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Just 2 minutes before an episode of the television show Boston Legal aired, Roger Pitman, MD, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, received a telephone call from his sister-in-law informing him that the show would include a segment on propranolol, a drug he was researching for the prevention and treatment of PTSD.

Essential tremor significantly compromises patients' professional and personal lives.

What is comorbidity? Psychiatric comorbidity refers to the occurrence of 2 or more mental or substance use disorders within a certain period. Research shows that comorbidity of substance use and other psychiatric disorders is common and often worsens the prognosis for each disorder.

To improve the prediction of stroke risk after atransient ischemic attack (TIA), researchers havecombined the California and ABCD risk scores tocreate a new unified score, ABCD2.

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Of all the misconceived DSM-5 suggestions, the one touching the rawest public nerve is the proposed medicalization of normal grief into a mental disorder. Fierce opposition has provoked two editorials in Lancet, a front page New York Times story, and incredulous articles in more than 100 journals around the world.

The FDA finds itself straddling a data divide as it decides how to rewrite the black box warnings on the labels of SSRI antidepressants. The agency will almost certainly mandate that the existing black box warning, which addresses suicidality in children and adolescents, be expanded to include young adults up to age 25 or 30. But in what might be a pioneering move for the FDA, the agency will probably also include new verbiage in the warning related to the benefits of antidepressants to people over the age of 30 years.

There are any number of ways to measure the effects of psychoactive medications, ranging from objective assessments of behavioral change to neuropsychological testing to subjective global ratings by physicians or patients. Several recent studies have examined the question of whether medication-induced improvements in neuropsychological test performance correlated with gains in healthful functioning.

This is a film for psychiatrists who are concerned about women's issues and for anyone else who struggles to reconcile an enlightened humanism with the constraints of religious tradition.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are approximately 50,000 violent deaths each year in the United States. Until recently, there were no comprehensive data available to the public regarding these deaths. It was with this in mind that the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) was created, not only to provide statistics of reported violent deaths, but also to educate and possibly prevent more violent deaths from occurring.

Treatment interventions via telephone, Internet, and through other telemedical services are gaining popularity, especially in rural areas where licensed clinicians might not be available. Dr Per Carlbring and colleagues recently evaluated a 10-week, Internet-based, self-help program with weekly telephone calls for patients who had panic disorder with or without agoraphobia. The results were published in the December 2006 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Increased plasma cortisol levels (correlated with increased hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis activity) may be associated with more rapid disease progression in Alzheimer-type dementia (AD). In a study conducted at the Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Dr John Csernansky and colleagues assessed 33 patients with very mild or mild AD and 21 persons without AD annually for up to 4 years, using the Clinical Dementia Rating Scale and various neuropsychological tests. Plasma was obtained from each patient and assessed for cortisol level.

This month, I decided that the time had finally come the time to throw out the 4 boxes I had stored in my attic since leaving my childhood home. These boxes lay piled in a corner with 30 years of dust and dirt on their lids. Unopened in all these years, they were filled with things I didn't need or miss. But before tossing them out, I decided to take a look inside.

In 2006, Psychiatric Times upgradedits Web site (www.PsychiatricTimes.com) to make it more user-friendlyand to provide more features of interestto our readers. As another step to enhancethe value of the Web site, PsychiatricTimes recently introduced a newsearch engine SearchMedica/Psychiatry.

Treatment interventions via telephone, Internet, and through other telemedical services are gaining popularity, especially in rural areas where licensed clinicians might not be available. Dr Per Carlbring and colleagues recently evaluated a 10-week, Internet-based, self-help program with weekly telephone calls for patients who had panic disorder with or without agoraphobia. The results were published in the December 2006 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

The price and availability of psychiatric drugs is expected to be one of the major issues as Congress decides whether to try to find a way to force pharmaceutical manufacturers to lower the prices they charge Medicare Part D drug plans. Antidepressants, antipsychotics, and anticonvulsants are among the 6 categories for which Part D formularies must make available "all or substantially all" medications. As a result, the formularies are unable to bring to bear the drug price reduction strategies they use in other categories.

Damage to part of the brain may cause persons addicted to nicotine to "forget" to smoke, a recent press release from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) claims. Preliminary research showed that smokers may find it easier to quit after suffering damage to the insula.

