Psychiatric Times Vol 25 No 13

Like more and more cancer patients today, I have outlived several prognoses and am still hanging around, in a diminished life, trying to outlive the latest. Sooner or later, all of us get swept up into one or another of the collectively available cancer story lines in the culture.

The jaw-dropping indignity was easy to miss at a time when the O.J. Simpson murder trial was unfolding. A man named Colin Ferguson had been charged with killing 6 people and wounding another 19 after an apparently indiscriminant shooting spree aboard a Long Island railroad train.

A Blue Ribbon report and a hearing in a House subcommittee raised fresh questions about the sufficiency of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) response to suicides among veterans-especially those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

A discovery about the brain protein KIBRA, commonly found in the kidneys and brain, could lead to future treatments for Alzheimer disease (AD). Investigators at the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), lead by Corneveaux and Liang, in Phoenix found that the risk for AD is 25% lower in persons who carry the memory-enhancing KIBRA gene.1 This fi nding indicates that there might be a link between KIBRA and some of the proteins with which it interacts.

Another day without timeto write: patients call in crisis,apple trees need stakes,cord wood waits to be stacked,and rows of pink-topped turnipsremain buried in half-frozen earth.

Although several studies indicate that psychotherapy (alone or in combination with medications) can help psychiatric patients reach recovery faster and stay well longer, a declining number of office-based psychiatrists are providing psychotherapy to their patients.

Scientists from the University of Michigan are beginning a phase 1 clinical trial for the treatment of cancerrelated pain that uses a novel gene transfer vector-an agent used to carry genes into cells-injected into the skin to deliver a pain-relieving gene to the nervous system.

Perhaps you read the editorial commentary in the August issue of Psychiatric Times in which our editor-in-chief, Ronald Pies, MD, wrote about ongoing congressional hearings into potential conflicts of interest (COIs) among prominent psychiatrists?

Our returning military veterans remind us dramatically of the importance to consider traumatic brain injury (TBI) as a potential comorbid illness in cases of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The common causes of comorbid TBI and PTSD are assault and battery to the head, head trauma (personal or work-related injuries), civilian or military explosions, inflicted head trauma in children, motor vehicle accidents, and suicide attempts by jumping. Prevalence figures for comorbid TBI and PTSD historically have been lacking

Late-Life Depression

Late-life depression is both underrecognized and undertreated. The impact of medical comorbidity may mask depressive symptoms.

In last month’s column (“Painting Neural Circuitry With a Viral Brush,” Psychiatric Times, October 2008, page 16), I used Michelangelo’s famous fresco, “Hand of God Giving Life to Adam” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as a metaphor to introduce a series of technologies that have allowed researchers to map the complex interactions of neural connections in continuously functioning neural tissues.

Too often news headlines exert a major influence on our patients-and nothing in child psychiatry grabs headlines like the alleged overprescription of medicines. Physicians sidestep the debate, assuring their patients and themselves that each prescription is written only after careful consideration of risks and bene-fits.