Psychiatric News (2/16) reports “switching patients with serious mental illness who are taking one or more antipsychotics to aripiprazole or ziprasidone may lead to weight loss and other cardiometabolic improvements,” according to a meta-analysis published in Schizophrenia Bulletin. The researchers “analyzed 61 articles, which described studies of 8,554 people (mean age, 39 years) – the majority of whom had been diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder, or comorbid mental disorders.”

Related Links:

— “Switching to Aripiprazole or Ziprasidone May Reduce Weight Gain in Patients Taking Antipsychotics, Psychiatric News, February 16, 2021

ABC News (2/16, Reshef, Schwartz-Lavares, Moll-Ramírez) reports experts say healthcare workers who have been on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic “will have to face a mental health reckoning after being in the trenches fighting the global pandemic.” ABC News adds, “Experts say there is still not enough data to assess the psychological toll COVID-19 has had on physicians in the past year.” Some healthcare workers, including Dr. Lorna Breen at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, have died by suicide during the pandemic, due to the trauma of the pandemic, according to their families and friends. Before the pandemic, 300-400 physicians died by suicide each year, according to the APA.

Related Links:

— “An urgent mental health crisis: Health workers facing immense psychological toll from pandemic “Erielle Reshef,Ashley Schwartz-Lavares, and Victoria Moll-Ramirez, ABC News, February 16, 2021

The New York Times (2/14, Kwai) reports that with COVID restrictions “set to drag into the spring or even the summer, mental health professionals are growing increasingly alarmed about the deteriorating mental state of young people, who they say have been among the most badly affected by a world with a foreshortened sense of the future.” The Times says that as they remain “last in line for vaccines and with schools and universities shuttered, young people have borne much of the burden of the sacrifices being made largely to protect older people, who are more at risk from severe infections.”

Related Links:

— “‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On ” Isabella Kwai and Elian Peltier, The New York Times, February 14, 2021

Medscape (2/12, James, Subscription Publication) reported that one of the reasons the APA is pushing for changes in reimbursement to telemedicine appointments to be made permanent is that some psychiatrists, such as Dr. Manuel Pacheco at Tufts Medical Center, say they have seen benefits from telepsychiatry visits. Dr. Pacheco, who is “on an APA committee that’s endorsed that shift in reimbursement to be permanent,” said, “I can hear their cat or their dog. Even on telephone visits, you can kind of hear how the patient lives…. So it really helps you to have increased access to your patient.” Medscape added, “The APA is also calling for research to gain an understanding of the pandemic’s full impact and to document and measure all the ways it is changing barriers and driving innovation in what it describes as the landscape of healthcare delivery.”

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)

Healio (2/11, Gramigna) reports, “More than half of low-income African American women with uncontrolled hypertension had symptoms of depression,” researchers concluded in a “cross-sectional analysis of data from the PTSC randomized controlled trial…to evaluate depressive symptom prevalence among 316 low-socioeconomic status African American women aged 40 to 75 years who had uncontrolled hypertension and received care from a federally qualified health center.” The findings were published online Feb. 10 in JAMA Psychiatry.

Related Links:

— “Low-income Black women with uncontrolled hypertension at increased risk for depression “Joe Gramigna, Healio, February 11, 2021