Clinical Psychiatry News

The Food and Drug Administration has granted marketing approval for the BrainsWay deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) system to help adult smokers kick tobacco.

This is the company’s third FDA-approved indication for its deep TMS system and the first FDA approval for any TMS device for addiction, the company said in a press release.

As previously reported, the system has already been approved by the FDA as a treatment for patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder and major depressive disorder.

The BrainsWay deep TMS system with H4-coil is designed to target addiction-related brain circuits.

It was evaluated as an aid to short-term smoking cessation in a prospective, double-blind, randomized, sham-controlled, multicenter study that involved 262 adults who had a history of smoking an average of more than 26 years and had attempted to quit multiple times but failed.

Active and sham treatments were performed daily 5 days a week for 3 weeks, followed by an additional three sessions once weekly for 3 weeks, for a total of 18 sessions over 6 weeks.

In the full intention-to-treat population (all 262 participants), the 4-week continuous quit rate (CQR, the primary endpoint) was higher in the active deep TMS group than in the sham TMS group (17.1% vs. 7.9%; P = .0238).

Among participants who completed the study, that is, those who underwent treatment for 4 weeks, who kept daily records, and for whom confirmatory urine samples were available, the CQR was 28.4% in the active deep TMS group, compared with 11.7% in the sham treatment group (P = .0063).

The average number of cigarettes smoked per day, as determined on the basis of daily records (secondary endpoint), was statistically significantly lower in the active deep TMS group, compared with the sham treatment group (P = .0311).

No patient suffered a seizure. The most common adverse event was headache, for which there was no statistical difference between the active and sham treatment groups. Other side effects included application site discomfort, back pain, muscle twitching, and discomfort.

“This FDA clearance represents a significant milestone for BrainsWay and our deep TMS platform technology,” Christopher von Jako, PhD, president and CEO of the company, said in the release.

“While other therapies are currently available, a substantial medical need continues to exist for treatments that can increase the continuous quit rate among smokers,” Dr. von Jako noted.

“Based on the compelling data from our large, randomized pivotal study of 262 subjects, we are confident that our deep TMS technology can play an important role in treating cigarette smokers who seek to quit,” he added.

The company plans a “controlled” U.S. market release of the system for this indication early next year.
 

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

The Food and Drug Administration has granted marketing approval for the BrainsWay deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) system to help adult smokers kick tobacco.

This is the company’s third FDA-approved indication for its deep TMS system and the first FDA approval for any TMS device for addiction, the company said in a press release.

As previously reported, the system has already been approved by the FDA as a treatment for patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder and major depressive disorder.

The BrainsWay deep TMS system with H4-coil is designed to target addiction-related brain circuits.

It was evaluated as an aid to short-term smoking cessation in a prospective, double-blind, randomized, sham-controlled, multicenter study that involved 262 adults who had a history of smoking an average of more than 26 years and had attempted to quit multiple times but failed.

Active and sham treatments were performed daily 5 days a week for 3 weeks, followed by an additional three sessions once weekly for 3 weeks, for a total of 18 sessions over 6 weeks.

In the full intention-to-treat population (all 262 participants), the 4-week continuous quit rate (CQR, the primary endpoint) was higher in the active deep TMS group than in the sham TMS group (17.1% vs. 7.9%; P = .0238).

Among participants who completed the study, that is, those who underwent treatment for 4 weeks, who kept daily records, and for whom confirmatory urine samples were available, the CQR was 28.4% in the active deep TMS group, compared with 11.7% in the sham treatment group (P = .0063).

The average number of cigarettes smoked per day, as determined on the basis of daily records (secondary endpoint), was statistically significantly lower in the active deep TMS group, compared with the sham treatment group (P = .0311).

No patient suffered a seizure. The most common adverse event was headache, for which there was no statistical difference between the active and sham treatment groups. Other side effects included application site discomfort, back pain, muscle twitching, and discomfort.

“This FDA clearance represents a significant milestone for BrainsWay and our deep TMS platform technology,” Christopher von Jako, PhD, president and CEO of the company, said in the release.

“While other therapies are currently available, a substantial medical need continues to exist for treatments that can increase the continuous quit rate among smokers,” Dr. von Jako noted.

“Based on the compelling data from our large, randomized pivotal study of 262 subjects, we are confident that our deep TMS technology can play an important role in treating cigarette smokers who seek to quit,” he added.

The company plans a “controlled” U.S. market release of the system for this indication early next year.
 

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

The Food and Drug Administration has granted marketing approval for the BrainsWay deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) system to help adult smokers kick tobacco.

This is the company’s third FDA-approved indication for its deep TMS system and the first FDA approval for any TMS device for addiction, the company said in a press release.

As previously reported, the system has already been approved by the FDA as a treatment for patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder and major depressive disorder.

The BrainsWay deep TMS system with H4-coil is designed to target addiction-related brain circuits.

It was evaluated as an aid to short-term smoking cessation in a prospective, double-blind, randomized, sham-controlled, multicenter study that involved 262 adults who had a history of smoking an average of more than 26 years and had attempted to quit multiple times but failed.

Active and sham treatments were performed daily 5 days a week for 3 weeks, followed by an additional three sessions once weekly for 3 weeks, for a total of 18 sessions over 6 weeks.

In the full intention-to-treat population (all 262 participants), the 4-week continuous quit rate (CQR, the primary endpoint) was higher in the active deep TMS group than in the sham TMS group (17.1% vs. 7.9%; P = .0238).

Among participants who completed the study, that is, those who underwent treatment for 4 weeks, who kept daily records, and for whom confirmatory urine samples were available, the CQR was 28.4% in the active deep TMS group, compared with 11.7% in the sham treatment group (P = .0063).

The average number of cigarettes smoked per day, as determined on the basis of daily records (secondary endpoint), was statistically significantly lower in the active deep TMS group, compared with the sham treatment group (P = .0311).

No patient suffered a seizure. The most common adverse event was headache, for which there was no statistical difference between the active and sham treatment groups. Other side effects included application site discomfort, back pain, muscle twitching, and discomfort.

“This FDA clearance represents a significant milestone for BrainsWay and our deep TMS platform technology,” Christopher von Jako, PhD, president and CEO of the company, said in the release.

“While other therapies are currently available, a substantial medical need continues to exist for treatments that can increase the continuous quit rate among smokers,” Dr. von Jako noted.

“Based on the compelling data from our large, randomized pivotal study of 262 subjects, we are confident that our deep TMS technology can play an important role in treating cigarette smokers who seek to quit,” he added.

The company plans a “controlled” U.S. market release of the system for this indication early next year.
 

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma on Aug. 23, opening up more access for hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

Convalescent plasma contains antibodies from the blood of recovered COVID-19 patients, which can be used to treat people with severe infections. Convalescent plasma has been used to treat patients for other infectious diseases. The authorization allows the plasma to be distributed in the United States and administered by health care providers.

“COVID-19 convalescent plasma is safe and shows promising efficacy,” Stephen Hahn, MD, commissioner of the FDA, said during a press briefing with President Donald Trump.

In April, the FDA approved a program to test convalescent plasma in COVID-19 patients at the Mayo Clinic, followed by other institutions. More than 90,000 patients have enrolled in the program, and 70,000 have received the treatment, Dr. Hahn said.

The data indicate that the plasma can reduce mortality in patients by 35%, particularly if patients are treated within 3 days of being diagnosed. Those who have benefited the most were under age 80 and not on artificial respiration, Alex Azar, the secretary for the Department of Health & Human Services, said during the briefing.

“We dream, in drug development, of something like a 35% mortality reduction,” he said.

But top scientists pushed back against the announcement.

Eric Topol, MD, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, professor of molecular medicine, and executive vice president of Scripps Research, said the data the FDA are relying on did not come from the rigorous randomized, double-blind placebo trials that best determine if a treatment is successful.

Still, convalescent plasma is “one more tool added to the arsenal” of combating COVID-19, Mr. Azar said. The FDA will continue to study convalescent plasma as a COVID-19 treatment, Dr. Hahn added.

“We’re waiting for more data. We’re going to continue to gather data,” Dr. Hahn said during the briefing, but the current results meet FDA criteria for issuing an emergency use authorization.

Convalescent plasma “may be effective in lessening the severity or shortening the length of COVID-19 illness in some hospitalized patients,” according to the FDA announcement. Potential side effects include allergic reactions, transfusion-transmitted infections, and transfusion-associated lung injury.

“We’ve seen a great deal of demand for this from doctors around the country,” Dr. Hahn said during the briefing. “The EUA … allows us to continue that and meet that demand.”

Dr. Topol, however, said it appears Trump and the FDA are playing politics with science.

“There’s no evidence to support any survival benefit,” Dr. Topol said on Twitter. “Two days ago [the] FDA’s website stated there was no evidence for an EUA.”

The American Red Cross and other blood centers put out a national call for blood donors in July, especially for patients who have recovered from COVID-19. Mr. Azar and Dr. Hahn emphasized the need for blood donors during the press briefing.

“If you donate plasma, you could save a life,” Mr. Azar said.

The study has not been peer reviewed and did not include a placebo group for comparison, STAT reported.

Last week several health officials warned that the scientific data were too weak to warrant an emergency authorization, the New York Times reported.

A version of this originally appeared on WebMD.com.

The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma on Aug. 23, opening up more access for hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

Convalescent plasma contains antibodies from the blood of recovered COVID-19 patients, which can be used to treat people with severe infections. Convalescent plasma has been used to treat patients for other infectious diseases. The authorization allows the plasma to be distributed in the United States and administered by health care providers.

“COVID-19 convalescent plasma is safe and shows promising efficacy,” Stephen Hahn, MD, commissioner of the FDA, said during a press briefing with President Donald Trump.

In April, the FDA approved a program to test convalescent plasma in COVID-19 patients at the Mayo Clinic, followed by other institutions. More than 90,000 patients have enrolled in the program, and 70,000 have received the treatment, Dr. Hahn said.

The data indicate that the plasma can reduce mortality in patients by 35%, particularly if patients are treated within 3 days of being diagnosed. Those who have benefited the most were under age 80 and not on artificial respiration, Alex Azar, the secretary for the Department of Health & Human Services, said during the briefing.

“We dream, in drug development, of something like a 35% mortality reduction,” he said.

But top scientists pushed back against the announcement.

Eric Topol, MD, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, professor of molecular medicine, and executive vice president of Scripps Research, said the data the FDA are relying on did not come from the rigorous randomized, double-blind placebo trials that best determine if a treatment is successful.

Still, convalescent plasma is “one more tool added to the arsenal” of combating COVID-19, Mr. Azar said. The FDA will continue to study convalescent plasma as a COVID-19 treatment, Dr. Hahn added.

“We’re waiting for more data. We’re going to continue to gather data,” Dr. Hahn said during the briefing, but the current results meet FDA criteria for issuing an emergency use authorization.

Convalescent plasma “may be effective in lessening the severity or shortening the length of COVID-19 illness in some hospitalized patients,” according to the FDA announcement. Potential side effects include allergic reactions, transfusion-transmitted infections, and transfusion-associated lung injury.

“We’ve seen a great deal of demand for this from doctors around the country,” Dr. Hahn said during the briefing. “The EUA … allows us to continue that and meet that demand.”

Dr. Topol, however, said it appears Trump and the FDA are playing politics with science.

“There’s no evidence to support any survival benefit,” Dr. Topol said on Twitter. “Two days ago [the] FDA’s website stated there was no evidence for an EUA.”

The American Red Cross and other blood centers put out a national call for blood donors in July, especially for patients who have recovered from COVID-19. Mr. Azar and Dr. Hahn emphasized the need for blood donors during the press briefing.

“If you donate plasma, you could save a life,” Mr. Azar said.

The study has not been peer reviewed and did not include a placebo group for comparison, STAT reported.

Last week several health officials warned that the scientific data were too weak to warrant an emergency authorization, the New York Times reported.

A version of this originally appeared on WebMD.com.

The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma on Aug. 23, opening up more access for hospitalized COVID-19 patients.

Convalescent plasma contains antibodies from the blood of recovered COVID-19 patients, which can be used to treat people with severe infections. Convalescent plasma has been used to treat patients for other infectious diseases. The authorization allows the plasma to be distributed in the United States and administered by health care providers.

“COVID-19 convalescent plasma is safe and shows promising efficacy,” Stephen Hahn, MD, commissioner of the FDA, said during a press briefing with President Donald Trump.

In April, the FDA approved a program to test convalescent plasma in COVID-19 patients at the Mayo Clinic, followed by other institutions. More than 90,000 patients have enrolled in the program, and 70,000 have received the treatment, Dr. Hahn said.

The data indicate that the plasma can reduce mortality in patients by 35%, particularly if patients are treated within 3 days of being diagnosed. Those who have benefited the most were under age 80 and not on artificial respiration, Alex Azar, the secretary for the Department of Health & Human Services, said during the briefing.

“We dream, in drug development, of something like a 35% mortality reduction,” he said.

But top scientists pushed back against the announcement.

Eric Topol, MD, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, professor of molecular medicine, and executive vice president of Scripps Research, said the data the FDA are relying on did not come from the rigorous randomized, double-blind placebo trials that best determine if a treatment is successful.

Still, convalescent plasma is “one more tool added to the arsenal” of combating COVID-19, Mr. Azar said. The FDA will continue to study convalescent plasma as a COVID-19 treatment, Dr. Hahn added.

“We’re waiting for more data. We’re going to continue to gather data,” Dr. Hahn said during the briefing, but the current results meet FDA criteria for issuing an emergency use authorization.

Convalescent plasma “may be effective in lessening the severity or shortening the length of COVID-19 illness in some hospitalized patients,” according to the FDA announcement. Potential side effects include allergic reactions, transfusion-transmitted infections, and transfusion-associated lung injury.

“We’ve seen a great deal of demand for this from doctors around the country,” Dr. Hahn said during the briefing. “The EUA … allows us to continue that and meet that demand.”

Dr. Topol, however, said it appears Trump and the FDA are playing politics with science.

“There’s no evidence to support any survival benefit,” Dr. Topol said on Twitter. “Two days ago [the] FDA’s website stated there was no evidence for an EUA.”

The American Red Cross and other blood centers put out a national call for blood donors in July, especially for patients who have recovered from COVID-19. Mr. Azar and Dr. Hahn emphasized the need for blood donors during the press briefing.

“If you donate plasma, you could save a life,” Mr. Azar said.

The study has not been peer reviewed and did not include a placebo group for comparison, STAT reported.

Last week several health officials warned that the scientific data were too weak to warrant an emergency authorization, the New York Times reported.

A version of this originally appeared on WebMD.com.

Suicide by hanging results in many deaths, and half of those survivors who are admitted later die from cardiac arrest.

Although hanging is a common form of suicide, studies of the clinical outcomes of near-hanging injury are rare. To address this void, Louise de Charentenay, MD, of the Medical-Surgical Intensive Care Unit, Centre Hospitalier de Versailles (France) and colleagues examined the vital and functional outcomes of more than 800 patients with suicidal near-hanging injury over 2 decades. Despite the high in-hospital mortality rate among survivors, those who do survive have an excellent chance of a full neurocognitive recovery. The investigators published their findings in Chest.
 

New data on near-hanging injuries

Near hanging refers to strangulation or hanging that doesn’t immediately lead to death. Little data have been available on this subject, particularly on the morbidity and mortality of patients admitted to the ICU following near-hanging injuries. In a retrospective analysis spanning 23 years (1992-2014), researchers looked at outcomes and early predictors of hospital deaths in patients with this injury. The study included 886 adult patients who were admitted to 31 university or university-affiliated ICUs in France and Belgium following successful resuscitation of suicidal near-hanging injury.

Investigators used logistic multivariate regression to report vital and functional outcomes at hospital discharge as a primary objective. They also aimed to identify predictors of hospital mortality in these patients. 

Among all patients, 450 (50.8%) had hanging-induced cardiac arrest and of these, 371 (95.4%) eventually died. Although the rate of crude hospital deaths decreased over the 23-year period, hanging-induced cardiac arrest emerged as the strongest predictor of hospital mortality, followed by high blood lactate and hyperglycemia at ICU admission. “Hanging-induced cardiac arrest and worse consciousness impairment at ICU admission are directly related to the hanging, whereas higher glycemia and lactate levels at ICU admission represent biochemical markers of physiologic perturbation and injury severity that may suggest avenues for improvement in prehospital care,” wrote the investigators.

More than 56% of the patients survived to discharge, with a majority achieving favorable outcomes (a Glasgow Outcome Scale scores of 4 or 5 at discharge).
 

‘COVID-lateral’ damage and ICU management

Casey D. Bryant, MD, of the department of anesthesiology and the department of emergency medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Health, Winston-Salem, N.C., has treated these patients in the ICU and is prepared to see more of them in light of the current situation. He said in an interview, “The “COVID-lateral” damage being unleashed on the population as a result of increased isolation, lack of access to resources, higher unemployment, and increased substance abuse was detailed recently in an article by one of my colleagues, Dr. Seth Hawkins (Emerg Med News. 2020 Jun;42[6]:1,31-2). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hanging is the second leading cause of suicide in the United States, and one can only assume that with increased mental health crises there will also be an increased number of hanging attempts.”

Dr. Bryant suggested that the first task of doctors who learn that a near-hanging patient has been admitted is to “recover from the gut-punch you feel when you learn that a fellow human has tried to take their own life.” Once one is composed, he said, the first order of business is to come up with a treatment plan, one that typically begins with the airway. “These patients are at a high risk for cervical vertebrae injury (e.g., hangman’s fracture), spinal cord injury, tracheal injury, and neck vessel injury or dissection, so care must be taken to maintain in-line stabilization and limit movement of the neck during intubation while also being prepared for all manner of airway disasters. After airway management, addressing traumatic injuries, and initial stabilization, the focus then shifts to ‘bread and butter’ critical care, including optimization of ventilator management, titration of analgosedation, providing adequate nutrition, and strict avoidance of hypoxia, hypotension, fever, and either hyper- or hypoglycemia.”

Dr. Bryant noted that targeted temperature management prescriptions remain an area of debate in those with comatose state after hanging, but fever should absolutely be avoided. He added: “As the path to recovery begins to be forged, the full gamut of mental health resources should be provided to the patients in order to give them the best chance for success once they leave the ICU, and ultimately the hospital.”

The different hospitals seemed to have varying degrees of success in saving these patients, which is surprising, Mangala Narasimhan, DO, FCCP, regional director of critical care, director of the acute lung injury/ECMO center at Northwell and a professor of medicine at the Hofstra/Northwell School of Medicine, New York, said in an interview. “Usually, the death rate for cardiac arrest is high and the death rate for hanging is high. But here, it was high in some places and low in others.” Different time frames from presenting from hanging and different treatments may explain this, said Dr. Narasimhan.
 

Patient characteristics

Consistent with previous research, near-hanging patients are predominantly male, have at least one psychiatric diagnosis and a previous suicidal attempt (rarely by hanging), and abuse substances such as an alcohol, Stéphane Legriel, MD, PhD, the study’s corresponding author, said in an interview. Overall, 67.7% of the patients had a diagnosed mental illness and 30% had previously attempted suicide. Most of the hangings took place at home (79%), while some took place in a hospital ward (6%), a correctional facility (7%), or outside (5%).

