Depression

This is the true story of how the Battle of Britain was won, how penicillin was discovered, how the largest pharmaceutical company in the world got its start-and how democracy was saved.

Sleep-disordered breathing and behavioral sleep disturbance in young children may lead to learning disabilities.

Patients who are experiencing pseudoexacerbations or confirmed exacerbations of disease should be assessed and monitored for depressive and anxiety symptoms.

In the opinion of this psychiatrist and former chair of the chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, the changes in the newly approved DSM-5 will loosen diagnosis and threaten to turn our current diagnostic inflation into diagnostic hyperinflation. There are direct implications for primary care physicians and pediatricians.

If physicians know how well their patients tolerate uncertainty about health before providing feedback during a consultation, they can improve their patients' care dramatically.

First-line agents include selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and venlafaxine.

Many patients clearly would benefit from help from clinicians, but two-thirds of patients have never sought medical care for this disorder.

Skills Quiz: Celiac Disease; Dysplastic Nevus; MS and Smoking; Giannotti-Crosti; Minocycline discoloration

Patients with ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease typically don’t receive preventive services at the same rate as general medical patients. Vaccination is a key area of confusion.

Several classes of drugs seem to have positive effects for patients with GI disorders--including NSAIDs, anticonvulsants, alpha-adrenergic agents, neuromuscular agents, and antidepressants. Details here.

Here: an update on the challenges of detection, diagnosis, and management of celiac disease and non–celiac disease and the importance of gluten sensitivity.

October 11th is National Depression Screening Day. But how do you screen, diagnose, and treat effectively given the time constraints of busy office practice?

Benzodiazepines are overprescribed and abused; are increasingly responsible for emergency room visits; and are contraindicated for patients with chronic pain.

For many patients with diabetic peripheral neuropathy, severe pain can be controlled to a degree sufficient to improve their quality of life. Here: effective management strategies, including topical agents, oral medications, and nonpharmacological therapies (eg, acupuncture and transcutaneous nerve stimulation).

The key diagnostic considerations hypokalemia, periodic paralysis, and ischemia should lead the assessment of a patient with acute generalized weakness.

Chronic pain management in the elderly is complex. Safe and effective use of analgesic medications in geriatric patients requires risk-benefit analysis.

Medication overuse headache can result from overuse of any drug to abort acute headache. Discontinuation is the only effective treatment and is difficult.

Also known as “broken-heart syndrome,” Takotsubo syndrome is a stress-induced cardiomyopathy.

A 56-year-old woman noted the abrupt onset of several very painful ulcerations located on her back. The patient had known (and active) Crohn disease, clinical depression requiring ongoing psychiatric care, and borderline diabetes mellitus.

Would you treat the elevated A1C aggressively-and what would your target level be? Would you consider statins? Dr Shahady invites your insights.

Ulcerative colitis has a greater impact on patients’ quality of life than physicians perceive, and the disease affects their lives even more than the impact of other chronic conditions, according to paired surveys of doctors and patients.

Here: 10 tips that can help you provide optimal care of your patients with MS.

A 52-year-old woman presents with severe intra-oral ulceration and oral pain. She reports that several years earlier, she had been taking cephalexin when severe intra-oral ulceration developed.

Different strategies to prompt patients to take their antidepressant as prescribed have been tried. Many that have been evaluated in controlled trials are considered in a new review that examines their effectiveness.

The British medical journal, The Lancet, surveyed a number of studies that discuss troubling statistics on suicide and depression among American physicians.