Most patients with bipolar disorder have cognitive complaints, but it’s a mistake to diagnose them all with ADHD, and a mistake to miss the genuine ADHD-bipolar comorbidity as well. Inside, a step-by-step guide to teasing apart the diagnoses.

Is it useful for psychiatrists to order EEGs on their patients? That’s a perennially controversial question, and one that’s worth revisiting from time to time.

Neurofeedback is a type of biofeedback that uses an EEG to provide feedback to patients. While hooked up to an EEG, patients are shown different images through various forms of media, including video and other tools.

There used to be this rule of thumb that you don’t need to worry about people who are worried about their memory; you need to worry about people who aren’t worried. And that might be true for people with dementia, where there is often a loss of insight. But if you want to pick up memory problems at the earlier, mild cognitive impairment stage, do an evaluation when someone is worried about memory loss.

Given how many essentially equivalent medications we have to choose from, how great would it be to have a test that tells us which drug to prescribe for which patient? Everybody wants personalized medicine, and in some other specialties, such as oncology, this is becoming a standard part of treatment. In this article, we’ll review some of the basics of pharmacogenetic testing and examine in more detail the commercial genetic tests that are currently available.

The basic goal of this kind of research is to try to find an association between a genetic variant and the clinical response to a particular medication. Given that there are dozens of medications to choose from for any given disorder, it would be very helpful if we could do a genetic test that would tell us which drug is the best for a particular patient.

Choosing the “right” treatment for a given patient involves a large number of factors, including personal preference—both the clinician’s and the patient’s. Is there a better way?

Assurex Health recently sent me an email inviting me to dine at Legal Seafood to learn about “Clinical Applications of Psychiatric Pharmacogenetics.” I didn’t go, but increasingly I am hearing from colleagues about their experiences at these dinner programs: “What do you think about this GeneSight test? The data looked pretty impressive at this dinner.”

The technology of drug testing has progressed significantly over the years. This is both good and bad for doctors. There are more options, but perhaps too many. There are many types of tests and they vary in terms of the drug detection time frames.

Learn about the benefits of toxicology screening in psychiatry in an interview with Alex Stalcup, MD, medical director of New Leaf Treatment Center in Layfayette, CA.