The study had several limitations: It applied only to near-hanging patients admitted to the ICU, and its long duration may have resulted in heterogeneity of the population and therapeutic interventions, and in some missing data. “However, the multivariate analysis was adjusted for the time period and we carried out a sensitivity analysis after multiple imputation for missing data by means of chained equations, which reinforces confidence in our findings,” Dr. Legriel said. Next steps are to conduct a prospective data collection.
 

Postdischarge recovery and psychiatric follow-up

Those left to treat survivors of near-hangings are psychiatrists and other mental health clinicians, Eric M. Plakun, MD, said in an interview.

“Some of these survivors will regret they survived and remain high suicide risks. Some will feel their lives are transformed or at least no longer as intensely drawn to suicide as a solution to a life filled with the impact of adversity, trauma, comorbidity, and other struggles – but even these individuals will still have to face the often complex underlying issues that led them to choose suicide as a solution,” said Dr. Plakun, medical director and CEO of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass.

Patients with medically serious suicide attempts are seen a lot at Austen Riggs, he said, because acute inpatient settings are designed for brief, crisis-focused treatment of those for whom safety is an issue. After the crisis has been stabilized, patients are discharged, and then must begin to achieve recovery as outpatients, he said.

John Kruse, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist who practices in San Francisco, praised the size and the breath of the study. “One limitation was the reliance on hospital records, without an opportunity to directly evaluate or interview the patients involved.”

The authors disclosed no conflicts of interest. The study received grant support from the French public funding agency, Délégation la Recherche Clinique et de l’Innovation in Versailles, France.

SOURCE: de Charentenay L et al. 2020 Aug 3. doi: 10.1016/j.chest.2020.07.064

Suicide by hanging results in many deaths, and half of those survivors who are admitted later die from cardiac arrest.

Although hanging is a common form of suicide, studies of the clinical outcomes of near-hanging injury are rare. To address this void, Louise de Charentenay, MD, of the Medical-Surgical Intensive Care Unit, Centre Hospitalier de Versailles (France) and colleagues examined the vital and functional outcomes of more than 800 patients with suicidal near-hanging injury over 2 decades. Despite the high in-hospital mortality rate among survivors, those who do survive have an excellent chance of a full neurocognitive recovery. The investigators published their findings in Chest.
 

New data on near-hanging injuries

Near hanging refers to strangulation or hanging that doesn’t immediately lead to death. Little data have been available on this subject, particularly on the morbidity and mortality of patients admitted to the ICU following near-hanging injuries. In a retrospective analysis spanning 23 years (1992-2014), researchers looked at outcomes and early predictors of hospital deaths in patients with this injury. The study included 886 adult patients who were admitted to 31 university or university-affiliated ICUs in France and Belgium following successful resuscitation of suicidal near-hanging injury.

Investigators used logistic multivariate regression to report vital and functional outcomes at hospital discharge as a primary objective. They also aimed to identify predictors of hospital mortality in these patients. 

Among all patients, 450 (50.8%) had hanging-induced cardiac arrest and of these, 371 (95.4%) eventually died. Although the rate of crude hospital deaths decreased over the 23-year period, hanging-induced cardiac arrest emerged as the strongest predictor of hospital mortality, followed by high blood lactate and hyperglycemia at ICU admission. “Hanging-induced cardiac arrest and worse consciousness impairment at ICU admission are directly related to the hanging, whereas higher glycemia and lactate levels at ICU admission represent biochemical markers of physiologic perturbation and injury severity that may suggest avenues for improvement in prehospital care,” wrote the investigators.

More than 56% of the patients survived to discharge, with a majority achieving favorable outcomes (a Glasgow Outcome Scale scores of 4 or 5 at discharge).
 

‘COVID-lateral’ damage and ICU management

Casey D. Bryant, MD, of the department of anesthesiology and the department of emergency medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Health, Winston-Salem, N.C., has treated these patients in the ICU and is prepared to see more of them in light of the current situation. He said in an interview, “The “COVID-lateral” damage being unleashed on the population as a result of increased isolation, lack of access to resources, higher unemployment, and increased substance abuse was detailed recently in an article by one of my colleagues, Dr. Seth Hawkins (Emerg Med News. 2020 Jun;42[6]:1,31-2). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hanging is the second leading cause of suicide in the United States, and one can only assume that with increased mental health crises there will also be an increased number of hanging attempts.”

Dr. Bryant suggested that the first task of doctors who learn that a near-hanging patient has been admitted is to “recover from the gut-punch you feel when you learn that a fellow human has tried to take their own life.” Once one is composed, he said, the first order of business is to come up with a treatment plan, one that typically begins with the airway. “These patients are at a high risk for cervical vertebrae injury (e.g., hangman’s fracture), spinal cord injury, tracheal injury, and neck vessel injury or dissection, so care must be taken to maintain in-line stabilization and limit movement of the neck during intubation while also being prepared for all manner of airway disasters. After airway management, addressing traumatic injuries, and initial stabilization, the focus then shifts to ‘bread and butter’ critical care, including optimization of ventilator management, titration of analgosedation, providing adequate nutrition, and strict avoidance of hypoxia, hypotension, fever, and either hyper- or hypoglycemia.”

Dr. Bryant noted that targeted temperature management prescriptions remain an area of debate in those with comatose state after hanging, but fever should absolutely be avoided. He added: “As the path to recovery begins to be forged, the full gamut of mental health resources should be provided to the patients in order to give them the best chance for success once they leave the ICU, and ultimately the hospital.”

The different hospitals seemed to have varying degrees of success in saving these patients, which is surprising, Mangala Narasimhan, DO, FCCP, regional director of critical care, director of the acute lung injury/ECMO center at Northwell and a professor of medicine at the Hofstra/Northwell School of Medicine, New York, said in an interview. “Usually, the death rate for cardiac arrest is high and the death rate for hanging is high. But here, it was high in some places and low in others.” Different time frames from presenting from hanging and different treatments may explain this, said Dr. Narasimhan.
 

Patient characteristics

Consistent with previous research, near-hanging patients are predominantly male, have at least one psychiatric diagnosis and a previous suicidal attempt (rarely by hanging), and abuse substances such as an alcohol, Stéphane Legriel, MD, PhD, the study’s corresponding author, said in an interview. Overall, 67.7% of the patients had a diagnosed mental illness and 30% had previously attempted suicide. Most of the hangings took place at home (79%), while some took place in a hospital ward (6%), a correctional facility (7%), or outside (5%).

The study had several limitations: It applied only to near-hanging patients admitted to the ICU, and its long duration may have resulted in heterogeneity of the population and therapeutic interventions, and in some missing data. “However, the multivariate analysis was adjusted for the time period and we carried out a sensitivity analysis after multiple imputation for missing data by means of chained equations, which reinforces confidence in our findings,” Dr. Legriel said. Next steps are to conduct a prospective data collection.
 

Postdischarge recovery and psychiatric follow-up

Those left to treat survivors of near-hangings are psychiatrists and other mental health clinicians, Eric M. Plakun, MD, said in an interview.

“Some of these survivors will regret they survived and remain high suicide risks. Some will feel their lives are transformed or at least no longer as intensely drawn to suicide as a solution to a life filled with the impact of adversity, trauma, comorbidity, and other struggles – but even these individuals will still have to face the often complex underlying issues that led them to choose suicide as a solution,” said Dr. Plakun, medical director and CEO of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass.

Patients with medically serious suicide attempts are seen a lot at Austen Riggs, he said, because acute inpatient settings are designed for brief, crisis-focused treatment of those for whom safety is an issue. After the crisis has been stabilized, patients are discharged, and then must begin to achieve recovery as outpatients, he said.

John Kruse, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist who practices in San Francisco, praised the size and the breath of the study. “One limitation was the reliance on hospital records, without an opportunity to directly evaluate or interview the patients involved.”

The authors disclosed no conflicts of interest. The study received grant support from the French public funding agency, Délégation la Recherche Clinique et de l’Innovation in Versailles, France.

SOURCE: de Charentenay L et al. 2020 Aug 3. doi: 10.1016/j.chest.2020.07.064

Suicide by hanging results in many deaths, and half of those survivors who are admitted later die from cardiac arrest.

Although hanging is a common form of suicide, studies of the clinical outcomes of near-hanging injury are rare. To address this void, Louise de Charentenay, MD, of the Medical-Surgical Intensive Care Unit, Centre Hospitalier de Versailles (France) and colleagues examined the vital and functional outcomes of more than 800 patients with suicidal near-hanging injury over 2 decades. Despite the high in-hospital mortality rate among survivors, those who do survive have an excellent chance of a full neurocognitive recovery. The investigators published their findings in Chest.
 

New data on near-hanging injuries

Near hanging refers to strangulation or hanging that doesn’t immediately lead to death. Little data have been available on this subject, particularly on the morbidity and mortality of patients admitted to the ICU following near-hanging injuries. In a retrospective analysis spanning 23 years (1992-2014), researchers looked at outcomes and early predictors of hospital deaths in patients with this injury. The study included 886 adult patients who were admitted to 31 university or university-affiliated ICUs in France and Belgium following successful resuscitation of suicidal near-hanging injury.

Investigators used logistic multivariate regression to report vital and functional outcomes at hospital discharge as a primary objective. They also aimed to identify predictors of hospital mortality in these patients. 

Among all patients, 450 (50.8%) had hanging-induced cardiac arrest and of these, 371 (95.4%) eventually died. Although the rate of crude hospital deaths decreased over the 23-year period, hanging-induced cardiac arrest emerged as the strongest predictor of hospital mortality, followed by high blood lactate and hyperglycemia at ICU admission. “Hanging-induced cardiac arrest and worse consciousness impairment at ICU admission are directly related to the hanging, whereas higher glycemia and lactate levels at ICU admission represent biochemical markers of physiologic perturbation and injury severity that may suggest avenues for improvement in prehospital care,” wrote the investigators.

More than 56% of the patients survived to discharge, with a majority achieving favorable outcomes (a Glasgow Outcome Scale scores of 4 or 5 at discharge).
 

‘COVID-lateral’ damage and ICU management

Casey D. Bryant, MD, of the department of anesthesiology and the department of emergency medicine at Wake Forest Baptist Health, Winston-Salem, N.C., has treated these patients in the ICU and is prepared to see more of them in light of the current situation. He said in an interview, “The “COVID-lateral” damage being unleashed on the population as a result of increased isolation, lack of access to resources, higher unemployment, and increased substance abuse was detailed recently in an article by one of my colleagues, Dr. Seth Hawkins (Emerg Med News. 2020 Jun;42[6]:1,31-2). According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hanging is the second leading cause of suicide in the United States, and one can only assume that with increased mental health crises there will also be an increased number of hanging attempts.”

Dr. Bryant suggested that the first task of doctors who learn that a near-hanging patient has been admitted is to “recover from the gut-punch you feel when you learn that a fellow human has tried to take their own life.” Once one is composed, he said, the first order of business is to come up with a treatment plan, one that typically begins with the airway. “These patients are at a high risk for cervical vertebrae injury (e.g., hangman’s fracture), spinal cord injury, tracheal injury, and neck vessel injury or dissection, so care must be taken to maintain in-line stabilization and limit movement of the neck during intubation while also being prepared for all manner of airway disasters. After airway management, addressing traumatic injuries, and initial stabilization, the focus then shifts to ‘bread and butter’ critical care, including optimization of ventilator management, titration of analgosedation, providing adequate nutrition, and strict avoidance of hypoxia, hypotension, fever, and either hyper- or hypoglycemia.”

Dr. Bryant noted that targeted temperature management prescriptions remain an area of debate in those with comatose state after hanging, but fever should absolutely be avoided. He added: “As the path to recovery begins to be forged, the full gamut of mental health resources should be provided to the patients in order to give them the best chance for success once they leave the ICU, and ultimately the hospital.”

The different hospitals seemed to have varying degrees of success in saving these patients, which is surprising, Mangala Narasimhan, DO, FCCP, regional director of critical care, director of the acute lung injury/ECMO center at Northwell and a professor of medicine at the Hofstra/Northwell School of Medicine, New York, said in an interview. “Usually, the death rate for cardiac arrest is high and the death rate for hanging is high. But here, it was high in some places and low in others.” Different time frames from presenting from hanging and different treatments may explain this, said Dr. Narasimhan.
 

Patient characteristics

Consistent with previous research, near-hanging patients are predominantly male, have at least one psychiatric diagnosis and a previous suicidal attempt (rarely by hanging), and abuse substances such as an alcohol, Stéphane Legriel, MD, PhD, the study’s corresponding author, said in an interview. Overall, 67.7% of the patients had a diagnosed mental illness and 30% had previously attempted suicide. Most of the hangings took place at home (79%), while some took place in a hospital ward (6%), a correctional facility (7%), or outside (5%).

The study had several limitations: It applied only to near-hanging patients admitted to the ICU, and its long duration may have resulted in heterogeneity of the population and therapeutic interventions, and in some missing data. “However, the multivariate analysis was adjusted for the time period and we carried out a sensitivity analysis after multiple imputation for missing data by means of chained equations, which reinforces confidence in our findings,” Dr. Legriel said. Next steps are to conduct a prospective data collection.
 

Postdischarge recovery and psychiatric follow-up

Those left to treat survivors of near-hangings are psychiatrists and other mental health clinicians, Eric M. Plakun, MD, said in an interview.

“Some of these survivors will regret they survived and remain high suicide risks. Some will feel their lives are transformed or at least no longer as intensely drawn to suicide as a solution to a life filled with the impact of adversity, trauma, comorbidity, and other struggles – but even these individuals will still have to face the often complex underlying issues that led them to choose suicide as a solution,” said Dr. Plakun, medical director and CEO of the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Mass.

Patients with medically serious suicide attempts are seen a lot at Austen Riggs, he said, because acute inpatient settings are designed for brief, crisis-focused treatment of those for whom safety is an issue. After the crisis has been stabilized, patients are discharged, and then must begin to achieve recovery as outpatients, he said.

John Kruse, MD, PhD, a psychiatrist who practices in San Francisco, praised the size and the breath of the study. “One limitation was the reliance on hospital records, without an opportunity to directly evaluate or interview the patients involved.”

The authors disclosed no conflicts of interest. The study received grant support from the French public funding agency, Délégation la Recherche Clinique et de l’Innovation in Versailles, France.

SOURCE: de Charentenay L et al. 2020 Aug 3. doi: 10.1016/j.chest.2020.07.064

Spirituality and religion remain central to the worldview of millions of Americans. According to the Pew Research Center, almost 75% of Americans identify as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu.¹ As is the case with many Americans,² the lens of spirituality³ and religion shaped my own worldview since childhood.

j-wildman/Getty Images

Growing up in a Christian household, many of my family’s discussions centered on bolstering our spiritual health. I grew to internalize the notion that spiritual health relates to a sense of self, a sense of purpose, and a connection to God, nature, and others. Religious texts such as the Bible, Quran, and Torah share principles aimed at developing believers’ spiritual health. However, the intricacies of mental health remain entirely foreign within many faith communities. In these communities, unfamiliarity with mental health topics seemingly leads to the conflation of spiritual health and mental health.⁴

Within faith communities, I often hear the phrase, “You can’t worry and pray at the same time.” This commonly used expression encourages people of faith to lean on their spiritual health in times of uncertainty. The perceived dichotomy between worry and prayer represents the theology of sole reliance on spiritual coping skills, such as prayer, when feelings of anxiety and other psychological stressors arise. Because of “pray it away” doctrines and ongoing stigma related to mental health, many of our spiritually minded patients are more likely to seek counsel from religious leaders than they are from mental health clinicians in times of psychological distress.^5,6

About 54% of U.S. adults identify as religious, and 75% think of themselves as spiritual.⁷ This intrapersonal conflict between religious/spiritual health and mental health raises an important question: How can psychiatrists more actively collaborate with religious communities to ease the perceived tensions between spiritual health and mental health for our patients?
 

Engaging with the community

In a recent virtual talk titled, “Dealing with Depression: Faith, Meds, and Therapy,” I openly discussed varying aspects of mental health and mental illness with approximately 70 women at my church in Philadelphia. Before this presentation, there had never been a leadership-sponsored conversation within the church to discuss spiritual health and mental health as separate but highly interconnected entities.

Throughout the nearly 2-hour session, I used biblical and biological principles to explain the differences between spiritual health and mental health, strategies to recognize signs and symptoms of depression, and treatment options for depression. After the formal presentation, a 45-minute question-and-answer session followed in which some members shared their own experiences with mental illness.

Two major themes emerged as central points of discussion during our time of open dialogue. First, several women shared the spiritual and clinical avenues they used to access support in times of psychological distress. There was a general tone of agreement among attendees that spiritual health and mental health are, in fact, different. Second, the presentation opened the door for attendees, previously unfamiliar with mental health services, to ask questions about connecting with the appropriate resources to receive mental health treatment. The subject of seeking psychiatric care for mental health challenges was, at least in part, demystified and brought to the forefront of the attendees’ minds.

Studies show that many faith-based communities are more likely to seek counsel for psychological distress from religious leaders than from mental health professionals. In this vein, my recent community engagement highlighted to me ways that we can readily reach spiritually and religiously minded patients who otherwise would not receive the psychiatric care that they need. Psychiatrists can play an integral role in bridging the gap in psychiatric care for faith-based persons through outreach to and collaboration with religious communities.
 

Opportunities for collaboration

In collaboration with religious leaders, psychiatrists can actively support the mental health of spiritually and religiously minded patients through several low-effort, but potentially high-yield, initiatives. Notably, many of my suggested interventions do not require significant, if any, infrastructural changes to the health care system or worship communities. As psychiatrists, we can collaborate with faith leaders as follows:

1. More regularly assess the role of religion and spirituality in our patients’ daily lives to better meet their spiritual and mental health needs.

2. Better use existing chaplain services to provide spiritual support for hospitalized patients.

3. Present information about mental health – in-person, virtually, or in written form – to religious communities through talks, discussions, popular religious publications, social media platforms, and webinars.

4. Amplify existing mental health guides for faith leaders (i.e., the American Psychiatric Association’s guidebook Mental Health: A Guide for Faith Leaders),⁸ thereby encouraging church leaders and staff to become better informed about common mental health conditions.

5. Collaborate with places of worship to offer psychiatric and psychological services to their members.

This sort of engagement with religious communities is the collective role of community-oriented psychiatrists, not just psychiatrists who ascribe to religious or spiritual beliefs. We ought to remain mindful of the spiritual distress that many spiritual and religious patients feel when they experience mental illness,⁹ particularly in light of the distress caused by the coronavirus pandemic.¹⁰ But first, we must become comfortable with asking our patients about their religious or spiritual affiliations using tools such as the Cultural Formulation Interview.¹¹ The more we recognize the role of spirituality in our patients’ lives, the better equipped we become to help patients identify and seek treatment for mental illness without the distress of their feeling spiritually deficient.
 

Dr. Jordan is a psychiatry resident physician in Philadelphia. She has no conflicts of interest.

References

1. Religious Landscape Study. pewforum.org.

2. U.S. Religion Census Census: Religious Congregations and Membership Study. Association of Religion Data Archives. 2010. doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/9AMDJ.

3. J Med Ethics Hist Med. 2018 Apr 9;11:3.

4. The Dimensions of Health: Conceptual Models. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones & Bartlett, 2010.

5. J Res Christ Educ. 2014;23(2):176-86.

6. Health Serv Res. 2003 Apr;38(2):647-73.

7. “More Americans say they’re spiritual but not religious.” pewresearch.org. 2017 Sep 6.

8. Mental Health: A Guide for Faith Leaders. Washington: American Psychiatric Association Foundation, 2018.

9. Mental Health by the Numbers. NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness. 2019.

10. “Most Americans say coronavirus outbreak has impacted their lives. Pew Research Center. pewsocialtrends.org. 2020 Mar 30.

11. DSM-5 Handbook on the Cultural Formulation Interview. Washington: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2016.

Spirituality and religion remain central to the worldview of millions of Americans. According to the Pew Research Center, almost 75% of Americans identify as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu.¹ As is the case with many Americans,² the lens of spirituality³ and religion shaped my own worldview since childhood.

j-wildman/Getty Images

Growing up in a Christian household, many of my family’s discussions centered on bolstering our spiritual health. I grew to internalize the notion that spiritual health relates to a sense of self, a sense of purpose, and a connection to God, nature, and others. Religious texts such as the Bible, Quran, and Torah share principles aimed at developing believers’ spiritual health. However, the intricacies of mental health remain entirely foreign within many faith communities. In these communities, unfamiliarity with mental health topics seemingly leads to the conflation of spiritual health and mental health.⁴

Within faith communities, I often hear the phrase, “You can’t worry and pray at the same time.” This commonly used expression encourages people of faith to lean on their spiritual health in times of uncertainty. The perceived dichotomy between worry and prayer represents the theology of sole reliance on spiritual coping skills, such as prayer, when feelings of anxiety and other psychological stressors arise. Because of “pray it away” doctrines and ongoing stigma related to mental health, many of our spiritually minded patients are more likely to seek counsel from religious leaders than they are from mental health clinicians in times of psychological distress.^5,6

About 54% of U.S. adults identify as religious, and 75% think of themselves as spiritual.⁷ This intrapersonal conflict between religious/spiritual health and mental health raises an important question: How can psychiatrists more actively collaborate with religious communities to ease the perceived tensions between spiritual health and mental health for our patients?
 

Engaging with the community

In a recent virtual talk titled, “Dealing with Depression: Faith, Meds, and Therapy,” I openly discussed varying aspects of mental health and mental illness with approximately 70 women at my church in Philadelphia. Before this presentation, there had never been a leadership-sponsored conversation within the church to discuss spiritual health and mental health as separate but highly interconnected entities.

Throughout the nearly 2-hour session, I used biblical and biological principles to explain the differences between spiritual health and mental health, strategies to recognize signs and symptoms of depression, and treatment options for depression. After the formal presentation, a 45-minute question-and-answer session followed in which some members shared their own experiences with mental illness.

Two major themes emerged as central points of discussion during our time of open dialogue. First, several women shared the spiritual and clinical avenues they used to access support in times of psychological distress. There was a general tone of agreement among attendees that spiritual health and mental health are, in fact, different. Second, the presentation opened the door for attendees, previously unfamiliar with mental health services, to ask questions about connecting with the appropriate resources to receive mental health treatment. The subject of seeking psychiatric care for mental health challenges was, at least in part, demystified and brought to the forefront of the attendees’ minds.

Studies show that many faith-based communities are more likely to seek counsel for psychological distress from religious leaders than from mental health professionals. In this vein, my recent community engagement highlighted to me ways that we can readily reach spiritually and religiously minded patients who otherwise would not receive the psychiatric care that they need. Psychiatrists can play an integral role in bridging the gap in psychiatric care for faith-based persons through outreach to and collaboration with religious communities.
 

Opportunities for collaboration

In collaboration with religious leaders, psychiatrists can actively support the mental health of spiritually and religiously minded patients through several low-effort, but potentially high-yield, initiatives. Notably, many of my suggested interventions do not require significant, if any, infrastructural changes to the health care system or worship communities. As psychiatrists, we can collaborate with faith leaders as follows:

1. More regularly assess the role of religion and spirituality in our patients’ daily lives to better meet their spiritual and mental health needs.

2. Better use existing chaplain services to provide spiritual support for hospitalized patients.

3. Present information about mental health – in-person, virtually, or in written form – to religious communities through talks, discussions, popular religious publications, social media platforms, and webinars.

4. Amplify existing mental health guides for faith leaders (i.e., the American Psychiatric Association’s guidebook Mental Health: A Guide for Faith Leaders),⁸ thereby encouraging church leaders and staff to become better informed about common mental health conditions.

5. Collaborate with places of worship to offer psychiatric and psychological services to their members.

This sort of engagement with religious communities is the collective role of community-oriented psychiatrists, not just psychiatrists who ascribe to religious or spiritual beliefs. We ought to remain mindful of the spiritual distress that many spiritual and religious patients feel when they experience mental illness,⁹ particularly in light of the distress caused by the coronavirus pandemic.¹⁰ But first, we must become comfortable with asking our patients about their religious or spiritual affiliations using tools such as the Cultural Formulation Interview.¹¹ The more we recognize the role of spirituality in our patients’ lives, the better equipped we become to help patients identify and seek treatment for mental illness without the distress of their feeling spiritually deficient.
 

Dr. Jordan is a psychiatry resident physician in Philadelphia. She has no conflicts of interest.

References

1. Religious Landscape Study. pewforum.org.

2. U.S. Religion Census Census: Religious Congregations and Membership Study. Association of Religion Data Archives. 2010. doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/9AMDJ.

3. J Med Ethics Hist Med. 2018 Apr 9;11:3.

4. The Dimensions of Health: Conceptual Models. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones & Bartlett, 2010.

5. J Res Christ Educ. 2014;23(2):176-86.

6. Health Serv Res. 2003 Apr;38(2):647-73.

7. “More Americans say they’re spiritual but not religious.” pewresearch.org. 2017 Sep 6.

8. Mental Health: A Guide for Faith Leaders. Washington: American Psychiatric Association Foundation, 2018.

9. Mental Health by the Numbers. NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness. 2019.

10. “Most Americans say coronavirus outbreak has impacted their lives. Pew Research Center. pewsocialtrends.org. 2020 Mar 30.

11. DSM-5 Handbook on the Cultural Formulation Interview. Washington: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2016.

Spirituality and religion remain central to the worldview of millions of Americans. According to the Pew Research Center, almost 75% of Americans identify as Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu.¹ As is the case with many Americans,² the lens of spirituality³ and religion shaped my own worldview since childhood.

j-wildman/Getty Images

Growing up in a Christian household, many of my family’s discussions centered on bolstering our spiritual health. I grew to internalize the notion that spiritual health relates to a sense of self, a sense of purpose, and a connection to God, nature, and others. Religious texts such as the Bible, Quran, and Torah share principles aimed at developing believers’ spiritual health. However, the intricacies of mental health remain entirely foreign within many faith communities. In these communities, unfamiliarity with mental health topics seemingly leads to the conflation of spiritual health and mental health.⁴

Within faith communities, I often hear the phrase, “You can’t worry and pray at the same time.” This commonly used expression encourages people of faith to lean on their spiritual health in times of uncertainty. The perceived dichotomy between worry and prayer represents the theology of sole reliance on spiritual coping skills, such as prayer, when feelings of anxiety and other psychological stressors arise. Because of “pray it away” doctrines and ongoing stigma related to mental health, many of our spiritually minded patients are more likely to seek counsel from religious leaders than they are from mental health clinicians in times of psychological distress.^5,6

About 54% of U.S. adults identify as religious, and 75% think of themselves as spiritual.⁷ This intrapersonal conflict between religious/spiritual health and mental health raises an important question: How can psychiatrists more actively collaborate with religious communities to ease the perceived tensions between spiritual health and mental health for our patients?
 

Engaging with the community

In a recent virtual talk titled, “Dealing with Depression: Faith, Meds, and Therapy,” I openly discussed varying aspects of mental health and mental illness with approximately 70 women at my church in Philadelphia. Before this presentation, there had never been a leadership-sponsored conversation within the church to discuss spiritual health and mental health as separate but highly interconnected entities.

Throughout the nearly 2-hour session, I used biblical and biological principles to explain the differences between spiritual health and mental health, strategies to recognize signs and symptoms of depression, and treatment options for depression. After the formal presentation, a 45-minute question-and-answer session followed in which some members shared their own experiences with mental illness.

Two major themes emerged as central points of discussion during our time of open dialogue. First, several women shared the spiritual and clinical avenues they used to access support in times of psychological distress. There was a general tone of agreement among attendees that spiritual health and mental health are, in fact, different. Second, the presentation opened the door for attendees, previously unfamiliar with mental health services, to ask questions about connecting with the appropriate resources to receive mental health treatment. The subject of seeking psychiatric care for mental health challenges was, at least in part, demystified and brought to the forefront of the attendees’ minds.

Studies show that many faith-based communities are more likely to seek counsel for psychological distress from religious leaders than from mental health professionals. In this vein, my recent community engagement highlighted to me ways that we can readily reach spiritually and religiously minded patients who otherwise would not receive the psychiatric care that they need. Psychiatrists can play an integral role in bridging the gap in psychiatric care for faith-based persons through outreach to and collaboration with religious communities.
 

Opportunities for collaboration

In collaboration with religious leaders, psychiatrists can actively support the mental health of spiritually and religiously minded patients through several low-effort, but potentially high-yield, initiatives. Notably, many of my suggested interventions do not require significant, if any, infrastructural changes to the health care system or worship communities. As psychiatrists, we can collaborate with faith leaders as follows:

1. More regularly assess the role of religion and spirituality in our patients’ daily lives to better meet their spiritual and mental health needs.

2. Better use existing chaplain services to provide spiritual support for hospitalized patients.

3. Present information about mental health – in-person, virtually, or in written form – to religious communities through talks, discussions, popular religious publications, social media platforms, and webinars.

4. Amplify existing mental health guides for faith leaders (i.e., the American Psychiatric Association’s guidebook Mental Health: A Guide for Faith Leaders),⁸ thereby encouraging church leaders and staff to become better informed about common mental health conditions.

5. Collaborate with places of worship to offer psychiatric and psychological services to their members.

This sort of engagement with religious communities is the collective role of community-oriented psychiatrists, not just psychiatrists who ascribe to religious or spiritual beliefs. We ought to remain mindful of the spiritual distress that many spiritual and religious patients feel when they experience mental illness,⁹ particularly in light of the distress caused by the coronavirus pandemic.¹⁰ But first, we must become comfortable with asking our patients about their religious or spiritual affiliations using tools such as the Cultural Formulation Interview.¹¹ The more we recognize the role of spirituality in our patients’ lives, the better equipped we become to help patients identify and seek treatment for mental illness without the distress of their feeling spiritually deficient.
 

Dr. Jordan is a psychiatry resident physician in Philadelphia. She has no conflicts of interest.

References

1. Religious Landscape Study. pewforum.org.

2. U.S. Religion Census Census: Religious Congregations and Membership Study. Association of Religion Data Archives. 2010. doi: 10.17605/OSF.IO/9AMDJ.

3. J Med Ethics Hist Med. 2018 Apr 9;11:3.

4. The Dimensions of Health: Conceptual Models. Sudbury, Mass.: Jones & Bartlett, 2010.

5. J Res Christ Educ. 2014;23(2):176-86.

6. Health Serv Res. 2003 Apr;38(2):647-73.

7. “More Americans say they’re spiritual but not religious.” pewresearch.org. 2017 Sep 6.

8. Mental Health: A Guide for Faith Leaders. Washington: American Psychiatric Association Foundation, 2018.

9. Mental Health by the Numbers. NAMI: National Alliance on Mental Illness. 2019.

10. “Most Americans say coronavirus outbreak has impacted their lives. Pew Research Center. pewsocialtrends.org. 2020 Mar 30.

11. DSM-5 Handbook on the Cultural Formulation Interview. Washington: American Psychiatric Association Publishing, 2016.

Aggression in individuals is influenced by genetic and environmental factors, but can be reduced with treatment, according to Emil F. Coccaro, MD.

“It actually is a complex triad of emotion, cognition, and behavior. The emotion is anger, the cognition is hostility, and the behavior is aggression. And they sort of go in that order,” Dr. Coccaro said at Focus on Neuropsychiatry presented by Current Psychiatry and the American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists.

Although aggression can be thought of in a numerous ways, premeditated and impulsive aggression are most relevant to behavioral studies in psychiatry, Dr. Coccaro explained. Premeditated aggression is goal oriented, while impulsive aggression comes from frustration or a response to a threat. Impulsive aggression is “typically social or frustrative in nature, and studies that we’ve done that show that individuals move toward a threat while nonaggressives move away it,” he said. Both types of aggression can be seen in the same individuals at different times.

Aggression also can be considered using a threshold model. Calm individuals, for example, might have a low baseline of aggression and a high threshold before they act out. An aggressive person, on the other hand, has a lower threshold and a higher baseline level. “Their delta to get to the point where they’re going to explode is much shorter, much lower than it is in someone who is healthy,” Dr. Coccaro said.

“What we think is that the threshold to explode is probably regulated by various neurobiological features. The baseline state of aggression also may be related to baseline neurobiological features, but also what’s going on in the environment, because the neurobiological features that send someone to exploding aggression are there all the time,” he explained.

Individuals with secondary aggression are likely to have an underlying condition, such as a primary disease of the brain, systemic or metabolic disorder, or a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia. “If someone’s schizophrenic and they’ve got voices telling them to hurt somebody, or delusions that someone’s going to hurt them, that’s not primary aggression, that’s secondary to the psychosis,” Dr. Coccaro noted.

An individual with primary aggression is likely to have intermittent explosive disorder (IED). IED is not a new diagnosis and has been listed in the DSM since the DSM-I as “passive-aggressive personality.” It was relisted in the DSM-II as “explosive personality,” then changed to IED in the DSM-3 as a diagnosis of exclusion that was poorly operationalized, according to Dr. Coccaro. The criteria for IED under the DSM-III did not define the number of recurrent outbursts needed, what they looked like, the time frame, and excluded people who were generally impulsive.

“That’s not really what these people look like and it’s not what impulsive aggression looks like,” he said. Although the DSM-IV removed the exclusion criteria for general impulsivity and aggression, “it was still purely operational.”

The DSM-5 criteria define IED as “verbal and physical aggression without destruction or assault, twice equally on average for 3 months, or three or more episodes of physical destruction/assault over a 1-year period. These individuals have outbursts “grossly out of proportion to provocation,” the aggression is generally impulsive, and it causes stress and impairment with an age of onset at older than 6 years.

“It’s not better accounted for a whole variety of things, but we actually made some of those exclusion criteria a little less stringent,” compared with criteria in the DSM-IV, Dr. Coccaro said. “That’s because it turns out that it doesn’t really matter much of the time what the comorbidity is. If you have this aggressiveness in the absence of those other conditions, it’s IED.”

According to a reanalysis of the National Comorbidity Survey, 11.7% of adolescents displayed aggressiveness within the last year and 17.3% over a lifetime, compared with 5.1% of adults within the last year and 8.0% within a lifetime. Under DSM-5 criteria, 6.4% of adolescents within the last year and 8.9% over a lifetime currently have IED, compared with 2.6% of adults within the last year and 4.0% over a lifetime, but “could go as high” as the percentage of individuals diagnosed with aggressiveness, Dr. Coccaro noted.

“People who are not called IED many times are not called IED because we didn’t have all the information we needed to actually make the diagnosis,” he said.

Individuals with DSM-5 IED can have as many as 30 episodes in 1 year, compared with those who are nonaggressive and are also more likely to damage property. “These are the big episodes, not simply the episodes where people are getting irritable and snapping at people. These are the big ones, where they’re really destroying objects and pushing or hitting people,” Dr. Coccaro said. About one-fourth of individuals with IED hurt victims badly enough that they require medical attention, one-fifth exhibit aggression toward a partner, and one-fourth receive aggression from their own partner.

In terms of comorbidity with other psychiatric disorders, “IEDs don’t have more comorbidity in general than other disorders,” Dr. Coccaro noted. Personality disorders such as paranoid, antisocial, borderline narcissistic, and obsessive-compulsive disorders are more common in individuals with IED. Aggression in these people present differently depending on the personality disorder. “Someone who’s paranoid might blow up at you if you get in their face. For an antisocial, they’ll blow up at you if you’re preventing them from doing what they want to do. Borderlines, you reject them or you abandon them, they’re going to blow up. Narcissists will blow up when you reject. OCD will also blow up when you mess around with their sense of order,” Dr. Coccaro said.

Genetics also play a role in whether a person may have IED. There is a “clear signal” in families, with about one-fourth of individuals with IED having a relative with IED, compared with 8% of nonaggressive individuals. These percentages were consistent, regardless of whether the individual had a comorbid condition, history of alcohol or drug use, or history of suicide, he said. Other factors that influence likelihood of IED are environment, behaviors such as smoking, and conditions such as traumatic brain injury. Experiencing aggression as a child is another factor.

“IED is the categorical expression of impulsive aggression, and it’s far more common than once thought,” Dr. Coccaro said. “And IED is totally unrecognized in its role in societal violence.”
 

Treatment can suppress, but not cure aggression

Medications used to treat aggression and impulsive aggression include lithium, SSRIs, mood stabilizers, neuroleptics, and beta-blockers. However, the treatments are not a “magic bullet,” Dr. Coccaro noted. “The meds tend to suppress aggressiveness, but not cure it.”

Timing of treatment is also a factor for medication. In studies of patients taking lithium for aggression, for example, “when they gave the drug to people who liked being aggressive, they didn’t like being on these drugs because it made them feel unprotected. It just was at odds with who they thought they were,” Dr. Coccaro said. “The people who took the drug and did well and really liked being on the drug with people who didn’t like that they were aggressive.”

Neurorehabilitation and cognitive-behavioral therapy specific to aggression, called cognitive relaxation and coping skills therapy, are nonpsychotropic approaches to treating aggression. “These therapeutic approaches are working not only to reduce progression, but also to reduce the social information processing problems that aggressive individuals have,” Dr. Coccaro said.

Another approach, known as interpretation bias training, teaches individuals with aggression to judge slightly angry-looking photos of people as not being angry. After 7-14 days of training, aggressive behavior in adolescents has been shown to be reduced. The changes were also visible on functional MRI.

“What they found was that when you treated them, the change in the amygdala went down when you looked at the angry faces and in the left lateral, post training, they became happier,” Dr. Coccaro said.

Global Academy and this news organization are owned by the same parent company. Dr. Coccaro reported serving as a consultant for Avanir, Azevan, and Bracket. He also reported receiving research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation.

Aggression in individuals is influenced by genetic and environmental factors, but can be reduced with treatment, according to Emil F. Coccaro, MD.

“It actually is a complex triad of emotion, cognition, and behavior. The emotion is anger, the cognition is hostility, and the behavior is aggression. And they sort of go in that order,” Dr. Coccaro said at Focus on Neuropsychiatry presented by Current Psychiatry and the American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists.

Although aggression can be thought of in a numerous ways, premeditated and impulsive aggression are most relevant to behavioral studies in psychiatry, Dr. Coccaro explained. Premeditated aggression is goal oriented, while impulsive aggression comes from frustration or a response to a threat. Impulsive aggression is “typically social or frustrative in nature, and studies that we’ve done that show that individuals move toward a threat while nonaggressives move away it,” he said. Both types of aggression can be seen in the same individuals at different times.

Aggression also can be considered using a threshold model. Calm individuals, for example, might have a low baseline of aggression and a high threshold before they act out. An aggressive person, on the other hand, has a lower threshold and a higher baseline level. “Their delta to get to the point where they’re going to explode is much shorter, much lower than it is in someone who is healthy,” Dr. Coccaro said.

“What we think is that the threshold to explode is probably regulated by various neurobiological features. The baseline state of aggression also may be related to baseline neurobiological features, but also what’s going on in the environment, because the neurobiological features that send someone to exploding aggression are there all the time,” he explained.

Individuals with secondary aggression are likely to have an underlying condition, such as a primary disease of the brain, systemic or metabolic disorder, or a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia. “If someone’s schizophrenic and they’ve got voices telling them to hurt somebody, or delusions that someone’s going to hurt them, that’s not primary aggression, that’s secondary to the psychosis,” Dr. Coccaro noted.

An individual with primary aggression is likely to have intermittent explosive disorder (IED). IED is not a new diagnosis and has been listed in the DSM since the DSM-I as “passive-aggressive personality.” It was relisted in the DSM-II as “explosive personality,” then changed to IED in the DSM-3 as a diagnosis of exclusion that was poorly operationalized, according to Dr. Coccaro. The criteria for IED under the DSM-III did not define the number of recurrent outbursts needed, what they looked like, the time frame, and excluded people who were generally impulsive.

“That’s not really what these people look like and it’s not what impulsive aggression looks like,” he said. Although the DSM-IV removed the exclusion criteria for general impulsivity and aggression, “it was still purely operational.”

The DSM-5 criteria define IED as “verbal and physical aggression without destruction or assault, twice equally on average for 3 months, or three or more episodes of physical destruction/assault over a 1-year period. These individuals have outbursts “grossly out of proportion to provocation,” the aggression is generally impulsive, and it causes stress and impairment with an age of onset at older than 6 years.

“It’s not better accounted for a whole variety of things, but we actually made some of those exclusion criteria a little less stringent,” compared with criteria in the DSM-IV, Dr. Coccaro said. “That’s because it turns out that it doesn’t really matter much of the time what the comorbidity is. If you have this aggressiveness in the absence of those other conditions, it’s IED.”

According to a reanalysis of the National Comorbidity Survey, 11.7% of adolescents displayed aggressiveness within the last year and 17.3% over a lifetime, compared with 5.1% of adults within the last year and 8.0% within a lifetime. Under DSM-5 criteria, 6.4% of adolescents within the last year and 8.9% over a lifetime currently have IED, compared with 2.6% of adults within the last year and 4.0% over a lifetime, but “could go as high” as the percentage of individuals diagnosed with aggressiveness, Dr. Coccaro noted.

“People who are not called IED many times are not called IED because we didn’t have all the information we needed to actually make the diagnosis,” he said.

Individuals with DSM-5 IED can have as many as 30 episodes in 1 year, compared with those who are nonaggressive and are also more likely to damage property. “These are the big episodes, not simply the episodes where people are getting irritable and snapping at people. These are the big ones, where they’re really destroying objects and pushing or hitting people,” Dr. Coccaro said. About one-fourth of individuals with IED hurt victims badly enough that they require medical attention, one-fifth exhibit aggression toward a partner, and one-fourth receive aggression from their own partner.

In terms of comorbidity with other psychiatric disorders, “IEDs don’t have more comorbidity in general than other disorders,” Dr. Coccaro noted. Personality disorders such as paranoid, antisocial, borderline narcissistic, and obsessive-compulsive disorders are more common in individuals with IED. Aggression in these people present differently depending on the personality disorder. “Someone who’s paranoid might blow up at you if you get in their face. For an antisocial, they’ll blow up at you if you’re preventing them from doing what they want to do. Borderlines, you reject them or you abandon them, they’re going to blow up. Narcissists will blow up when you reject. OCD will also blow up when you mess around with their sense of order,” Dr. Coccaro said.

Genetics also play a role in whether a person may have IED. There is a “clear signal” in families, with about one-fourth of individuals with IED having a relative with IED, compared with 8% of nonaggressive individuals. These percentages were consistent, regardless of whether the individual had a comorbid condition, history of alcohol or drug use, or history of suicide, he said. Other factors that influence likelihood of IED are environment, behaviors such as smoking, and conditions such as traumatic brain injury. Experiencing aggression as a child is another factor.

“IED is the categorical expression of impulsive aggression, and it’s far more common than once thought,” Dr. Coccaro said. “And IED is totally unrecognized in its role in societal violence.”
 

Treatment can suppress, but not cure aggression

Medications used to treat aggression and impulsive aggression include lithium, SSRIs, mood stabilizers, neuroleptics, and beta-blockers. However, the treatments are not a “magic bullet,” Dr. Coccaro noted. “The meds tend to suppress aggressiveness, but not cure it.”

Timing of treatment is also a factor for medication. In studies of patients taking lithium for aggression, for example, “when they gave the drug to people who liked being aggressive, they didn’t like being on these drugs because it made them feel unprotected. It just was at odds with who they thought they were,” Dr. Coccaro said. “The people who took the drug and did well and really liked being on the drug with people who didn’t like that they were aggressive.”

Neurorehabilitation and cognitive-behavioral therapy specific to aggression, called cognitive relaxation and coping skills therapy, are nonpsychotropic approaches to treating aggression. “These therapeutic approaches are working not only to reduce progression, but also to reduce the social information processing problems that aggressive individuals have,” Dr. Coccaro said.

Another approach, known as interpretation bias training, teaches individuals with aggression to judge slightly angry-looking photos of people as not being angry. After 7-14 days of training, aggressive behavior in adolescents has been shown to be reduced. The changes were also visible on functional MRI.

“What they found was that when you treated them, the change in the amygdala went down when you looked at the angry faces and in the left lateral, post training, they became happier,” Dr. Coccaro said.

Global Academy and this news organization are owned by the same parent company. Dr. Coccaro reported serving as a consultant for Avanir, Azevan, and Bracket. He also reported receiving research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation.

Aggression in individuals is influenced by genetic and environmental factors, but can be reduced with treatment, according to Emil F. Coccaro, MD.

“It actually is a complex triad of emotion, cognition, and behavior. The emotion is anger, the cognition is hostility, and the behavior is aggression. And they sort of go in that order,” Dr. Coccaro said at Focus on Neuropsychiatry presented by Current Psychiatry and the American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists.

Although aggression can be thought of in a numerous ways, premeditated and impulsive aggression are most relevant to behavioral studies in psychiatry, Dr. Coccaro explained. Premeditated aggression is goal oriented, while impulsive aggression comes from frustration or a response to a threat. Impulsive aggression is “typically social or frustrative in nature, and studies that we’ve done that show that individuals move toward a threat while nonaggressives move away it,” he said. Both types of aggression can be seen in the same individuals at different times.

Aggression also can be considered using a threshold model. Calm individuals, for example, might have a low baseline of aggression and a high threshold before they act out. An aggressive person, on the other hand, has a lower threshold and a higher baseline level. “Their delta to get to the point where they’re going to explode is much shorter, much lower than it is in someone who is healthy,” Dr. Coccaro said.

“What we think is that the threshold to explode is probably regulated by various neurobiological features. The baseline state of aggression also may be related to baseline neurobiological features, but also what’s going on in the environment, because the neurobiological features that send someone to exploding aggression are there all the time,” he explained.

Individuals with secondary aggression are likely to have an underlying condition, such as a primary disease of the brain, systemic or metabolic disorder, or a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia. “If someone’s schizophrenic and they’ve got voices telling them to hurt somebody, or delusions that someone’s going to hurt them, that’s not primary aggression, that’s secondary to the psychosis,” Dr. Coccaro noted.

An individual with primary aggression is likely to have intermittent explosive disorder (IED). IED is not a new diagnosis and has been listed in the DSM since the DSM-I as “passive-aggressive personality.” It was relisted in the DSM-II as “explosive personality,” then changed to IED in the DSM-3 as a diagnosis of exclusion that was poorly operationalized, according to Dr. Coccaro. The criteria for IED under the DSM-III did not define the number of recurrent outbursts needed, what they looked like, the time frame, and excluded people who were generally impulsive.

“That’s not really what these people look like and it’s not what impulsive aggression looks like,” he said. Although the DSM-IV removed the exclusion criteria for general impulsivity and aggression, “it was still purely operational.”

The DSM-5 criteria define IED as “verbal and physical aggression without destruction or assault, twice equally on average for 3 months, or three or more episodes of physical destruction/assault over a 1-year period. These individuals have outbursts “grossly out of proportion to provocation,” the aggression is generally impulsive, and it causes stress and impairment with an age of onset at older than 6 years.

“It’s not better accounted for a whole variety of things, but we actually made some of those exclusion criteria a little less stringent,” compared with criteria in the DSM-IV, Dr. Coccaro said. “That’s because it turns out that it doesn’t really matter much of the time what the comorbidity is. If you have this aggressiveness in the absence of those other conditions, it’s IED.”

According to a reanalysis of the National Comorbidity Survey, 11.7% of adolescents displayed aggressiveness within the last year and 17.3% over a lifetime, compared with 5.1% of adults within the last year and 8.0% within a lifetime. Under DSM-5 criteria, 6.4% of adolescents within the last year and 8.9% over a lifetime currently have IED, compared with 2.6% of adults within the last year and 4.0% over a lifetime, but “could go as high” as the percentage of individuals diagnosed with aggressiveness, Dr. Coccaro noted.

“People who are not called IED many times are not called IED because we didn’t have all the information we needed to actually make the diagnosis,” he said.

Individuals with DSM-5 IED can have as many as 30 episodes in 1 year, compared with those who are nonaggressive and are also more likely to damage property. “These are the big episodes, not simply the episodes where people are getting irritable and snapping at people. These are the big ones, where they’re really destroying objects and pushing or hitting people,” Dr. Coccaro said. About one-fourth of individuals with IED hurt victims badly enough that they require medical attention, one-fifth exhibit aggression toward a partner, and one-fourth receive aggression from their own partner.

In terms of comorbidity with other psychiatric disorders, “IEDs don’t have more comorbidity in general than other disorders,” Dr. Coccaro noted. Personality disorders such as paranoid, antisocial, borderline narcissistic, and obsessive-compulsive disorders are more common in individuals with IED. Aggression in these people present differently depending on the personality disorder. “Someone who’s paranoid might blow up at you if you get in their face. For an antisocial, they’ll blow up at you if you’re preventing them from doing what they want to do. Borderlines, you reject them or you abandon them, they’re going to blow up. Narcissists will blow up when you reject. OCD will also blow up when you mess around with their sense of order,” Dr. Coccaro said.

Genetics also play a role in whether a person may have IED. There is a “clear signal” in families, with about one-fourth of individuals with IED having a relative with IED, compared with 8% of nonaggressive individuals. These percentages were consistent, regardless of whether the individual had a comorbid condition, history of alcohol or drug use, or history of suicide, he said. Other factors that influence likelihood of IED are environment, behaviors such as smoking, and conditions such as traumatic brain injury. Experiencing aggression as a child is another factor.

“IED is the categorical expression of impulsive aggression, and it’s far more common than once thought,” Dr. Coccaro said. “And IED is totally unrecognized in its role in societal violence.”
 

Treatment can suppress, but not cure aggression

Medications used to treat aggression and impulsive aggression include lithium, SSRIs, mood stabilizers, neuroleptics, and beta-blockers. However, the treatments are not a “magic bullet,” Dr. Coccaro noted. “The meds tend to suppress aggressiveness, but not cure it.”

Timing of treatment is also a factor for medication. In studies of patients taking lithium for aggression, for example, “when they gave the drug to people who liked being aggressive, they didn’t like being on these drugs because it made them feel unprotected. It just was at odds with who they thought they were,” Dr. Coccaro said. “The people who took the drug and did well and really liked being on the drug with people who didn’t like that they were aggressive.”

Neurorehabilitation and cognitive-behavioral therapy specific to aggression, called cognitive relaxation and coping skills therapy, are nonpsychotropic approaches to treating aggression. “These therapeutic approaches are working not only to reduce progression, but also to reduce the social information processing problems that aggressive individuals have,” Dr. Coccaro said.

Another approach, known as interpretation bias training, teaches individuals with aggression to judge slightly angry-looking photos of people as not being angry. After 7-14 days of training, aggressive behavior in adolescents has been shown to be reduced. The changes were also visible on functional MRI.

“What they found was that when you treated them, the change in the amygdala went down when you looked at the angry faces and in the left lateral, post training, they became happier,” Dr. Coccaro said.

Global Academy and this news organization are owned by the same parent company. Dr. Coccaro reported serving as a consultant for Avanir, Azevan, and Bracket. He also reported receiving research grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and the Pritzker Pucker Family Foundation.

Patients have often been labeled as “poor historians” if they are not able to recollect their own medical history, whether through illness or difficulties in communication. But Fred Ovsiew, MD, speaking at Focus on Neuropsychiatry presented by Current Psychiatry and the American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists, sees that label as an excuse on the part of the clinician.

“I strongly advise you to drop that phrase from your vocabulary if you do use it, because the patient is not the historian. The doctor, the clinician is the historian,” Dr. Ovsiew said at the meeting, presented by Global Academy for Medical Education. “It is the clinician’s job to put the story together using the account by the patient as one source, but [also] interviewing a collateral informant and/or reviewing records, which is necessary in almost every case of a neuropsychiatric illness.”

Rather, clinicians taking history at the bedside should focus on why the patients cannot give a narrative account of their illness. Patients can have narrative incapacity on a psychogenic basis, such as in patients with conversion or somatoform disorder, he explained. “I think this is a result of the narrative incapacity that develops in people who have had trauma or adverse experiences in childhood and insecure attachment. This is shown on the adult attachment interview as a disorganized account of their childhoods.”

Other patients might not be able to recount their medical history because they are amnestic, which leaves their account vague because of a lack of access to information. “It may be frozen in time in the sense that, up to a certain point in their life, they can recount the history,” Dr. Ovsiew said. “But in recent years, their account becomes vague.”

Patients with right hemisphere lesions might not know that their account has incongruity and is implausible, while patients with dorsolateral prefrontal lesions might be aspontaneous, use few words to describe their situation, and have poor insight. Those with ventromedial prefrontal lesions can be impulsive and have poor insight, not considering alternative possibilities, Dr. Ovsiew noted.

Asking open-ended questions of the patient is the first step to identifying any potential narrative incapacity, followed by a detailed medical history by the clinician. When taking a medical history, try avoiding what Dr. Ovsiew calls the “anything like that?” problem, where a clinician asks a question about a cluster of symptoms that would make sense to a doctor, but not a patient. For example, a doctor might ask whether a patient is experiencing “chest pain or leg swelling – anything like that?” because he or she knows what those symptoms have in common, but the patient might not know the relationship between those symptoms. “You can’t count on the patient to tell you all the relevant information,” he said. “You have to know what to ask about.”

“Patients with brain disease have subtle personality changes, sometimes more obvious personality changes. These need to be inquired about,” Dr. Ovsiew said. He encouraged asking “non-DSM questions” to help identify specific symptoms of a neuropsychiatric illness. “The patient with apathy has reduced negative as well as positive emotions. The patient with depression has reduced positive emotions, but often tells you very clearly about the negative emotions of sadness, guilt. The patient with depression has diurnal variation in mood, a very telling symptom, especially when it’s disclosed spontaneously,” Dr. Ovsiew explained. “The point is, you need to know to ask about it.”

When taking a sleep history, clinicians should be aware of sleep disturbances apart from insomnia and early waking. REM sleep behavior disorder is a condition that should be inquired about. Obstructive sleep apnea is a condition that might not be immediately apparent to the patient, but a bed partner can identify whether a patient has problems breathing throughout the night.

“This is an important condition to uncover for the neuropsychiatrist because it contributes to treatment resistance and depression, and it contributes to cognitive impairment,” Dr. Ovsiew said. “These patients commonly have mild difficulties with attention and concentration.”

Always ask about head injury in every history, which can be relevant to later onset depression, PTSD, and cognitive impairment. Every head injury follows a trajectory of retrograde amnesia and altered state of consciousness (including coma), followed by a period of posttraumatic amnesia. Duration of these states can be used to assess the severity of brain injury, but the 15-point Glasgow Coma Scale is another way to assess injury severity, Dr. Ovsiew explained.

However, the two do not always overlap, he noted. “Someone may have a Glasgow Coma Scale score that is 9-12, predicting moderate brain injury, but they may have a short duration of amnesia. These don’t always follow the same path. There are many different ways of classifying how severe the brain injury is.”
 

Keep probes brief, straightforward

Cognitive exams of patients with suspected psychiatric disorders should be simple, easy to administer and focused on a single domain of cognition. “Probes should be brief. They should not require specialized equipment. The Purdue Pegboard Test might be a great neuropsychological instrument, but very few of us carry a pegboard around in our medical bags,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

The probe administered should also be accessible to the patient. The serial sevens clinical test, where a patient is asked to repeatedly subtract 7 from 100, is only effective at testing concentration if the patient is capable of completing the test. “There are going to be patients who can’t do the task, but it’s not because of concentration failure, it’s because of subtraction failure,” he said.

When assessing attention, effective tasks include having the patient perform the digit span test forward and backward, count backward from 20 to 1, listing the months of the year in reverse, and performing the Mental Alternation Test. However, Dr. Ovsiew explained there may be some barriers for patients in completing these tasks. “The person may be aphasic and not know the alphabet. The person may have English as a second language and not be skilled at giving the alphabet in English. In some cases, you may want to check and not assume that the patient can count and does know the alphabet.”

In assessing language, listen for aphasic abnormalities. “The patient, of course, is speaking throughout the interview, but you need to take a moment to listen for prosody, to listen to rate of speech, to listen for paraphasic errors or word-finding problems,” Dr. Ovsiew said. Any abnormalities should be probed further through confrontation naming tasks, which can be done in person and with some success through video, but not by phone. Naming to definition (“What do you call the part of a shirt that covers the arm?”) is one way of administering the test over the phone.

Visuospatial function can be assessed by clock drawing but also carries problems. Patients who do not plan their clock before beginning to draw, for example, may have an executive function problem instead of a visuospatial problem, Dr. Ovsiew noted. Patients in whom a clinician suspects hemineglect should be given a visual search task or line by section task. “I like doing clock drawing. It’s a nice screening test. It’s becoming, I think, less useful as people count on digital clocks and have trouble even imagining what an analog clock looks like.”

An approach that is better suited to in-person assessment, but also works by video, is the Poppelreuter figure visual perceptual function test, which is a prompt for the patient that involves common household items overlaying one another “in atypical positions and atypical configurations” where the patient is instructed to describe the items they see on the card. Another approach that works over video is the interlocking finger test, where the patient is asked to copy the hand positions made by the clinician.

Dr. Ovsiew admitted that visuospatial function is nearly impossible to assess over the phone. Asking topographical questions (“If you’re driving from Chicago to Los Angeles, is the Pacific Ocean in front of you, behind you, to your left, or to your right?”) may help judge visuospatial function, but this relies on the patient having the topographic knowledge to answer the questions. Some patients who are topographically disoriented can’t do them at all,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

Bedside neuropsychiatry assesses encoding of a memory, its retention and its retrieval as well as verbal and visual cues. Each one of these aspects of memory can be impaired on its own and should be explored separately, Dr. Ovsiew explained. “Neuropsychiatric clinicians have a rough-and-ready, seat-of-the-pants way of approaching this that wouldn’t pass muster if you’re a psychologist, but is the best we can do at the bedside.”

