Dear Colleagues:
Welcome to the November-December issue of Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience. This month, we present an installment of our “Psychiatry and Neurology” article series. In it, Dr. Paulette Gillig reviews psychogenic nonepileptic seizures and discusses a decision-making process that can be used for determining if further neurological evaluation is needed in patients who exhibit seizure-like behavior but have negative EEGs. She also discusses the differential diagnoses and potential comorbidities involved when making this determination, and an approach to conveying the psychogenic nonepileptic seizure diagnosis to the patient that may help reduce symptom frequency.
Next, Yarlagadda et al present a brief report that describes a checklist that may be useful in providing informational and educational tools both for parents and teachers to distinguish insomnia from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children. In their article, “Insomnia and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Pediatrics: A Checklist for Parents,” the authors review several medical conditions that may cause insomnia in children and should be ruled out before the diagnosis of ADHD is confirmed. The authors discuss how the use of the described checklist may help delineate the two conditions.
In this month’s “The Interface,” Sansone and Sansone present their article, “Preventing Wounds from Healing: Clinical Prevalence and Relationship to Borderline Personality.” The authors examine the prevalence of preventing wounds from healing in several types of patient samples and find that the more psychiatric loading in a given population, the higher the potential rate of preventing wounds from healing. In addition, the authors also find that preventing wounds from healing is consistently associated with borderline personality disorder. The authors recommend that clinicians be alert to unexpected delays with wound healing, particularly in patients with psychiatric histories, and consider that such behavior is likely to be associated with borderline personality disorder.
Finally, in this month’s “Risk Management” column, Ms. Heagerty describes prescription monitoring programs (PMPs) and how using PMPs may be valuable in clinical practice.
Sincerely,
Amir Kalali, MD
Editor, Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience
