MedPage Today (8/5, Firth) reports six in ten physicians “say they often experience feelings of burnout, a 20% jump from pre-pandemic levels reported in 2018, according to The Physicians Foundation’s 2021 Survey of America’s Physicians released on Thursday.” Additionally, a “total of 46% of physicians said they have isolated or withdrawn from other people in the last year, more than one in three said they felt hopeless or without a purpose, and 57% reported experiencing ‘inappropriate episodes of anger, tearfulness, or anxiety.’” Further, “only 14% of physicians sought medical attention for their mental health concern.”

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— MedPage Today (requires login and subscription)

Healio (8/5, Gramigna) reports, “People with preexisting mood disorders had increased risk for COVID-19 hospitalization and death,” investigators concluded in a systematic review and meta-analysis that “included 21 primary research articles involving more than 91 million individuals that featured quantitative COVID-19 outcome data from people with mood disorders compared with people without mood disorders of any age, sex and nationality.” The authors suggested that these people “should be categorized as an at-risk group on the basis of a preexisting condition.” The findings were published online July 28 in JAMA Psychiatry.

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— “Mood disorders should be considered preexisting condition for increased COVID-19 risks “Joe Gramigna, Healio, August 5, 2021

The Hill (8/4, Choi) reports a study by Imperial College London was released on Wednesday that “found that fully vaccinated people are three times less likely to test positive for the coronavirus compared to unvaccinated people.” The findings “are based on swab tests taken by nearly 100,000 people in England between June 24 and July 12. Of the tests taken, 0.63 percent tested positive.” Researchers “estimated that fully vaccinated people were 50 to 60 percent less likely to become infected with the Delta variant than unvaccinated people, including asymptomatic cases.”

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— “Both vaccine doses reduce risk of delta variant infection by up to 60 percent: study “Joseph Cho, The Hill, August 4, 2021

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.

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— “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.

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