To test retrieval and retention, the Three Words–Three Shapes test works well in person, with some difficulty by video, and is not possible to administer over the phone. In lieu of that test, giving the patient a simple word list and asking them to repeat the list in order. Using the word list, “these different stages of memory function can be parsed out pretty well at the bedside or chairside, and even by the phone. Figuring out where the memory failure is diagnostically important,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

Executive function, which involves activation, planning, sequencing, maintaining, self-monitoring, and flexible employment of action and attention, is “complicated to evaluate because there are multiple aspects of executive function, multiple deficits that can be seen with executive dysfunction, and they don’t all correlate with each other.”

Within executive function evaluation, the Mental Alternation Test can assess working memory, motor sequencing can be assessed through the ring/fist, fist/edge/palm, alternating fist, and rampart tests. The Go/No-Go test can be used to assess response inhibition. For effortful retrieval evaluation, spontaneous word-list generation – such as thinking of all the items one can buy at a supermarket– can test category fluency, while a task to name all the words starting with a certain letter can assess letter stimulus.

Executive function “is of crucial importance in the neuropsychiatric evaluation because it’s strongly correlated with how well the person functions outside the office,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

Global Academy and this news organization are owned by the same parent company. Dr. Ovsiew reported relationships with Wolters Kluwer Health in the form of consulting, receiving royalty payments, and related activities.

Patients have often been labeled as “poor historians” if they are not able to recollect their own medical history, whether through illness or difficulties in communication. But Fred Ovsiew, MD, speaking at Focus on Neuropsychiatry presented by Current Psychiatry and the American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists, sees that label as an excuse on the part of the clinician.

“I strongly advise you to drop that phrase from your vocabulary if you do use it, because the patient is not the historian. The doctor, the clinician is the historian,” Dr. Ovsiew said at the meeting, presented by Global Academy for Medical Education. “It is the clinician’s job to put the story together using the account by the patient as one source, but [also] interviewing a collateral informant and/or reviewing records, which is necessary in almost every case of a neuropsychiatric illness.”

Rather, clinicians taking history at the bedside should focus on why the patients cannot give a narrative account of their illness. Patients can have narrative incapacity on a psychogenic basis, such as in patients with conversion or somatoform disorder, he explained. “I think this is a result of the narrative incapacity that develops in people who have had trauma or adverse experiences in childhood and insecure attachment. This is shown on the adult attachment interview as a disorganized account of their childhoods.”

Other patients might not be able to recount their medical history because they are amnestic, which leaves their account vague because of a lack of access to information. “It may be frozen in time in the sense that, up to a certain point in their life, they can recount the history,” Dr. Ovsiew said. “But in recent years, their account becomes vague.”

Patients with right hemisphere lesions might not know that their account has incongruity and is implausible, while patients with dorsolateral prefrontal lesions might be aspontaneous, use few words to describe their situation, and have poor insight. Those with ventromedial prefrontal lesions can be impulsive and have poor insight, not considering alternative possibilities, Dr. Ovsiew noted.

Asking open-ended questions of the patient is the first step to identifying any potential narrative incapacity, followed by a detailed medical history by the clinician. When taking a medical history, try avoiding what Dr. Ovsiew calls the “anything like that?” problem, where a clinician asks a question about a cluster of symptoms that would make sense to a doctor, but not a patient. For example, a doctor might ask whether a patient is experiencing “chest pain or leg swelling – anything like that?” because he or she knows what those symptoms have in common, but the patient might not know the relationship between those symptoms. “You can’t count on the patient to tell you all the relevant information,” he said. “You have to know what to ask about.”

“Patients with brain disease have subtle personality changes, sometimes more obvious personality changes. These need to be inquired about,” Dr. Ovsiew said. He encouraged asking “non-DSM questions” to help identify specific symptoms of a neuropsychiatric illness. “The patient with apathy has reduced negative as well as positive emotions. The patient with depression has reduced positive emotions, but often tells you very clearly about the negative emotions of sadness, guilt. The patient with depression has diurnal variation in mood, a very telling symptom, especially when it’s disclosed spontaneously,” Dr. Ovsiew explained. “The point is, you need to know to ask about it.”

When taking a sleep history, clinicians should be aware of sleep disturbances apart from insomnia and early waking. REM sleep behavior disorder is a condition that should be inquired about. Obstructive sleep apnea is a condition that might not be immediately apparent to the patient, but a bed partner can identify whether a patient has problems breathing throughout the night.

“This is an important condition to uncover for the neuropsychiatrist because it contributes to treatment resistance and depression, and it contributes to cognitive impairment,” Dr. Ovsiew said. “These patients commonly have mild difficulties with attention and concentration.”

Always ask about head injury in every history, which can be relevant to later onset depression, PTSD, and cognitive impairment. Every head injury follows a trajectory of retrograde amnesia and altered state of consciousness (including coma), followed by a period of posttraumatic amnesia. Duration of these states can be used to assess the severity of brain injury, but the 15-point Glasgow Coma Scale is another way to assess injury severity, Dr. Ovsiew explained.

However, the two do not always overlap, he noted. “Someone may have a Glasgow Coma Scale score that is 9-12, predicting moderate brain injury, but they may have a short duration of amnesia. These don’t always follow the same path. There are many different ways of classifying how severe the brain injury is.”
 

Keep probes brief, straightforward

Cognitive exams of patients with suspected psychiatric disorders should be simple, easy to administer and focused on a single domain of cognition. “Probes should be brief. They should not require specialized equipment. The Purdue Pegboard Test might be a great neuropsychological instrument, but very few of us carry a pegboard around in our medical bags,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

The probe administered should also be accessible to the patient. The serial sevens clinical test, where a patient is asked to repeatedly subtract 7 from 100, is only effective at testing concentration if the patient is capable of completing the test. “There are going to be patients who can’t do the task, but it’s not because of concentration failure, it’s because of subtraction failure,” he said.

When assessing attention, effective tasks include having the patient perform the digit span test forward and backward, count backward from 20 to 1, listing the months of the year in reverse, and performing the Mental Alternation Test. However, Dr. Ovsiew explained there may be some barriers for patients in completing these tasks. “The person may be aphasic and not know the alphabet. The person may have English as a second language and not be skilled at giving the alphabet in English. In some cases, you may want to check and not assume that the patient can count and does know the alphabet.”

In assessing language, listen for aphasic abnormalities. “The patient, of course, is speaking throughout the interview, but you need to take a moment to listen for prosody, to listen to rate of speech, to listen for paraphasic errors or word-finding problems,” Dr. Ovsiew said. Any abnormalities should be probed further through confrontation naming tasks, which can be done in person and with some success through video, but not by phone. Naming to definition (“What do you call the part of a shirt that covers the arm?”) is one way of administering the test over the phone.

Visuospatial function can be assessed by clock drawing but also carries problems. Patients who do not plan their clock before beginning to draw, for example, may have an executive function problem instead of a visuospatial problem, Dr. Ovsiew noted. Patients in whom a clinician suspects hemineglect should be given a visual search task or line by section task. “I like doing clock drawing. It’s a nice screening test. It’s becoming, I think, less useful as people count on digital clocks and have trouble even imagining what an analog clock looks like.”

An approach that is better suited to in-person assessment, but also works by video, is the Poppelreuter figure visual perceptual function test, which is a prompt for the patient that involves common household items overlaying one another “in atypical positions and atypical configurations” where the patient is instructed to describe the items they see on the card. Another approach that works over video is the interlocking finger test, where the patient is asked to copy the hand positions made by the clinician.

Dr. Ovsiew admitted that visuospatial function is nearly impossible to assess over the phone. Asking topographical questions (“If you’re driving from Chicago to Los Angeles, is the Pacific Ocean in front of you, behind you, to your left, or to your right?”) may help judge visuospatial function, but this relies on the patient having the topographic knowledge to answer the questions. Some patients who are topographically disoriented can’t do them at all,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

Bedside neuropsychiatry assesses encoding of a memory, its retention and its retrieval as well as verbal and visual cues. Each one of these aspects of memory can be impaired on its own and should be explored separately, Dr. Ovsiew explained. “Neuropsychiatric clinicians have a rough-and-ready, seat-of-the-pants way of approaching this that wouldn’t pass muster if you’re a psychologist, but is the best we can do at the bedside.”

To test retrieval and retention, the Three Words–Three Shapes test works well in person, with some difficulty by video, and is not possible to administer over the phone. In lieu of that test, giving the patient a simple word list and asking them to repeat the list in order. Using the word list, “these different stages of memory function can be parsed out pretty well at the bedside or chairside, and even by the phone. Figuring out where the memory failure is diagnostically important,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

Executive function, which involves activation, planning, sequencing, maintaining, self-monitoring, and flexible employment of action and attention, is “complicated to evaluate because there are multiple aspects of executive function, multiple deficits that can be seen with executive dysfunction, and they don’t all correlate with each other.”

Within executive function evaluation, the Mental Alternation Test can assess working memory, motor sequencing can be assessed through the ring/fist, fist/edge/palm, alternating fist, and rampart tests. The Go/No-Go test can be used to assess response inhibition. For effortful retrieval evaluation, spontaneous word-list generation – such as thinking of all the items one can buy at a supermarket– can test category fluency, while a task to name all the words starting with a certain letter can assess letter stimulus.

Executive function “is of crucial importance in the neuropsychiatric evaluation because it’s strongly correlated with how well the person functions outside the office,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

Global Academy and this news organization are owned by the same parent company. Dr. Ovsiew reported relationships with Wolters Kluwer Health in the form of consulting, receiving royalty payments, and related activities.

Patients have often been labeled as “poor historians” if they are not able to recollect their own medical history, whether through illness or difficulties in communication. But Fred Ovsiew, MD, speaking at Focus on Neuropsychiatry presented by Current Psychiatry and the American Academy of Clinical Psychiatrists, sees that label as an excuse on the part of the clinician.

“I strongly advise you to drop that phrase from your vocabulary if you do use it, because the patient is not the historian. The doctor, the clinician is the historian,” Dr. Ovsiew said at the meeting, presented by Global Academy for Medical Education. “It is the clinician’s job to put the story together using the account by the patient as one source, but [also] interviewing a collateral informant and/or reviewing records, which is necessary in almost every case of a neuropsychiatric illness.”

Rather, clinicians taking history at the bedside should focus on why the patients cannot give a narrative account of their illness. Patients can have narrative incapacity on a psychogenic basis, such as in patients with conversion or somatoform disorder, he explained. “I think this is a result of the narrative incapacity that develops in people who have had trauma or adverse experiences in childhood and insecure attachment. This is shown on the adult attachment interview as a disorganized account of their childhoods.”

Other patients might not be able to recount their medical history because they are amnestic, which leaves their account vague because of a lack of access to information. “It may be frozen in time in the sense that, up to a certain point in their life, they can recount the history,” Dr. Ovsiew said. “But in recent years, their account becomes vague.”

Patients with right hemisphere lesions might not know that their account has incongruity and is implausible, while patients with dorsolateral prefrontal lesions might be aspontaneous, use few words to describe their situation, and have poor insight. Those with ventromedial prefrontal lesions can be impulsive and have poor insight, not considering alternative possibilities, Dr. Ovsiew noted.

Asking open-ended questions of the patient is the first step to identifying any potential narrative incapacity, followed by a detailed medical history by the clinician. When taking a medical history, try avoiding what Dr. Ovsiew calls the “anything like that?” problem, where a clinician asks a question about a cluster of symptoms that would make sense to a doctor, but not a patient. For example, a doctor might ask whether a patient is experiencing “chest pain or leg swelling – anything like that?” because he or she knows what those symptoms have in common, but the patient might not know the relationship between those symptoms. “You can’t count on the patient to tell you all the relevant information,” he said. “You have to know what to ask about.”

“Patients with brain disease have subtle personality changes, sometimes more obvious personality changes. These need to be inquired about,” Dr. Ovsiew said. He encouraged asking “non-DSM questions” to help identify specific symptoms of a neuropsychiatric illness. “The patient with apathy has reduced negative as well as positive emotions. The patient with depression has reduced positive emotions, but often tells you very clearly about the negative emotions of sadness, guilt. The patient with depression has diurnal variation in mood, a very telling symptom, especially when it’s disclosed spontaneously,” Dr. Ovsiew explained. “The point is, you need to know to ask about it.”

When taking a sleep history, clinicians should be aware of sleep disturbances apart from insomnia and early waking. REM sleep behavior disorder is a condition that should be inquired about. Obstructive sleep apnea is a condition that might not be immediately apparent to the patient, but a bed partner can identify whether a patient has problems breathing throughout the night.

“This is an important condition to uncover for the neuropsychiatrist because it contributes to treatment resistance and depression, and it contributes to cognitive impairment,” Dr. Ovsiew said. “These patients commonly have mild difficulties with attention and concentration.”

Always ask about head injury in every history, which can be relevant to later onset depression, PTSD, and cognitive impairment. Every head injury follows a trajectory of retrograde amnesia and altered state of consciousness (including coma), followed by a period of posttraumatic amnesia. Duration of these states can be used to assess the severity of brain injury, but the 15-point Glasgow Coma Scale is another way to assess injury severity, Dr. Ovsiew explained.

However, the two do not always overlap, he noted. “Someone may have a Glasgow Coma Scale score that is 9-12, predicting moderate brain injury, but they may have a short duration of amnesia. These don’t always follow the same path. There are many different ways of classifying how severe the brain injury is.”
 

Keep probes brief, straightforward

Cognitive exams of patients with suspected psychiatric disorders should be simple, easy to administer and focused on a single domain of cognition. “Probes should be brief. They should not require specialized equipment. The Purdue Pegboard Test might be a great neuropsychological instrument, but very few of us carry a pegboard around in our medical bags,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

The probe administered should also be accessible to the patient. The serial sevens clinical test, where a patient is asked to repeatedly subtract 7 from 100, is only effective at testing concentration if the patient is capable of completing the test. “There are going to be patients who can’t do the task, but it’s not because of concentration failure, it’s because of subtraction failure,” he said.

When assessing attention, effective tasks include having the patient perform the digit span test forward and backward, count backward from 20 to 1, listing the months of the year in reverse, and performing the Mental Alternation Test. However, Dr. Ovsiew explained there may be some barriers for patients in completing these tasks. “The person may be aphasic and not know the alphabet. The person may have English as a second language and not be skilled at giving the alphabet in English. In some cases, you may want to check and not assume that the patient can count and does know the alphabet.”

In assessing language, listen for aphasic abnormalities. “The patient, of course, is speaking throughout the interview, but you need to take a moment to listen for prosody, to listen to rate of speech, to listen for paraphasic errors or word-finding problems,” Dr. Ovsiew said. Any abnormalities should be probed further through confrontation naming tasks, which can be done in person and with some success through video, but not by phone. Naming to definition (“What do you call the part of a shirt that covers the arm?”) is one way of administering the test over the phone.

Visuospatial function can be assessed by clock drawing but also carries problems. Patients who do not plan their clock before beginning to draw, for example, may have an executive function problem instead of a visuospatial problem, Dr. Ovsiew noted. Patients in whom a clinician suspects hemineglect should be given a visual search task or line by section task. “I like doing clock drawing. It’s a nice screening test. It’s becoming, I think, less useful as people count on digital clocks and have trouble even imagining what an analog clock looks like.”

An approach that is better suited to in-person assessment, but also works by video, is the Poppelreuter figure visual perceptual function test, which is a prompt for the patient that involves common household items overlaying one another “in atypical positions and atypical configurations” where the patient is instructed to describe the items they see on the card. Another approach that works over video is the interlocking finger test, where the patient is asked to copy the hand positions made by the clinician.

Dr. Ovsiew admitted that visuospatial function is nearly impossible to assess over the phone. Asking topographical questions (“If you’re driving from Chicago to Los Angeles, is the Pacific Ocean in front of you, behind you, to your left, or to your right?”) may help judge visuospatial function, but this relies on the patient having the topographic knowledge to answer the questions. Some patients who are topographically disoriented can’t do them at all,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

Bedside neuropsychiatry assesses encoding of a memory, its retention and its retrieval as well as verbal and visual cues. Each one of these aspects of memory can be impaired on its own and should be explored separately, Dr. Ovsiew explained. “Neuropsychiatric clinicians have a rough-and-ready, seat-of-the-pants way of approaching this that wouldn’t pass muster if you’re a psychologist, but is the best we can do at the bedside.”

To test retrieval and retention, the Three Words–Three Shapes test works well in person, with some difficulty by video, and is not possible to administer over the phone. In lieu of that test, giving the patient a simple word list and asking them to repeat the list in order. Using the word list, “these different stages of memory function can be parsed out pretty well at the bedside or chairside, and even by the phone. Figuring out where the memory failure is diagnostically important,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

Executive function, which involves activation, planning, sequencing, maintaining, self-monitoring, and flexible employment of action and attention, is “complicated to evaluate because there are multiple aspects of executive function, multiple deficits that can be seen with executive dysfunction, and they don’t all correlate with each other.”

Within executive function evaluation, the Mental Alternation Test can assess working memory, motor sequencing can be assessed through the ring/fist, fist/edge/palm, alternating fist, and rampart tests. The Go/No-Go test can be used to assess response inhibition. For effortful retrieval evaluation, spontaneous word-list generation – such as thinking of all the items one can buy at a supermarket– can test category fluency, while a task to name all the words starting with a certain letter can assess letter stimulus.

Executive function “is of crucial importance in the neuropsychiatric evaluation because it’s strongly correlated with how well the person functions outside the office,” Dr. Ovsiew said.

Global Academy and this news organization are owned by the same parent company. Dr. Ovsiew reported relationships with Wolters Kluwer Health in the form of consulting, receiving royalty payments, and related activities.

The coronavirus has infected millions of Americans and killed over 174,000. But could it be worse? Maybe.

“Racism is the pandemic within the pandemic,” Marc H. Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, said in the 2020 “State of Black America, Unmasked” report.

“Black people with COVID-19 symptoms in February and March were less likely to get tested or treated than white patients,” he wrote.

After less testing and less treatment, the next step seems inevitable. The death rate from COVID-19 is 70 per 100,000 population among Black Americans, compared with 30 per 100,000 for Whites and 34 per 100,000 for Hispanics, the league said based on data from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity.

Black and Hispanic patients with COVID-19 are more likely to have preexisting health conditions, but they “tend to receive less aggressive treatment than white patients,” the report noted. The lower death rate among Hispanics may be explained by the Black population’s greater age, although Hispanic Americans have a higher infection rate (73 per 10,000) than Blacks (62 per 10,000) or Whites (23 per 10,000).

Another possible explanation for the differences in infection rates: Blacks and Hispanics are less able to work at home because they “are overrepresented in low-wage jobs that offer the least flexibility and increase their risk of exposure to the coronavirus,” the league said.

Hispanics and Blacks also are more likely to be uninsured than Whites – 19.5% and 11.5%, respectively, vs. 7.5% – so “they tend to delay seeking treatment and are sicker than white patients when they finally do,” the league said. That may account for their much higher COVID-19 hospitalization rates: 213 per 100,000 for Blacks, 205 for Hispanics, and 46 for Whites.

“The silver lining during these dark times is that this pandemic has revealed our shared vulnerability and our interconnectedness. Many people are beginning to see that when others don’t have the opportunity to be healthy, it puts all of us at risk,” Lisa Cooper, MD, James F. Fries Professor of Medicine and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in Health Equity at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, wrote in an essay accompanying the report.

