Psychiatric News (8/4) reports, “Between 1998 and 2018, medical aid in dying…under Oregon state’s Death With Dignity Act was the most common form (52.7%) of self-initiated death among women over 65,” whereas “firearm suicides were the most common form (65.7%) of self-initiated death among men in the state, followed by deaths caused by lethal medication under the Death With Dignity Act.” Investigators arrived at these conclusions after analyzing “data from the Public Health Division of the Oregon Health Authority on deaths attributed to the Death With Dignity Act and from the CDC on unassisted suicide by sex and age for the 1998−2018 period.” The findings were published online June 11 ahead of print in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Related Links:

— “Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act Impacts Older Women, Men Differently, Study Suggests, Psychiatric News, August 4, 2021

HCPlive (8/3, Walter) reports researchers have conducted a study in which they “analyzed data from the Global Aging & Geriatric Experiments in Bipolar Disorder Database…to assess older-age bipolar disorder associations among age, bipolar disorder [BD] symptoms, comorbidities, and functioning.” For the study, the team “identified harmonized, baseline, cross-sectional data from 19 international studies involving 1377 participants with a mean age of 60.8 years old.” The study revealed that “depressive symptom severity was strongly associated with worse functioning in older individuals, underscoring the need for effective treatments of BD depression in older people.” The study also revealed that “higher depressive and manic symptoms were associated with lower” Global Assessment of Functioning, “most strongly among the older participants.” The findings were published online July 27 in the journal Bipolar Disorders.

Related Links:

— “New Research Addresses Symptoms of Older-Age Bipolar Disorder “Kenny Walter, HCPlive, August 3, 2021

Healio (8/3, Miller) reports, “Patients who had their opioids tapered after receiving stable, long-term, higher-dose opioid therapy were at a significantly increased risk for overdose and mental health crisis than those who did not have reduced doses,” investigators concluded in a “retrospective cohort study” that analyzed data on a “total of 113,618 hospital and” emergency department “patients with demographic and geographically diverse characteristics and 203,920 stable baseline periods.” The findings were published in JAMA.

Psychiatric News (8/3) reports investigators found that “post-tapering periods were associated with an adjusted incidence rate of 9.3 overdose events per 100 person-years compared with 5.5 events per 100 person-years in non-tapered periods.” In addition, tapering appeared to be tied to “an adjusted incidence rate of 7.6 mental health crisis events per 100 person-years compared with 3.3 events per 100 person-years in non-tapered periods.”

Related Links:

— “Opioid tapering significantly increases risk for overdose, mental health crisis “Janel Miller, Healio, August 3, 2021

MedPage Today (8/2, Kneisel) reports, “Daily treatment with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) had no effect on stroke survivors’ risk of depression, which decreased on its own by 6 months, a secondary analysis of the AFFINITY trial found.” Further, “among study participants who had experienced a recent stroke, fluoxetine (Prozac) use did not reduce clinically significant symptoms of depression, which at baseline affected 18.9% of the fluoxetine group and 18.5% of the placebo group and dropped at 26 weeks to 7.0% and 8.2% (P=0.41), respectively, according to the study published in JAMA Neurology.” The cumulative prevalence of clinically significant symptoms “during the study was 20.2% of the fluoxetine group and 21.1% of the placebo group (P=0.70), reported Osvaldo Almeida, PhD, of University of Western Australia in Perth, and colleagues.”

Related Links:

— MedPage Today (requires login and subscription)

Healio (8/2, Miller) reports that in a recent study, “the age that women reached menopause and the type of menopause experienced appeared to impact their cognition as they grew older.” Researchers for the study “assessed memory, executive function, attention, visuospatial function, processing speed and nonverbal reasoning of 243 women in the cohort.” The researchers “reported that later menopause was linked to better cognitive performance at an older age, while surgical menopause was linked to worse cognitive performance.” The reasons for the associations are not “fully explained” by childhood cognition and other lifetime events, according to the researchers.

Related Links:

— “Menopause age, type may be linked to cognitive performance “Janel Miller, Healio, August 2, 2021