about 1,000 aging Catholic nuns, priests and brothers whose memory and brain health were measured for an average of nearly eight years.

Those whose self-assessment indicated higher than average conscientiousness were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than colleagues with lower rating. Alzheimer robs individuals of their memory as well as problem-solving and other intellectual skills. The work was done by researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

The final item comes from a national study examining how best to treat depressed adolescents.

Turns out young people who received both medication and talk therapy were most likely to improve. The treatment included the antidepressant medication known as fluoxetine and a type of talk therapy known as cognitive behavior therapy. Nine months into treatment, 86 percent reported feeling better. That compares with 81 percent for patients who received either medicine or talk therapy alone.

The study involved more then 400 depressed adolescents.