[email protected]

The coronavirus has infected millions of Americans and killed over 174,000. But could it be worse? Maybe.

“Racism is the pandemic within the pandemic,” Marc H. Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, said in the 2020 “State of Black America, Unmasked” report.

“Black people with COVID-19 symptoms in February and March were less likely to get tested or treated than white patients,” he wrote.

After less testing and less treatment, the next step seems inevitable. The death rate from COVID-19 is 70 per 100,000 population among Black Americans, compared with 30 per 100,000 for Whites and 34 per 100,000 for Hispanics, the league said based on data from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity.

Black and Hispanic patients with COVID-19 are more likely to have preexisting health conditions, but they “tend to receive less aggressive treatment than white patients,” the report noted. The lower death rate among Hispanics may be explained by the Black population’s greater age, although Hispanic Americans have a higher infection rate (73 per 10,000) than Blacks (62 per 10,000) or Whites (23 per 10,000).

Another possible explanation for the differences in infection rates: Blacks and Hispanics are less able to work at home because they “are overrepresented in low-wage jobs that offer the least flexibility and increase their risk of exposure to the coronavirus,” the league said.

Hispanics and Blacks also are more likely to be uninsured than Whites – 19.5% and 11.5%, respectively, vs. 7.5% – so “they tend to delay seeking treatment and are sicker than white patients when they finally do,” the league said. That may account for their much higher COVID-19 hospitalization rates: 213 per 100,000 for Blacks, 205 for Hispanics, and 46 for Whites.

“The silver lining during these dark times is that this pandemic has revealed our shared vulnerability and our interconnectedness. Many people are beginning to see that when others don’t have the opportunity to be healthy, it puts all of us at risk,” Lisa Cooper, MD, James F. Fries Professor of Medicine and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in Health Equity at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, wrote in an essay accompanying the report.

[email protected]

The coronavirus has infected millions of Americans and killed over 174,000. But could it be worse? Maybe.

“Racism is the pandemic within the pandemic,” Marc H. Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, said in the 2020 “State of Black America, Unmasked” report.

“Black people with COVID-19 symptoms in February and March were less likely to get tested or treated than white patients,” he wrote.

After less testing and less treatment, the next step seems inevitable. The death rate from COVID-19 is 70 per 100,000 population among Black Americans, compared with 30 per 100,000 for Whites and 34 per 100,000 for Hispanics, the league said based on data from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity.

Black and Hispanic patients with COVID-19 are more likely to have preexisting health conditions, but they “tend to receive less aggressive treatment than white patients,” the report noted. The lower death rate among Hispanics may be explained by the Black population’s greater age, although Hispanic Americans have a higher infection rate (73 per 10,000) than Blacks (62 per 10,000) or Whites (23 per 10,000).

Another possible explanation for the differences in infection rates: Blacks and Hispanics are less able to work at home because they “are overrepresented in low-wage jobs that offer the least flexibility and increase their risk of exposure to the coronavirus,” the league said.

Hispanics and Blacks also are more likely to be uninsured than Whites – 19.5% and 11.5%, respectively, vs. 7.5% – so “they tend to delay seeking treatment and are sicker than white patients when they finally do,” the league said. That may account for their much higher COVID-19 hospitalization rates: 213 per 100,000 for Blacks, 205 for Hispanics, and 46 for Whites.

“The silver lining during these dark times is that this pandemic has revealed our shared vulnerability and our interconnectedness. Many people are beginning to see that when others don’t have the opportunity to be healthy, it puts all of us at risk,” Lisa Cooper, MD, James F. Fries Professor of Medicine and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in Health Equity at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, wrote in an essay accompanying the report.

[email protected]

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he accomplished something that many telegraph devotees never thought possible: the synchronous, bidirectional transmission of voice over electrical lines.

verbaska_studio/Getty Images

This was an incredible milestone in the advancement of mankind and enabled true revolutions in commerce, scientific collaboration, and human interaction. But Mr. Bell knew his invention didn’t represent the final advancement in telecommunication; he was quite prescient in imagining a day when individuals could see each other while speaking on the phone.

Many years later, what was once only a dream is now commonplace, and children growing up today can’t imagine a world where apps such as FaceTime and Skype don’t exist. Until recently, however, the medical community has been slow to adopt the idea of video interactions. This has dramatically changed because of the pandemic and the need for social distancing. It appears that telemedicine has found its footing, but whether it will remain popular once patients feel safe going to see their doctors in person again remains to be seen. This month, we’ll examine a few key issues that will determine the future of virtual medical visits.
 

Collect calling

The pandemic has wrought both human and economic casualties. With fear, job loss, and regulations leading to decreased spending, many large and small businesses have been and will continue to be unable to survive. Companies, including Brooks Brothers, Hertz, Lord and Taylor, GNC, and J.C. Penney, have declared bankruptcy.¹ Medical practices and hospitals have taken cuts to their bottom line, and we’ve heard of many physician groups that have had to enact substantial salary cuts or even lay off providers – something previously unheard of. Recent months have demonstrated the health care community’s commitment to put patients first, but we simply cannot survive if we aren’t adequately reimbursed. Traditionally, this has been a significant roadblock toward the widespread adoption of telemedicine.

Until the pandemic, virtual visits were paid for by a very small number of insurance carriers, often at a decreased rate and in limited circumstances. In most cases, these visits were not reimbursed at all. Thankfully, shortly after the coronavirus hit our shores, Medicare and Medicaid changed their policies, offering equal payment for video and in-person patient encounters. Most private insurers have followed suit, but the commitment to this payment parity appears – thus far – to be temporary. It is unclear that the financial support of telemedicine will continue post COVID-19, and this has many physicians feeling uncomfortable. In the meantime, many patients have come to prefer virtual visits, appreciating the convenience and efficiency.

Physicians don’t always have the same experience. Telemedicine can be technically challenging and take just as much – or sometimes more – time to navigate and document. Unless they are reimbursed equitably, providers will be forced to limit their use of virtual visits or not offer them at all. This leads to another issue: reliability.
 

‘Can you hear me now?’

Over the past several months, we have had the opportunity to use telemedicine firsthand and have spoken to many other physicians and patients about their experiences with it. The reports are all quite consistent: Most have had generally positive things to say. Still, some common concerns emerge when diving a bit deeper. Most notably are complaints about usability and reliability of the software.

While there are large telemedicine companies that have developed world-class cross-platform products, many in use today are proprietary and EHR dependent. As a result, the quality varies widely. Many EHR vendors were caught completely off guard by the sudden demand for telemedicine and are playing catch-up as they develop their own virtual visit platforms. While these vendor-developed platforms promise tight integration with patient records, some have significant shortcomings in stability when taxed under high utilization, including choppy video and garbled voice. This simply won’t do if telemedicine is to survive. It is incumbent on software developers and health care providers to invest in high-quality, reliable platforms on which to build their virtual visit offerings. This will ensure a more rapid adoption and the “staying power” of the new technology.
 

Dialing ‘0’ for the operator

Once seen as a “novelty” offered by only a small number of medical providers, virtual visits now represent a significant and ever-increasing percentage of patient encounters. The technology therefore must be easy to use. Given confidentiality and documentation requirements, along with the broad variety of available computing platforms and devices (e.g., PC, Mac, iOS, and Android), the process is often far from problem free. Patients may need help downloading apps, setting up webcams, or registering for the service. Providers may face issues with Internet connectivity or EHR-related delays.

It is critical that help be available to make the connection seamless and the experience a positive one. We are fortunate to work for a health care institution that has made this a priority, dedicating a team of individuals to provide real-time support to patients and clinicians. Small independent practices may not have this luxury, but we would encourage all providers to engage with their telemedicine or EHR vendors to determine what resources are available when problems arise, as they undoubtedly will.
 

Answering the call

Like the invention of the telephone, the advent of telemedicine is another milestone on the journey toward better communication with our patients, and it appears to be here to stay. Virtual visits won’t completely replace in-person care, nor minimize the benefit of human interaction, but they will continue to play an important role in the care continuum. By addressing the above concerns, we’ll lay a solid foundation for success and create a positive experience for physicians and patients alike.

Dr. Notte is a family physician and chief medical officer of Abington (Pa.) Hospital–Jefferson Health. Follow him on Twitter (@doctornotte). Dr. Skolnik is professor of family and community medicine at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, Philadelphia, and associate director of the family medicine residency program at Abington (Pa.) Hospital–Jefferson Health. They have no conflicts related to the content of this piece.

Reference

1. A running list of companies that have filed for bankruptcy during the coronavirus pandemic. Fortune.

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he accomplished something that many telegraph devotees never thought possible: the synchronous, bidirectional transmission of voice over electrical lines.

verbaska_studio/Getty Images

This was an incredible milestone in the advancement of mankind and enabled true revolutions in commerce, scientific collaboration, and human interaction. But Mr. Bell knew his invention didn’t represent the final advancement in telecommunication; he was quite prescient in imagining a day when individuals could see each other while speaking on the phone.

Many years later, what was once only a dream is now commonplace, and children growing up today can’t imagine a world where apps such as FaceTime and Skype don’t exist. Until recently, however, the medical community has been slow to adopt the idea of video interactions. This has dramatically changed because of the pandemic and the need for social distancing. It appears that telemedicine has found its footing, but whether it will remain popular once patients feel safe going to see their doctors in person again remains to be seen. This month, we’ll examine a few key issues that will determine the future of virtual medical visits.
 

Collect calling

The pandemic has wrought both human and economic casualties. With fear, job loss, and regulations leading to decreased spending, many large and small businesses have been and will continue to be unable to survive. Companies, including Brooks Brothers, Hertz, Lord and Taylor, GNC, and J.C. Penney, have declared bankruptcy.¹ Medical practices and hospitals have taken cuts to their bottom line, and we’ve heard of many physician groups that have had to enact substantial salary cuts or even lay off providers – something previously unheard of. Recent months have demonstrated the health care community’s commitment to put patients first, but we simply cannot survive if we aren’t adequately reimbursed. Traditionally, this has been a significant roadblock toward the widespread adoption of telemedicine.

Until the pandemic, virtual visits were paid for by a very small number of insurance carriers, often at a decreased rate and in limited circumstances. In most cases, these visits were not reimbursed at all. Thankfully, shortly after the coronavirus hit our shores, Medicare and Medicaid changed their policies, offering equal payment for video and in-person patient encounters. Most private insurers have followed suit, but the commitment to this payment parity appears – thus far – to be temporary. It is unclear that the financial support of telemedicine will continue post COVID-19, and this has many physicians feeling uncomfortable. In the meantime, many patients have come to prefer virtual visits, appreciating the convenience and efficiency.

Physicians don’t always have the same experience. Telemedicine can be technically challenging and take just as much – or sometimes more – time to navigate and document. Unless they are reimbursed equitably, providers will be forced to limit their use of virtual visits or not offer them at all. This leads to another issue: reliability.
 

‘Can you hear me now?’

Over the past several months, we have had the opportunity to use telemedicine firsthand and have spoken to many other physicians and patients about their experiences with it. The reports are all quite consistent: Most have had generally positive things to say. Still, some common concerns emerge when diving a bit deeper. Most notably are complaints about usability and reliability of the software.

While there are large telemedicine companies that have developed world-class cross-platform products, many in use today are proprietary and EHR dependent. As a result, the quality varies widely. Many EHR vendors were caught completely off guard by the sudden demand for telemedicine and are playing catch-up as they develop their own virtual visit platforms. While these vendor-developed platforms promise tight integration with patient records, some have significant shortcomings in stability when taxed under high utilization, including choppy video and garbled voice. This simply won’t do if telemedicine is to survive. It is incumbent on software developers and health care providers to invest in high-quality, reliable platforms on which to build their virtual visit offerings. This will ensure a more rapid adoption and the “staying power” of the new technology.
 

Dialing ‘0’ for the operator

Once seen as a “novelty” offered by only a small number of medical providers, virtual visits now represent a significant and ever-increasing percentage of patient encounters. The technology therefore must be easy to use. Given confidentiality and documentation requirements, along with the broad variety of available computing platforms and devices (e.g., PC, Mac, iOS, and Android), the process is often far from problem free. Patients may need help downloading apps, setting up webcams, or registering for the service. Providers may face issues with Internet connectivity or EHR-related delays.

It is critical that help be available to make the connection seamless and the experience a positive one. We are fortunate to work for a health care institution that has made this a priority, dedicating a team of individuals to provide real-time support to patients and clinicians. Small independent practices may not have this luxury, but we would encourage all providers to engage with their telemedicine or EHR vendors to determine what resources are available when problems arise, as they undoubtedly will.
 

Answering the call

Like the invention of the telephone, the advent of telemedicine is another milestone on the journey toward better communication with our patients, and it appears to be here to stay. Virtual visits won’t completely replace in-person care, nor minimize the benefit of human interaction, but they will continue to play an important role in the care continuum. By addressing the above concerns, we’ll lay a solid foundation for success and create a positive experience for physicians and patients alike.

Dr. Notte is a family physician and chief medical officer of Abington (Pa.) Hospital–Jefferson Health. Follow him on Twitter (@doctornotte). Dr. Skolnik is professor of family and community medicine at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, Philadelphia, and associate director of the family medicine residency program at Abington (Pa.) Hospital–Jefferson Health. They have no conflicts related to the content of this piece.

Reference

1. A running list of companies that have filed for bankruptcy during the coronavirus pandemic. Fortune.

When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he accomplished something that many telegraph devotees never thought possible: the synchronous, bidirectional transmission of voice over electrical lines.

verbaska_studio/Getty Images

This was an incredible milestone in the advancement of mankind and enabled true revolutions in commerce, scientific collaboration, and human interaction. But Mr. Bell knew his invention didn’t represent the final advancement in telecommunication; he was quite prescient in imagining a day when individuals could see each other while speaking on the phone.

Many years later, what was once only a dream is now commonplace, and children growing up today can’t imagine a world where apps such as FaceTime and Skype don’t exist. Until recently, however, the medical community has been slow to adopt the idea of video interactions. This has dramatically changed because of the pandemic and the need for social distancing. It appears that telemedicine has found its footing, but whether it will remain popular once patients feel safe going to see their doctors in person again remains to be seen. This month, we’ll examine a few key issues that will determine the future of virtual medical visits.
 

Collect calling

The pandemic has wrought both human and economic casualties. With fear, job loss, and regulations leading to decreased spending, many large and small businesses have been and will continue to be unable to survive. Companies, including Brooks Brothers, Hertz, Lord and Taylor, GNC, and J.C. Penney, have declared bankruptcy.¹ Medical practices and hospitals have taken cuts to their bottom line, and we’ve heard of many physician groups that have had to enact substantial salary cuts or even lay off providers – something previously unheard of. Recent months have demonstrated the health care community’s commitment to put patients first, but we simply cannot survive if we aren’t adequately reimbursed. Traditionally, this has been a significant roadblock toward the widespread adoption of telemedicine.

Until the pandemic, virtual visits were paid for by a very small number of insurance carriers, often at a decreased rate and in limited circumstances. In most cases, these visits were not reimbursed at all. Thankfully, shortly after the coronavirus hit our shores, Medicare and Medicaid changed their policies, offering equal payment for video and in-person patient encounters. Most private insurers have followed suit, but the commitment to this payment parity appears – thus far – to be temporary. It is unclear that the financial support of telemedicine will continue post COVID-19, and this has many physicians feeling uncomfortable. In the meantime, many patients have come to prefer virtual visits, appreciating the convenience and efficiency.

Physicians don’t always have the same experience. Telemedicine can be technically challenging and take just as much – or sometimes more – time to navigate and document. Unless they are reimbursed equitably, providers will be forced to limit their use of virtual visits or not offer them at all. This leads to another issue: reliability.
 

‘Can you hear me now?’

Over the past several months, we have had the opportunity to use telemedicine firsthand and have spoken to many other physicians and patients about their experiences with it. The reports are all quite consistent: Most have had generally positive things to say. Still, some common concerns emerge when diving a bit deeper. Most notably are complaints about usability and reliability of the software.

While there are large telemedicine companies that have developed world-class cross-platform products, many in use today are proprietary and EHR dependent. As a result, the quality varies widely. Many EHR vendors were caught completely off guard by the sudden demand for telemedicine and are playing catch-up as they develop their own virtual visit platforms. While these vendor-developed platforms promise tight integration with patient records, some have significant shortcomings in stability when taxed under high utilization, including choppy video and garbled voice. This simply won’t do if telemedicine is to survive. It is incumbent on software developers and health care providers to invest in high-quality, reliable platforms on which to build their virtual visit offerings. This will ensure a more rapid adoption and the “staying power” of the new technology.
 

Dialing ‘0’ for the operator

Once seen as a “novelty” offered by only a small number of medical providers, virtual visits now represent a significant and ever-increasing percentage of patient encounters. The technology therefore must be easy to use. Given confidentiality and documentation requirements, along with the broad variety of available computing platforms and devices (e.g., PC, Mac, iOS, and Android), the process is often far from problem free. Patients may need help downloading apps, setting up webcams, or registering for the service. Providers may face issues with Internet connectivity or EHR-related delays.

It is critical that help be available to make the connection seamless and the experience a positive one. We are fortunate to work for a health care institution that has made this a priority, dedicating a team of individuals to provide real-time support to patients and clinicians. Small independent practices may not have this luxury, but we would encourage all providers to engage with their telemedicine or EHR vendors to determine what resources are available when problems arise, as they undoubtedly will.
 

Answering the call

Like the invention of the telephone, the advent of telemedicine is another milestone on the journey toward better communication with our patients, and it appears to be here to stay. Virtual visits won’t completely replace in-person care, nor minimize the benefit of human interaction, but they will continue to play an important role in the care continuum. By addressing the above concerns, we’ll lay a solid foundation for success and create a positive experience for physicians and patients alike.

Dr. Notte is a family physician and chief medical officer of Abington (Pa.) Hospital–Jefferson Health. Follow him on Twitter (@doctornotte). Dr. Skolnik is professor of family and community medicine at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, Philadelphia, and associate director of the family medicine residency program at Abington (Pa.) Hospital–Jefferson Health. They have no conflicts related to the content of this piece.

Reference

1. A running list of companies that have filed for bankruptcy during the coronavirus pandemic. Fortune.

Yousuf El-Jayyousi, a junior engineering student at the University of Missouri, wanted guidance and reassurance that it would be safe to go back to school for the fall semester. He tuned into a pair of online town halls organized by the university hoping to find that.

He did not.

Christine Herman/Illinois Public Media

Hundreds Undecided

According to the College Crisis Initiative, or C2i, a project of Davidson College that monitors how higher ed is responding to the pandemic, there is nothing resembling a common approach. Of 2,958 institutions it follows, 151 were planning to open fully online, 729 were mostly online and 433 were taking a hybrid approach. Just 75 schools were insisting on students attending fully in person, and 614 were aiming to be primarily in-person. Some 800 others were still deciding, just weeks before instruction was to start.

The decisions often have little correlation with the public health advisories in the region. Mizzou, which is in an area with recent COVID spikes, is holding some in-person instruction and has nearly 7,000 students signed up to live in dorms and other university-owned housing. Harvard, in a region with extremely low rates of viral spread, has opted to go all online and allowed students to defer a year.

The specific circumstances colleges and universities face are as much determined by local fiscal and political dictates as by medicine and epidemiology. It is often unclear who is making the call. So it’s every student for herself to chart these unknown waters, even as students (or their families) have written tuition checks for tens of thousands of dollars and signed leases for campus and off-campus housing.

