Meg Fluharty summarises a recent report from the Royal College of Psychiatrists and explores why novel psychoactive substances and club drugs need a different response from UK treatment providers.
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Caroline Struthers appraises a recent US cross-sectional study of the use of medications of “questionable benefit” in nursing home residents with advanced dementia. She concludes that all medications are of questionable value if they have side effects which might have a negative impact on quality of life or are likely to cause harm.
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This new review covers similar ground to the 2013 Cochrane review. It includes non-randomised controlled trials, but as with the Cochrane review the findings suggest that antibiotics reduce early implant failure.
[read the full story...]Helge Hasselmann reviews a new systematic review of ketamine for depression, which highlights the need for an RCT to provide reliable data on the safety, tolerability and best route of administration.
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A new study finds that psychiatric medications are implicated in many adverse drug events treated in US emergency departments. Nearly 1 in 10 of all adverse drug event visits to emergency departments are due to psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, lithium salts, sedatives, anxiolytics and stimulants.
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Psychiatrist Andrés Fonseca considers how his clinical practice should change, after reading a systematic review and meta-analysis of drug treatment for neuropsychiatric symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease
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Andrew Shepherd summarises a recent JAMA Psychiatry study looking at the efficacy of pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy for adult psychiatric disorders (and uses words like hubristic and existential quite a lot!)
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John Baker reports on the first population based report of the positive effects of antipsychotic medication and mood stabilisers on reducing the risk of a conviction for violent crime, published in the Lancet in May.
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This is a dilemma I frequently face when I am called out to see someone with dementia on the ward or living in a nursing home. On the one hand I am thinking that anything I use can potentially have serious side-effects and will probably lead to increased health risks and increased mortality. On the [read the full story…]
The aim of this review is to assess the effects of behavioural techniques, pharmacological and non-pharmacological interventions for management of gagging in patients undergoing dental procedures. As the authors note gaging-related problems contributed to about 20% of dental avoidance cases and a wide range of methods have been describe for management of the gaging patients. [read the full story…]
