Patients with long-term diseases to be assessed for depression

GPs must assess people with chronic diseases to see whether they are suffering from depression, under new guidelines.

GPs must assess all patients with long-term diseases such as cancer to see whether they are suffering from depression, under new guidelines published today.

Too many doctors and patients assume that fatigue and weight loss are a result of the disease or the medicines they are taking, according to experts who formulated the guidelines for the National Institute for Healthcare and Clinical Excellence (NICE).

Depression affects one in six people at some point, but is three times more common in people with chronic diseases than in the rest of the population.

John Hindle, a consultant physician with the Betsi Cadwaladr University local health board, who was on the guideline development group, said that improving people's mood may even make them physically better.

"We should give everybody with physical disease the opportunity to be asked about the symptoms of depression," he said.

GPs should be asking two key questions, the guidelines say: during the last month, has the patient been bothered by feeling down, depressed or hopeless in the last month or by having little interest or pleasure in doing things?

READ MORE @ THE GUARDIAN

Task Force Proposes New Bipolar Guidelines

An international team of experts recently proposed expanding the diagnostic criteria for several subtypes of bipolar disorder, adding a pediatric bipolar disorder category and eliminating the schizoaffective disorder category.

The Diagnostic Guidelines Task Force of the International Society for Bipolar Disorder (ISBD) has been examining diagnostic issues since 2004 and recently presented its recommendations at ISBD's third biennial meeting in India and in the society's journal, Bipolar Disorders (February, part 2).

Task force chairman S. Nassir Ghaemi, MD, MPH, told Psychiatric Times that the task force brought together some of the world's clinical experts on bipolar disorder and key researchers with the goal of having them develop a more systematic and coherent set of diagnostic guidelines.

The task force's charge, originally developed by then ISBD president Samuel Gershon, MD, was to evaluate current diagnostic systems, identify key similarities and differences among them, reconcile the data, provide an organizational schema for diagnosis of bipolar disorder across cultures, and highlight continuing differences for further research.

READ MORE @ PSYCHIATRIC TIMES