And the risks – health, educational and financial – boomerang back on individual students: Two weeks after University of North Carolina students, as instructed, returned to the flagship campus in Chapel Hill with the promise of at least some in-person learning, all classes went online. Early outbreaks surged from a few students to more than 130 in a matter of days. Most undergrads have about a week to clear out of their dorms.

“It’s really tough,” said neuroscience major Luke Lawless, 20. “Chapel Hill is an amazing place, and as a senior it’s tough to know that my time’s running out – and the virus only adds to that.”
 

Location, location, location

C2i’s creator, Davidson education Assistant Professor Chris Marsicano, said the extreme diversity of approaches comes from the sheer diversity of schools, the penchant of many to follow the leads of more prestigious peers, and local politics.

“Some states have very strong and stringent mask requirements. Some have stronger stay-at-home orders. Others are sort of leaving it up to localities. So the confluence of politics, institutional isomorphism – that imitation – and different needs that the institutions have are driving the differences,” Marsicano said.

Location matters a lot, too, Marsicano said, pointing to schools like George Washington University and Boston University in urban settings where the environment is beyond the control of the school, versus a place like the University of the South in remote, rural Sewanee, Tennessee, where 90% of students will return to campus.

“It’s a lot easier to control an outbreak if you are a fairly isolated college campus than if you are in the middle of a city,” Marsicano said.

Student behavior is another wild card, Marsicano said, since even the best plans will fail if college kids “do something stupid, like have a massive frat party without masks.”

“You’ve got student affairs professionals across the country who are screaming at the top of their lungs, ‘We can’t control student behavior when they go off campus’” Marsicano said.

Another factor is a vacuum at the federal level. Although the Department of Education says Secretary Betsy DeVos has held dozens of calls with governors and state education superintendents, there’s no sign of an attempt to offer unified guidance to colleges beyond a webpage that links to relaxed regulatory requirements and anodyne fact sheets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on preventing viral spread.

Even the money that the department notes it has dispensed – $30 billion from Congress’ CARES Act – is weighted toward K-12 schools, with about $13 billion for higher education, including student aid.

The U.S. Senate adjourned last week until Sept. 8, having never taken up a House-passed relief package that included some $30 billion for higher education. A trio of Democratic senators, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, is calling for national reporting standards on college campuses.
 

No benchmarks

Campus communities with very different levels of contagion are making opposite calls about in-person learning. Mizzou’s Boone County has seen more than 1,400 confirmed COVID cases after a spike in mid-July. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute’s COVID risk map, Boone has accelerated spread, with 14 infections per day per 100,000 people. The institute advises stay-at-home orders or rigorous testing and tracing at such rates of infection. Two neighboring counties were in the red zone recently, with more than 25 cases per day per 100,000 people. Mizzou has left it up to deans whether classes will meet in person, making a strong argument for face-to-face instruction.

Meanwhile, Columbia University in New York City opted for all online instruction, even though the rate of infection there is a comparatively low 3.8 cases per day per 100,000 people.

Administrators at Mizzou considered and rejected mandatory testing. “All that does is provide one a snapshot of the situation,” University of Missouri system President Mun Choi said in one of the town halls.

Mizzou has an in-house team that will carry out case investigation and contact tracing with the local health department. This week, following questions from the press and pressure from the public, the university announced students will be required to report any positive COVID test to the school.
 

Who do you test? When?

CDC guidance for higher education suggests there’s not enough data to know whether testing everyone is effective, but some influential researchers, such as those at Harvard and Yale, disagree.

“This virus is subject to silent spreading and asymptomatic spreading, and it’s very hard to play catch-up,” said Yale professor David Paltiel, who studies public health policy. “And so thinking that you can keep your campus safe by simply waiting until students develop symptoms before acting, I think, is a very dangerous game.”

Simulation models conducted by Paltiel and his colleagues show that, of all the factors university administrators can control – including the sensitivity and specificity of COVID-19 tests – the frequency of testing is most important.

He’s “painfully aware” that testing everyone on campus every few days sets a very high bar – logistically, financially, behaviorally – that may be beyond what most schools can reach. But he says the consequences of reopening campuses without those measures are severe, not just for students, but for vulnerable populations among school workers and in the surrounding community.

“You really have to ask yourself whether you have any business reopening if you’re not going to commit to an aggressive program of high-frequency testing,” he said.
 

The fighting – and testing – Illini

Some institutions that desperately want students to return to campus are backing the goal with a maximal approach to safety and testing.

About a 4-hour drive east along the interstates from Mizzou is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose sports teams are known as the Fighting Illini.

Weeks ago, large white tents with signs reading “Walk-Up COVID-19 Testing” have popped up across campus; there students take a simple saliva test.

“This seems to be a lot easier than sticking a cotton swab up your nose,” graduate student Kristen Muñoz said after collecting a bit of her saliva in a plastic tube and sealing it in a bag labeled “Biohazard.”

In just a few hours, she got back her result: negative.

The school plans to offer free tests to the 50,000 students expected to return this month, as well as some 11,000 faculty and staff members.

“The exciting thing is, because we can test up to 10,000 per day, it allows the scientist to do what’s really the best for trying to protect the community as opposed to having to cut corners, because of the limitations of the testing,” said University of Illinois chemist Martin Burke, who helped develop the campus’s saliva test, which received emergency use authorization from the federal Food and Drug Administration this week.

The test is similar to one designed by Yale and funded by the NBA that cleared the FDA hurdle just before the Illinois test. Both Yale and Illinois hope aggressive testing will allow most undergraduate students to live on campus, even though most classes will be online.

University of Illinois epidemiologist Becky Smith said they are following data that suggest campuses need to test everyone every few days because the virus is not detectable in infected people for 3 or 4 days.

“But about two days after that, your infectiousness peaks,” she said. “So, we have a very small window of time in which to catch people before they have done most of the infection that they’re going to be doing.”

Campus officials accepted Smith’s recommendation that all faculty, staffers and students participating in any on-campus activities be required to get tested twice a week.

Illinois can do that because its test is convenient and not invasive, which spares the campus from using as much personal protective equipment as the more invasive tests require, Burke said. And on-site analysis avoids backlogs at public health and commercial labs.
 

Muddled in the middle

Most other colleges fall somewhere between the approaches of Mizzou and the University of Illinois, and many of their students still are uncertain how their fall semester will go.

At the University of Southern California, a private campus of about 48,500 students in Los Angeles, officials had hoped to have about 20% of classes in person – but the county government scaled that back, insisting on tougher rules for reopening than the statewide standards.

If students eventually are allowed back, they will have to show a recent coronavirus test result that they obtained on their own, said Dr. Sarah Van Orman, chief health officer of USC Student Health.

They will be asked to do daily health assessments, such as fever checks, and those who have been exposed to the virus or show symptoms will receive a rapid test, with about a 24-hour turnaround through the university medical center’s lab. “We believe it is really important to have very rapid access to those results,” Van Orman said.

At California State University – the nation’s largest 4-year system, with 23 campuses and nearly a half-million students – officials decided back in May to move nearly all its fall courses online.

“The first priority was really the health and safety of all of the campus community,” said Mike Uhlenkamp, spokesperson for the CSU Chancellor’s Office. About 10% of CSU students are expected to attend some in-person classes, such as nursing lab courses, fine art and dance classes, and some graduate classes.

Uhlenkamp said testing protocols are being left up to each campus, though all are required to follow local safety guidelines. And without a medical campus in the system, CSU campuses do not have the same capacity to take charge of their own testing, as the University of Illinois is doing.

For students who know they won’t be on campus this fall, there is regret at lost social experiences, networking and hands-on learning so important to college.

But the certainty also brings relief.

“I don’t think I would want to be indoors with a group of, you know, even just a handful of people, even if we have masks on,” said Haley Gray, a 28-year-old graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley starting the second year of her journalism program.

She knows she won’t have access to Berkeley’s advanced media labs or the collaborative sessions students experience there. And she said she realized the other day she probably won’t just sit around the student lounge and strike up unexpected friendships.

“That’s a pretty big bummer but, you know, I think overall we’re all just doing our best, and given the circumstances, I feel pretty OK about it,” she said.

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation), which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. This story is part of a partnership that includes KBIA, Illinois Public Media, Side Effects Public Media, NPR and Kaiser Health News. 

Yousuf El-Jayyousi, a junior engineering student at the University of Missouri, wanted guidance and reassurance that it would be safe to go back to school for the fall semester. He tuned into a pair of online town halls organized by the university hoping to find that.

He did not.

Christine Herman/Illinois Public Media

Hundreds Undecided

According to the College Crisis Initiative, or C2i, a project of Davidson College that monitors how higher ed is responding to the pandemic, there is nothing resembling a common approach. Of 2,958 institutions it follows, 151 were planning to open fully online, 729 were mostly online and 433 were taking a hybrid approach. Just 75 schools were insisting on students attending fully in person, and 614 were aiming to be primarily in-person. Some 800 others were still deciding, just weeks before instruction was to start.

The decisions often have little correlation with the public health advisories in the region. Mizzou, which is in an area with recent COVID spikes, is holding some in-person instruction and has nearly 7,000 students signed up to live in dorms and other university-owned housing. Harvard, in a region with extremely low rates of viral spread, has opted to go all online and allowed students to defer a year.

The specific circumstances colleges and universities face are as much determined by local fiscal and political dictates as by medicine and epidemiology. It is often unclear who is making the call. So it’s every student for herself to chart these unknown waters, even as students (or their families) have written tuition checks for tens of thousands of dollars and signed leases for campus and off-campus housing.

And the risks – health, educational and financial – boomerang back on individual students: Two weeks after University of North Carolina students, as instructed, returned to the flagship campus in Chapel Hill with the promise of at least some in-person learning, all classes went online. Early outbreaks surged from a few students to more than 130 in a matter of days. Most undergrads have about a week to clear out of their dorms.

“It’s really tough,” said neuroscience major Luke Lawless, 20. “Chapel Hill is an amazing place, and as a senior it’s tough to know that my time’s running out – and the virus only adds to that.”
 

Location, location, location

C2i’s creator, Davidson education Assistant Professor Chris Marsicano, said the extreme diversity of approaches comes from the sheer diversity of schools, the penchant of many to follow the leads of more prestigious peers, and local politics.

“Some states have very strong and stringent mask requirements. Some have stronger stay-at-home orders. Others are sort of leaving it up to localities. So the confluence of politics, institutional isomorphism – that imitation – and different needs that the institutions have are driving the differences,” Marsicano said.

Location matters a lot, too, Marsicano said, pointing to schools like George Washington University and Boston University in urban settings where the environment is beyond the control of the school, versus a place like the University of the South in remote, rural Sewanee, Tennessee, where 90% of students will return to campus.

“It’s a lot easier to control an outbreak if you are a fairly isolated college campus than if you are in the middle of a city,” Marsicano said.

Student behavior is another wild card, Marsicano said, since even the best plans will fail if college kids “do something stupid, like have a massive frat party without masks.”

“You’ve got student affairs professionals across the country who are screaming at the top of their lungs, ‘We can’t control student behavior when they go off campus’” Marsicano said.

Another factor is a vacuum at the federal level. Although the Department of Education says Secretary Betsy DeVos has held dozens of calls with governors and state education superintendents, there’s no sign of an attempt to offer unified guidance to colleges beyond a webpage that links to relaxed regulatory requirements and anodyne fact sheets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on preventing viral spread.

Even the money that the department notes it has dispensed – $30 billion from Congress’ CARES Act – is weighted toward K-12 schools, with about $13 billion for higher education, including student aid.

The U.S. Senate adjourned last week until Sept. 8, having never taken up a House-passed relief package that included some $30 billion for higher education. A trio of Democratic senators, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, is calling for national reporting standards on college campuses.
 

No benchmarks

Campus communities with very different levels of contagion are making opposite calls about in-person learning. Mizzou’s Boone County has seen more than 1,400 confirmed COVID cases after a spike in mid-July. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute’s COVID risk map, Boone has accelerated spread, with 14 infections per day per 100,000 people. The institute advises stay-at-home orders or rigorous testing and tracing at such rates of infection. Two neighboring counties were in the red zone recently, with more than 25 cases per day per 100,000 people. Mizzou has left it up to deans whether classes will meet in person, making a strong argument for face-to-face instruction.

Meanwhile, Columbia University in New York City opted for all online instruction, even though the rate of infection there is a comparatively low 3.8 cases per day per 100,000 people.

Administrators at Mizzou considered and rejected mandatory testing. “All that does is provide one a snapshot of the situation,” University of Missouri system President Mun Choi said in one of the town halls.

Mizzou has an in-house team that will carry out case investigation and contact tracing with the local health department. This week, following questions from the press and pressure from the public, the university announced students will be required to report any positive COVID test to the school.
 

Who do you test? When?

CDC guidance for higher education suggests there’s not enough data to know whether testing everyone is effective, but some influential researchers, such as those at Harvard and Yale, disagree.

“This virus is subject to silent spreading and asymptomatic spreading, and it’s very hard to play catch-up,” said Yale professor David Paltiel, who studies public health policy. “And so thinking that you can keep your campus safe by simply waiting until students develop symptoms before acting, I think, is a very dangerous game.”

Simulation models conducted by Paltiel and his colleagues show that, of all the factors university administrators can control – including the sensitivity and specificity of COVID-19 tests – the frequency of testing is most important.

He’s “painfully aware” that testing everyone on campus every few days sets a very high bar – logistically, financially, behaviorally – that may be beyond what most schools can reach. But he says the consequences of reopening campuses without those measures are severe, not just for students, but for vulnerable populations among school workers and in the surrounding community.

“You really have to ask yourself whether you have any business reopening if you’re not going to commit to an aggressive program of high-frequency testing,” he said.
 

The fighting – and testing – Illini

Some institutions that desperately want students to return to campus are backing the goal with a maximal approach to safety and testing.

About a 4-hour drive east along the interstates from Mizzou is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose sports teams are known as the Fighting Illini.

Weeks ago, large white tents with signs reading “Walk-Up COVID-19 Testing” have popped up across campus; there students take a simple saliva test.

“This seems to be a lot easier than sticking a cotton swab up your nose,” graduate student Kristen Muñoz said after collecting a bit of her saliva in a plastic tube and sealing it in a bag labeled “Biohazard.”

In just a few hours, she got back her result: negative.

The school plans to offer free tests to the 50,000 students expected to return this month, as well as some 11,000 faculty and staff members.

“The exciting thing is, because we can test up to 10,000 per day, it allows the scientist to do what’s really the best for trying to protect the community as opposed to having to cut corners, because of the limitations of the testing,” said University of Illinois chemist Martin Burke, who helped develop the campus’s saliva test, which received emergency use authorization from the federal Food and Drug Administration this week.

The test is similar to one designed by Yale and funded by the NBA that cleared the FDA hurdle just before the Illinois test. Both Yale and Illinois hope aggressive testing will allow most undergraduate students to live on campus, even though most classes will be online.

University of Illinois epidemiologist Becky Smith said they are following data that suggest campuses need to test everyone every few days because the virus is not detectable in infected people for 3 or 4 days.

“But about two days after that, your infectiousness peaks,” she said. “So, we have a very small window of time in which to catch people before they have done most of the infection that they’re going to be doing.”

Campus officials accepted Smith’s recommendation that all faculty, staffers and students participating in any on-campus activities be required to get tested twice a week.

Illinois can do that because its test is convenient and not invasive, which spares the campus from using as much personal protective equipment as the more invasive tests require, Burke said. And on-site analysis avoids backlogs at public health and commercial labs.
 

Muddled in the middle

Most other colleges fall somewhere between the approaches of Mizzou and the University of Illinois, and many of their students still are uncertain how their fall semester will go.

At the University of Southern California, a private campus of about 48,500 students in Los Angeles, officials had hoped to have about 20% of classes in person – but the county government scaled that back, insisting on tougher rules for reopening than the statewide standards.

If students eventually are allowed back, they will have to show a recent coronavirus test result that they obtained on their own, said Dr. Sarah Van Orman, chief health officer of USC Student Health.

They will be asked to do daily health assessments, such as fever checks, and those who have been exposed to the virus or show symptoms will receive a rapid test, with about a 24-hour turnaround through the university medical center’s lab. “We believe it is really important to have very rapid access to those results,” Van Orman said.

At California State University – the nation’s largest 4-year system, with 23 campuses and nearly a half-million students – officials decided back in May to move nearly all its fall courses online.

“The first priority was really the health and safety of all of the campus community,” said Mike Uhlenkamp, spokesperson for the CSU Chancellor’s Office. About 10% of CSU students are expected to attend some in-person classes, such as nursing lab courses, fine art and dance classes, and some graduate classes.

Uhlenkamp said testing protocols are being left up to each campus, though all are required to follow local safety guidelines. And without a medical campus in the system, CSU campuses do not have the same capacity to take charge of their own testing, as the University of Illinois is doing.

For students who know they won’t be on campus this fall, there is regret at lost social experiences, networking and hands-on learning so important to college.

But the certainty also brings relief.

“I don’t think I would want to be indoors with a group of, you know, even just a handful of people, even if we have masks on,” said Haley Gray, a 28-year-old graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley starting the second year of her journalism program.

She knows she won’t have access to Berkeley’s advanced media labs or the collaborative sessions students experience there. And she said she realized the other day she probably won’t just sit around the student lounge and strike up unexpected friendships.

“That’s a pretty big bummer but, you know, I think overall we’re all just doing our best, and given the circumstances, I feel pretty OK about it,” she said.

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation), which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. This story is part of a partnership that includes KBIA, Illinois Public Media, Side Effects Public Media, NPR and Kaiser Health News. 

Yousuf El-Jayyousi, a junior engineering student at the University of Missouri, wanted guidance and reassurance that it would be safe to go back to school for the fall semester. He tuned into a pair of online town halls organized by the university hoping to find that.

He did not.

Christine Herman/Illinois Public Media

Hundreds Undecided

According to the College Crisis Initiative, or C2i, a project of Davidson College that monitors how higher ed is responding to the pandemic, there is nothing resembling a common approach. Of 2,958 institutions it follows, 151 were planning to open fully online, 729 were mostly online and 433 were taking a hybrid approach. Just 75 schools were insisting on students attending fully in person, and 614 were aiming to be primarily in-person. Some 800 others were still deciding, just weeks before instruction was to start.

The decisions often have little correlation with the public health advisories in the region. Mizzou, which is in an area with recent COVID spikes, is holding some in-person instruction and has nearly 7,000 students signed up to live in dorms and other university-owned housing. Harvard, in a region with extremely low rates of viral spread, has opted to go all online and allowed students to defer a year.

The specific circumstances colleges and universities face are as much determined by local fiscal and political dictates as by medicine and epidemiology. It is often unclear who is making the call. So it’s every student for herself to chart these unknown waters, even as students (or their families) have written tuition checks for tens of thousands of dollars and signed leases for campus and off-campus housing.

And the risks – health, educational and financial – boomerang back on individual students: Two weeks after University of North Carolina students, as instructed, returned to the flagship campus in Chapel Hill with the promise of at least some in-person learning, all classes went online. Early outbreaks surged from a few students to more than 130 in a matter of days. Most undergrads have about a week to clear out of their dorms.

“It’s really tough,” said neuroscience major Luke Lawless, 20. “Chapel Hill is an amazing place, and as a senior it’s tough to know that my time’s running out – and the virus only adds to that.”
 