I was disappointed to see the Figure titled Olanzapine and fluoxetine in the treatment of TRD in the article Treatment-Resistant Depression: Strategies for Management" ( Psychiatric Times, page 34) in the October 2006 special bonus edition.

Considerable debate exists about the value and wisdom of initiating "definitive" pharmacotherapies, particularly antidepressants, in the psychiatric emergency setting. In this article, the nature and prevalence of medication prescriptions for patients discharged from an urban psychiatric emergency service (PES) and the extent to which pharmacotherapy initiation was predictive of patient follow-through with aftercare were evaluated.

The review article, case presentations, and commentary on delirium in this issue of Psychiatric Issues in Emergency Care Settings provide a comprehensive overview of a challenging medical disorder. This issue is particularly useful for physicians and mental health care providers who work in emergency departments (EDs), on psychosomatic services, and on inpatient units with a significant geriatric population.

This study determined the prevalence of at-risk drinking in a psychiatric emergency service (PES) and compared the characteristics and functioning of at-risk drinkers with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder with those of at-risk drinkers with depression or anxiety disorders. Of the adult patients who entered the PES and met study criteria, 148 had schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and 242 had depression or anxiety.

When I was young and attended church services with the family, the sermons of a certain priest, who was a historian, consisted of anecdotes about desperation and compassion that occurred in such places as Nazi concentration camps, Hell's Kitchen or the Bowery in Depression-era New York, or Dickens-like orphanages somewhere. At the end of his anecdote, the priest would dolefully lilt, Examine your own conscience. It was the point during the sermon when a person might startle awake after nodding off.

Childhood survivors of brain tumors and leukemia are at particular risk for stroke later in life, according to research conducted through the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.1 The medical center is one of 26 facilities involved in the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS), a large, ongoing research investigation on the long-term effects of cancer and its treatment in the pediatric population.

The past decade has seen an explosion of new drugs, procedures, and technology. This upward trajectory of health care breakthroughs shows no sign of slowing; such innovations as molecular imaging and pharmacogenetics are within years of going prime time.

Although current guidelines require physicians to confirm whether a patient’s platelet count is 100,000/µL or higher before administering tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), researchers concluded that this testing might be a poor use of precious time. Bryon P. Jackson, MD, an intern, and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, Philadephia, conducted a retrospective record review of patients with ischemic stroke. He and coresearchers determined which patients had a platelet count lower than 100,000/µL and whether these patients had a known history of thrombocytopenia or conditions associated with this disorder, such as metastatic cancer, hematologic malignancy, or recent bleeding, or presentation with sepsis or shock.

Presenting a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is one of the most difficult tasks that a neurologist may have to undertake. Despite the tragic quality of the news, experts in ALS care are exhorting fellow neurologists not to give up on patients in whom ALS is diagnosed.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive, debilitating, fatal disease that involves degeneration of upper and lower motor neurons. Patients often initially present with limb or bulbar weakness, atrophy, and spasticity, followed by progressive loss of ambulation and, ultimately, respiratory failure, which is the most common cause of death.

The diagnosis of Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is devastating for patients and their families. There is no standardized treatment and no cure, and boys with this disorder typically die by age 25 years because of respiratory failure or failure of the heart muscle. Until 13 years ago, parents of boys with DMD had nowhere to turn for support and no concerted efforts in clinical research were being made. This changed in 1994 with the founding of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy (PPMD), a grassroots organization started by parents with the goal of creating awareness of DMD and generating interest and funding for research.

Despite the enormous progress made in stroke diagnosis and treatment in recent years, patients continue to experience stroke-related deficits that clinicians-even those working on stroke rehabilitation units-do not always recognize or record. In a recent study of 53 patients who underwent screening tests within 10 days of admission to a stroke unit, every impaired patient had at least 1 undocumented cognitive or sensory deficit. The authors suggested that without formal testing with standardized assessments, much stroke-related impairment goes unrecognized and perhaps untreated.

The greatest advance in reducing mortality from bacterial meningitis over the past 20 years has been the advent of widespread immunization. Vaccination has also had another effect: changing which forms of the disease are most prevalent.