Medscape (5/8, Brooks) reports, “Updated quality measures for the care of patients with dementia encourage physicians to disclose the diagnosis to patients and” those who provide their care. In a press release, the American Psychiatric Association acknowledged, “This is an ‘especially important and potentially controversial’ new addition to the measures on high-quality dementia care.”

The article quotes Robert Paul Roca, MD, MPH, “chair of the APA Council on Geriatric Psychiatry and co-chair of the working group that updated the dementia quality measures,” who said, “There is reluctance on the part of physicians to have this conversation because we really have no definitive disease-altering treatments, so physicians are concerned about the impact of the diagnosis on patients and caregivers.”

He added, “But we know that people want to know what ails them. They don’t want diagnoses withheld from them, so we felt it was important to include a measure that would prompt people to disclose the diagnosis,” he said.

The updated quality care measures were published online May 1 in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)

Medscape (5/3, Davenport) reports, “Severe mental illness need not be considered as a barrier to undergoing bariatric surgery,” researchers found after studying “patients who underwent bariatric surgery in 2012–2013 in seven US healthcare systems in the Patient Outcomes Research to Advance Learning (PORTAL) network.”

The study revealed that “patients with preexisting mental-health disorders can achieve comparable weight loss to those without mental illness.” The findings were published in the May issue of Obesity. The author of an accompanying editorial wrote that a diagnosis of mental illness “can no longer be considered a viable exclusion criterion.”

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)

STAT (5/3, Joseph) reports there are now 71, up from four, residential treatment programs for substance abuse for Medicaid beneficiaries in Virginia, “made possible in part by a new type of ‘waiver’ from federal rules that has dramatically expanded treatment options.” According to STAT, up to 200,000 of Virginia’s “1.1 million Medicaid beneficiaries have a substance use disorder, and fatal opioid overdoses doubled from 2010 to 2016.” The “growing opioid epidemic…stirred federal Medicaid officials to take action and widen access to care.”

Related Links:

— “How Virginia dramatically expanded treatment options for addiction (and skirted federal law),” ANDREW JOSEPH, STAT, May 3, 2017.

HealthDay (5/2, Dallas) reports, “Gender differences in depression diagnosis and symptoms start to appear around the age of 12,” researchers found after “reviewing existing studies that involved a total of about 3.5 million people from more than 90 countries.” The meta-analysis revealed not only that “depression affects significantly more women than men,” but also that “the gender gap appears two to three years earlier than previously thought.” The findings were published online April 27 in the Psychological Bulletin.

Related Links:

— “Depression’s Gender Gap Shows Up in Pre-Teen Years,” Mary Elizabeth Dallas, HealthDay, May 2, 2017.

HealthDay (5/2, Preidt) reports that a Michigan State University survey indicates “ignorance, myths and stigma are still common among Americans when it comes to mental health.” The online survey of approximately 4,600 people nationwide found, among other things, that “most people don’t know what to do about depression even if they recognize it.” Meanwhile, “nearly 80 percent don’t believe prescription drug abuse is a treatable problem.”

Related Links:

— “Mental Health Myths Abound in the U.S.,” Robert Preidt, HealthDay, May 2, 2017.