It has now been a full ten years since the first of the second-generation cholinesterase inhibitors (CIs), Aricept (donepezil) was approved for Alzheimer’s dementia.

A 70-year old man comes into your office and asks: “Doctor, I keep misplacing my keys-am I getting Alzheimer’s?” You detect the note of anxiety in his voice, and you want to give an answer, and soon.

Why don’t we start with the issue of agitation? The question in many psychiatrists’ minds is how seriously we should take the FDA advisory about the dangers of atypical antipsychotics?

The largest and most rigorous study to date on the treatment of bipolar depression was just published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study, conducted as part of the NIMH-funded Systematic Treatment Enhancement Program for Bipolar Disorder (STEP-BD), enrolled a total of 366 subjects with either bipolar I or II disorder during a major depressive episode.

On February 21, 2007, the FDA directed all manufacturers of stimulants to develop Medication Guides for patients, spelling out, in non-technical language, the dangers of taking these medications.

We’ve known for some time now that clozapine and Zyprexa (olanzapine) cause the most weight gain of any antipsychotic, but we didn’t know the actual mechanism – until now.

In the February issue of TCPR, we reported a recent FDA panel’s opinion that rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) was relatively ineffective for treatment-resistant depression. The type of rTMS that has been tested for depression generally involves 10 Hz (ten pulses per second).

After reading these articles, you should be able to…

Every month seems to bring a new FDA advisory or an alarming research finding about the use of medications in pregnancy. In this article, we update you on what we consider to be the most important developments over the past couple of years.

Over the last several years, we’ve all seen many FDA warnings and cautionary letters from drug companies about the effects of psychotropics in pregnancy. As a result, it’s easy to become a little skittish about prescribing any medication for pregnant women.