Dr. Osser, as an attending psychiatrist at a VA unit in which you evaluate many patients with PTSD, how do you typically approach establishing a valid and reliable diagnosis of PTSD in your patients?

The results of the cognitive therapy component of the NIMH-funded STAR-D trial were finally released. Recall that in STAR-D, about 4,000 depressed patients were initially enrolled and were all given Celexa (citalopram) at an average dose of about 40 mg/day (see TCPR January 2007 for a rundown of STAR-D findings).

Fibromyalgia is usually considered a rheumatologic condition characterized by at least 3 months of widespread pain and the presence of tender points. About two thirds of fibromyalgia patients also suffer from depression, and many such patients eventually find their way to our offices.

Project Match was a large, government-funded research project conducted in the 1990s that showed equivalent benefit of AA, cognitive behavioral therapy, and motivational enhancement therapy in alcoholism. Researchers recently reported on an effort to test brief versions of the Project Match therapies for alcohol abusing patients.

After reading these articles, you should be able to…

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.