Many of the medications we prescribe, most notably antipsychotics and antidepressants, have some risk of QTc prolongation. Since it’s rare to have complications of a prolonged QTc interval—such as torsades de pointes (TdP) and sudden cardiac death—clinics and hospitals typically don’t screen for it using electrocardiograms (ECG).

It’s well established that long-term, heavy alcohol use can damage the brain and can cause problems such as Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome and alcohol-related dementia. But what about the vast majority of our patients, who drink moderately?

The debate about whether antidepressants work in children has been with us since the tricyclic era. A recent study evaluated the short-term efficacy and safety of a newer agent, desvenlafaxine (Pristiq).

Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is typically defined as a major depression that fails to remit after at least 2 trials of 2 different classes of antidepressants. Other than electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), there remain few evidence-based biological treatment options for TRD.

The mainstay of current treatment for panic disorder involves SSRIs and psychotherapy, specifically either cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or exposure with response prevention (ERP) therapy. Several studies have evaluated whether adding DCS to ERP therapy might enhance the effectiveness of the therapy, but there have been mixed results.

Tourette’s disorder (TD) is a movement disorder emerging during childhood that causes persistent motor and vocal tics. TD is treated with a variety of medications, but often with an off-label designation.

As clinicians, we’re more interested in preventing excessive drinking than curing hangovers. But it’s always nice to have some helpful advice for patients, which we found in a recently published literature review of clinical trials of hangover treatments.

Since the 2004 FDA black-box warning on all antidepressants for pediatric use, controversy continues over the use of SSRIs and SNRIs in children and adolescents. Both classes of medication are still commonly used for pediatric depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Since estrogen can affect neurotransmitter functioning, there has been some interest in using estrogen modulators to treat psychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia. Raloxifene is a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM) with some preliminary evidence for effectiveness in women with schizophrenia.

A challenging barrier for patients with opi­oid use disorders is the discomfort that can occur during the “induction phase” of their treatment, which is the period between discontinuation of opioids and initiation of medication-assisted therapy (MAT).