Background: Polypharmacy is a common clinical issue. It increases in prevalence with older age and comorbidities of patients and has been recognized as a major cause for treatment complications. In psychiatry, polypharmacy is also commonly seen in younger patients and can lead to reduced treatment satisfaction and incompliance. A variety of structured polypharmacy interventions have been investigated. This systematic review provides a comprehensive overview of the field and identifies research gaps. Methods:We conducted a systematic review on structured interventions aimed at optimizing polypharmacy of psychotropic and somatic medication in psychiatric inpatient and outpatient settings as well as nursing homes. A search protocol was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42020187304). Data were synthesized narratively.Results: Fifty-eight studies with a total of 30,554 participants met the inclusion criteria. Interventions were most commonly guided by self-developed or national guidelines, drug assessment scores, and lists of potentially inappropriate medications. Tools to identify underprescribing were less commonly used. Most frequently reported outcomes were quantitative drugrelated measures; clinical outcomes such as falls, hospital admission, cognitive status, and neuropsychiatric symptom severity were reported less commonly. Reduction of polypharmacy and improvement of medication appropriateness were shown by most studies.Conclusions: Improvement of drug-related outcomes can be achieved by interventions such as individualized medication review and educational approaches in psychiatric settings and nursing homes. Changes in clinical outcomes, however, are often nonsubstantial and generally underreported. Patient selection and intervention procedures are highly heterogeneous. Future investigations should establish standards in intervention procedures, identify and assess patient-relevant outcome measures, and consider long-term follow-up assessments.
ObjectiveTo investigate the impact of clinical and demographic parameters on the duration of focal onset seizures with and without secondary generalization using precise duration measurements from intracranial electroencephalographic (iEEG) recordings.MethodsPatients with unifocal epilepsy syndromes and iEEG recording were retrospectively identified from the database of the local epilepsy center (2006‐2016). Seizure duration was defined as time difference of iEEG seizure pattern onset and cessation. The seizure semiology was classified based on video recordings. Clinical and demographic data were extracted from patient reports.ResultsIn total, 69 adults were included, and 654 focal onset seizures were analyzed. Focal to bilateral tonic‐clonic seizures (FBTCSs; 98/654) were significantly longer than focal seizures (FSs) without generalization (FS‐BTCs; 556/654, P < .001), and most FSs (545/654, 83.3%) terminated within 2 minutes. The duration of FSs was prolonged with increasing age of the patients (P = .003) and was significantly shortened (P < .001) by evolution into an FBTCS. FBTCSs with lateralizing semiologies like version (P = .015) and sign of four (P = .043) were associated with longer bilateral tonic‐clonic manifestations. Furthermore, FBTCSs with preceding aura, frontal origin, or onset during sleep were by trend shorter. Age (P < .001) and disease duration (P = .028) were essential for prediction of FS‐BTC duration, whereas the vigilance state (P = .085) was the main prediction factor for the duration of FBTCSs.SignificanceThe identified modifiers of seizure duration are of great relevance for clinical risk evaluation, especially in the aging epilepsy patient suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy with secondary generalized seizures.
The choroid plexus (ChP) is part of the blood‐cerebrospinal fluid barrier, regulating brain homeostasis and the brain's response to peripheral events. Its upregulation and enlargement are considered essential in psychosis. However, the timing of the ChP enlargement has not been established. This study introduces a novel magnetic resonance imaging‐based segmentation method to examine ChP volumes in two cohorts of individuals with psychosis. The first sample consists of 41 individuals with early course psychosis (mean duration of illness = 1.78 years) and 30 healthy individuals. The second sample consists of 30 individuals with chronic psychosis (mean duration of illness = 7.96 years) and 34 healthy individuals. We utilized manual segmentation to measure ChP volumes. We applied ANCOVAs to compare normalized ChP volumes between groups and partial correlations to investigate the relationship between ChP, LV volumes, and clinical characteristics. Our segmentation demonstrated good reliability (.87). We further showed a significant ChP volume increase in early psychosis (left: p < .00010, right: p < .00010) and a significant positive correlation between higher ChP and higher LV volumes in chronic psychosis (left: r = .54, p = .0030, right: r = .68; p < .0010). Our study suggests that ChP enlargement may be a marker of acute response around disease onset. It might also play a modulatory role in the chronic enlargement of lateral ventricles, often reported in psychosis. Future longitudinal studies should investigate the dynamics of ChP enlargement as a promising marker for novel therapeutic strategies.
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