Location, location, location

C2i’s creator, Davidson education Assistant Professor Chris Marsicano, said the extreme diversity of approaches comes from the sheer diversity of schools, the penchant of many to follow the leads of more prestigious peers, and local politics.

“Some states have very strong and stringent mask requirements. Some have stronger stay-at-home orders. Others are sort of leaving it up to localities. So the confluence of politics, institutional isomorphism – that imitation – and different needs that the institutions have are driving the differences,” Marsicano said.

Location matters a lot, too, Marsicano said, pointing to schools like George Washington University and Boston University in urban settings where the environment is beyond the control of the school, versus a place like the University of the South in remote, rural Sewanee, Tennessee, where 90% of students will return to campus.

“It’s a lot easier to control an outbreak if you are a fairly isolated college campus than if you are in the middle of a city,” Marsicano said.

Student behavior is another wild card, Marsicano said, since even the best plans will fail if college kids “do something stupid, like have a massive frat party without masks.”

“You’ve got student affairs professionals across the country who are screaming at the top of their lungs, ‘We can’t control student behavior when they go off campus’” Marsicano said.

Another factor is a vacuum at the federal level. Although the Department of Education says Secretary Betsy DeVos has held dozens of calls with governors and state education superintendents, there’s no sign of an attempt to offer unified guidance to colleges beyond a webpage that links to relaxed regulatory requirements and anodyne fact sheets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on preventing viral spread.

Even the money that the department notes it has dispensed – $30 billion from Congress’ CARES Act – is weighted toward K-12 schools, with about $13 billion for higher education, including student aid.

The U.S. Senate adjourned last week until Sept. 8, having never taken up a House-passed relief package that included some $30 billion for higher education. A trio of Democratic senators, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, is calling for national reporting standards on college campuses.
 

No benchmarks

Campus communities with very different levels of contagion are making opposite calls about in-person learning. Mizzou’s Boone County has seen more than 1,400 confirmed COVID cases after a spike in mid-July. According to the Harvard Global Health Institute’s COVID risk map, Boone has accelerated spread, with 14 infections per day per 100,000 people. The institute advises stay-at-home orders or rigorous testing and tracing at such rates of infection. Two neighboring counties were in the red zone recently, with more than 25 cases per day per 100,000 people. Mizzou has left it up to deans whether classes will meet in person, making a strong argument for face-to-face instruction.

Meanwhile, Columbia University in New York City opted for all online instruction, even though the rate of infection there is a comparatively low 3.8 cases per day per 100,000 people.

Administrators at Mizzou considered and rejected mandatory testing. “All that does is provide one a snapshot of the situation,” University of Missouri system President Mun Choi said in one of the town halls.

Mizzou has an in-house team that will carry out case investigation and contact tracing with the local health department. This week, following questions from the press and pressure from the public, the university announced students will be required to report any positive COVID test to the school.
 

Who do you test? When?

CDC guidance for higher education suggests there’s not enough data to know whether testing everyone is effective, but some influential researchers, such as those at Harvard and Yale, disagree.

“This virus is subject to silent spreading and asymptomatic spreading, and it’s very hard to play catch-up,” said Yale professor David Paltiel, who studies public health policy. “And so thinking that you can keep your campus safe by simply waiting until students develop symptoms before acting, I think, is a very dangerous game.”

Simulation models conducted by Paltiel and his colleagues show that, of all the factors university administrators can control – including the sensitivity and specificity of COVID-19 tests – the frequency of testing is most important.

He’s “painfully aware” that testing everyone on campus every few days sets a very high bar – logistically, financially, behaviorally – that may be beyond what most schools can reach. But he says the consequences of reopening campuses without those measures are severe, not just for students, but for vulnerable populations among school workers and in the surrounding community.

“You really have to ask yourself whether you have any business reopening if you’re not going to commit to an aggressive program of high-frequency testing,” he said.
 

The fighting – and testing – Illini

Some institutions that desperately want students to return to campus are backing the goal with a maximal approach to safety and testing.

About a 4-hour drive east along the interstates from Mizzou is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, whose sports teams are known as the Fighting Illini.

Weeks ago, large white tents with signs reading “Walk-Up COVID-19 Testing” have popped up across campus; there students take a simple saliva test.

“This seems to be a lot easier than sticking a cotton swab up your nose,” graduate student Kristen Muñoz said after collecting a bit of her saliva in a plastic tube and sealing it in a bag labeled “Biohazard.”

In just a few hours, she got back her result: negative.

The school plans to offer free tests to the 50,000 students expected to return this month, as well as some 11,000 faculty and staff members.

“The exciting thing is, because we can test up to 10,000 per day, it allows the scientist to do what’s really the best for trying to protect the community as opposed to having to cut corners, because of the limitations of the testing,” said University of Illinois chemist Martin Burke, who helped develop the campus’s saliva test, which received emergency use authorization from the federal Food and Drug Administration this week.

The test is similar to one designed by Yale and funded by the NBA that cleared the FDA hurdle just before the Illinois test. Both Yale and Illinois hope aggressive testing will allow most undergraduate students to live on campus, even though most classes will be online.

University of Illinois epidemiologist Becky Smith said they are following data that suggest campuses need to test everyone every few days because the virus is not detectable in infected people for 3 or 4 days.

“But about two days after that, your infectiousness peaks,” she said. “So, we have a very small window of time in which to catch people before they have done most of the infection that they’re going to be doing.”

Campus officials accepted Smith’s recommendation that all faculty, staffers and students participating in any on-campus activities be required to get tested twice a week.

Illinois can do that because its test is convenient and not invasive, which spares the campus from using as much personal protective equipment as the more invasive tests require, Burke said. And on-site analysis avoids backlogs at public health and commercial labs.
 

Muddled in the middle

Most other colleges fall somewhere between the approaches of Mizzou and the University of Illinois, and many of their students still are uncertain how their fall semester will go.

At the University of Southern California, a private campus of about 48,500 students in Los Angeles, officials had hoped to have about 20% of classes in person – but the county government scaled that back, insisting on tougher rules for reopening than the statewide standards.

If students eventually are allowed back, they will have to show a recent coronavirus test result that they obtained on their own, said Dr. Sarah Van Orman, chief health officer of USC Student Health.

They will be asked to do daily health assessments, such as fever checks, and those who have been exposed to the virus or show symptoms will receive a rapid test, with about a 24-hour turnaround through the university medical center’s lab. “We believe it is really important to have very rapid access to those results,” Van Orman said.

At California State University – the nation’s largest 4-year system, with 23 campuses and nearly a half-million students – officials decided back in May to move nearly all its fall courses online.

“The first priority was really the health and safety of all of the campus community,” said Mike Uhlenkamp, spokesperson for the CSU Chancellor’s Office. About 10% of CSU students are expected to attend some in-person classes, such as nursing lab courses, fine art and dance classes, and some graduate classes.

Uhlenkamp said testing protocols are being left up to each campus, though all are required to follow local safety guidelines. And without a medical campus in the system, CSU campuses do not have the same capacity to take charge of their own testing, as the University of Illinois is doing.

For students who know they won’t be on campus this fall, there is regret at lost social experiences, networking and hands-on learning so important to college.

But the certainty also brings relief.

“I don’t think I would want to be indoors with a group of, you know, even just a handful of people, even if we have masks on,” said Haley Gray, a 28-year-old graduate student at the University of California-Berkeley starting the second year of her journalism program.

She knows she won’t have access to Berkeley’s advanced media labs or the collaborative sessions students experience there. And she said she realized the other day she probably won’t just sit around the student lounge and strike up unexpected friendships.

“That’s a pretty big bummer but, you know, I think overall we’re all just doing our best, and given the circumstances, I feel pretty OK about it,” she said.

Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation), which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. This story is part of a partnership that includes KBIA, Illinois Public Media, Side Effects Public Media, NPR and Kaiser Health News. 

Myasthenia gravis should be added to the growing list of potential neurological sequelae associated with COVID-19, new research suggests. Clinicians from Italy have described what they believe are the first three reported cases of acetylcholine receptor (AChR) antibody-positive myasthenia gravis after COVID-19 infection.

“I think it is possible that there could be many more cases,” said lead author Domenico Restivo, MD, of the Garibaldi Hospital, Catania, Italy. “In fact, myasthenia gravis could be underestimated especially in the course of COVID-19 infection in which a specific muscular weakness is frequently present. For this reason, this association is easy to miss if not top of mind,” Dr. Restivo said.

None of the three patients had previous neurologic or autoimmune disorders. In all three cases, symptoms of myasthenia gravis appeared within 5-7 days after onset of fever caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection. The time from presumed SARS-CoV-2 infection to myasthenia gravis symptoms “is consistent with the time from infection to symptoms in other neurologic disorders triggered by infections,” the investigators reported.

The findings were published online August 10 in Annals of Internal Medicine.
 

First patients

The first patient described in the report was a 64-year-old man who had a fever as high as 39° C (102.2° F) for 4 days. Five days after fever onset, he developed diplopia and muscle fatigue. The patient’s neurologic examination was “unremarkable.” Computed tomography (CT) of the thorax excluded thymoma, and findings on chest radiograph were normal. He tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 on nasopharyngeal swab and real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR).

The patient’s symptoms led the investigators to suspect myasthenia gravis. Repetitive stimulation of the patient’s facial nerve showed a 57% decrement, confirming involvement of the postsynaptic neuromuscular junction. The concentration of AChR antibodies in serum was also elevated (22.8 pmol/L; reference range, <0.4 pmol/L). The patient was treated with pyridostigmine bromide and prednisone and had a response “typical for someone with myasthenia gravis,” the researchers wrote.

The second patient was a 68-year-old man who had a fever as high as 38.8° C (101.8° F) for 7 days. On day 7, he developed muscle fatigue, diplopia, and dysphagia. Findings of a chest CT and neurologic exam were normal. Nasopharyngeal swab and RT-PCR testing for COVID-19 were positive. As with the first patient, myasthenia gravis was suspected because of the patient’s symptoms. Repetitive nerve stimulation revealed a postsynaptic deficit of neuromuscular transmission of the facial (52%) and ulnar (21%) nerves. His serum AChR antibody level was elevated (27.6 pmol/L). The patient improved after one cycle of intravenous immunoglobulin treatment.
 

Possible mechanisms

The third patient was a 71-year-old woman with cough and a fever up to 38.6° C (101.5° F) for 6 days. She initially tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 on nasopharyngeal swab and RT-PCR. Five days after her symptoms began, she developed bilateral ocular ptosis, diplopia, and hypophonia. CT of the thorax excluded thymoma but showed bilateral interstitial pneumonia. On day 6, she developed dysphagia and respiratory failure, and was transferred to the ICU where she received mechanical ventilation.

Repetitive nerve stimulation revealed a postsynaptic deficit of neuromuscular transmission of the ulnar nerve (56%), and her serum AChR antibody level was elevated (35.6 pmol/L). Five days later, a second nasopharyngeal swab test for SARS-CoV-2 was positive. The patient improved following plasmapheresis treatment and was successfully extubated.

The investigators noted that this patient received hydroxychloroquine the day after the onset of neurologic symptoms, but the drug was withdrawn a day later, so they do not believe that it caused the symptoms of myasthenia gravis.

The observations in these three patients are “consistent with reports of other infections that induce autoimmune disorders, as well as with the growing evidence of other neurologic disorders with presumed autoimmune mechanisms after COVID-19 onset,” the researchers wrote.

They offered several possible explanations for the link between COVID-19 and myasthenia gravis. “Antibodies that are directed against SARS-CoV-2 proteins may cross-react with AChR subunits, because the virus has epitopes that are similar to components of the neuromuscular junction; this is known to occur in other neurologic autoimmune disorders after infection. Alternatively, COVID-19 infection may break immunologic self-tolerance,” the investigators wrote.

“The main message for clinicians is that myasthenia gravis, as well as other neurological disorders associated with autoimmunity, could occur in the course of SARS-CoV-2 infection,” Dr. Restivo said. Prompt recognition of the disease “could lead to a drug treatment that limits its evolution as quickly as possible,” he added.
 

An “unmasking”

Commenting on the findings, Anthony Geraci, MD, director of neuromuscular medicine, Northwell Health, Great Neck, N.Y., said these case reports of myasthenia gravis after SARS-CoV-2 infection are “not unique or novel as there has been a long understanding that seropositive [AChR antibody-positive] myasthenia gravis can and is frequently ‘unmasked’ in the setting” of several viral and bacterial infections.

“Antibodies in myasthenia gravis are of a type that take several weeks to develop to measurable levels as in the reported cases by Restivo et al., giving strong support to the notion that subclinical myasthenia gravis can be immunologically upregulated in the setting of viral infection and this is a far more likely explanation of the observed association reported,” added Dr. Geraci, who was not involved with the research.

He noted that, at his institution, “we have also observed ocular myasthenia gravis emerge in patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection, with similar double vision and lid droop, as we have seen similarly in patients with Zika, West Nile, and other viral infections, as well as a multiplicity of bacterial infections.”

“Most of our observed patients have responded to treatment much the same as reported by the three cases from Restivo and colleagues,” Dr.Geraci reported.

The authors of the study disclosed no conflicts of interest.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

Myasthenia gravis should be added to the growing list of potential neurological sequelae associated with COVID-19, new research suggests. Clinicians from Italy have described what they believe are the first three reported cases of acetylcholine receptor (AChR) antibody-positive myasthenia gravis after COVID-19 infection.

“I think it is possible that there could be many more cases,” said lead author Domenico Restivo, MD, of the Garibaldi Hospital, Catania, Italy. “In fact, myasthenia gravis could be underestimated especially in the course of COVID-19 infection in which a specific muscular weakness is frequently present. For this reason, this association is easy to miss if not top of mind,” Dr. Restivo said.

None of the three patients had previous neurologic or autoimmune disorders. In all three cases, symptoms of myasthenia gravis appeared within 5-7 days after onset of fever caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection. The time from presumed SARS-CoV-2 infection to myasthenia gravis symptoms “is consistent with the time from infection to symptoms in other neurologic disorders triggered by infections,” the investigators reported.

The findings were published online August 10 in Annals of Internal Medicine.
 

First patients

The first patient described in the report was a 64-year-old man who had a fever as high as 39° C (102.2° F) for 4 days. Five days after fever onset, he developed diplopia and muscle fatigue. The patient’s neurologic examination was “unremarkable.” Computed tomography (CT) of the thorax excluded thymoma, and findings on chest radiograph were normal. He tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 on nasopharyngeal swab and real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR).

The patient’s symptoms led the investigators to suspect myasthenia gravis. Repetitive stimulation of the patient’s facial nerve showed a 57% decrement, confirming involvement of the postsynaptic neuromuscular junction. The concentration of AChR antibodies in serum was also elevated (22.8 pmol/L; reference range, <0.4 pmol/L). The patient was treated with pyridostigmine bromide and prednisone and had a response “typical for someone with myasthenia gravis,” the researchers wrote.

The second patient was a 68-year-old man who had a fever as high as 38.8° C (101.8° F) for 7 days. On day 7, he developed muscle fatigue, diplopia, and dysphagia. Findings of a chest CT and neurologic exam were normal. Nasopharyngeal swab and RT-PCR testing for COVID-19 were positive. As with the first patient, myasthenia gravis was suspected because of the patient’s symptoms. Repetitive nerve stimulation revealed a postsynaptic deficit of neuromuscular transmission of the facial (52%) and ulnar (21%) nerves. His serum AChR antibody level was elevated (27.6 pmol/L). The patient improved after one cycle of intravenous immunoglobulin treatment.
 

Possible mechanisms

The third patient was a 71-year-old woman with cough and a fever up to 38.6° C (101.5° F) for 6 days. She initially tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 on nasopharyngeal swab and RT-PCR. Five days after her symptoms began, she developed bilateral ocular ptosis, diplopia, and hypophonia. CT of the thorax excluded thymoma but showed bilateral interstitial pneumonia. On day 6, she developed dysphagia and respiratory failure, and was transferred to the ICU where she received mechanical ventilation.

Repetitive nerve stimulation revealed a postsynaptic deficit of neuromuscular transmission of the ulnar nerve (56%), and her serum AChR antibody level was elevated (35.6 pmol/L). Five days later, a second nasopharyngeal swab test for SARS-CoV-2 was positive. The patient improved following plasmapheresis treatment and was successfully extubated.

The investigators noted that this patient received hydroxychloroquine the day after the onset of neurologic symptoms, but the drug was withdrawn a day later, so they do not believe that it caused the symptoms of myasthenia gravis.

The observations in these three patients are “consistent with reports of other infections that induce autoimmune disorders, as well as with the growing evidence of other neurologic disorders with presumed autoimmune mechanisms after COVID-19 onset,” the researchers wrote.

They offered several possible explanations for the link between COVID-19 and myasthenia gravis. “Antibodies that are directed against SARS-CoV-2 proteins may cross-react with AChR subunits, because the virus has epitopes that are similar to components of the neuromuscular junction; this is known to occur in other neurologic autoimmune disorders after infection. Alternatively, COVID-19 infection may break immunologic self-tolerance,” the investigators wrote.

“The main message for clinicians is that myasthenia gravis, as well as other neurological disorders associated with autoimmunity, could occur in the course of SARS-CoV-2 infection,” Dr. Restivo said. Prompt recognition of the disease “could lead to a drug treatment that limits its evolution as quickly as possible,” he added.
 

An “unmasking”

Commenting on the findings, Anthony Geraci, MD, director of neuromuscular medicine, Northwell Health, Great Neck, N.Y., said these case reports of myasthenia gravis after SARS-CoV-2 infection are “not unique or novel as there has been a long understanding that seropositive [AChR antibody-positive] myasthenia gravis can and is frequently ‘unmasked’ in the setting” of several viral and bacterial infections.

“Antibodies in myasthenia gravis are of a type that take several weeks to develop to measurable levels as in the reported cases by Restivo et al., giving strong support to the notion that subclinical myasthenia gravis can be immunologically upregulated in the setting of viral infection and this is a far more likely explanation of the observed association reported,” added Dr. Geraci, who was not involved with the research.

He noted that, at his institution, “we have also observed ocular myasthenia gravis emerge in patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection, with similar double vision and lid droop, as we have seen similarly in patients with Zika, West Nile, and other viral infections, as well as a multiplicity of bacterial infections.”

“Most of our observed patients have responded to treatment much the same as reported by the three cases from Restivo and colleagues,” Dr.Geraci reported.

The authors of the study disclosed no conflicts of interest.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.

Myasthenia gravis should be added to the growing list of potential neurological sequelae associated with COVID-19, new research suggests. Clinicians from Italy have described what they believe are the first three reported cases of acetylcholine receptor (AChR) antibody-positive myasthenia gravis after COVID-19 infection.

“I think it is possible that there could be many more cases,” said lead author Domenico Restivo, MD, of the Garibaldi Hospital, Catania, Italy. “In fact, myasthenia gravis could be underestimated especially in the course of COVID-19 infection in which a specific muscular weakness is frequently present. For this reason, this association is easy to miss if not top of mind,” Dr. Restivo said.

None of the three patients had previous neurologic or autoimmune disorders. In all three cases, symptoms of myasthenia gravis appeared within 5-7 days after onset of fever caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection. The time from presumed SARS-CoV-2 infection to myasthenia gravis symptoms “is consistent with the time from infection to symptoms in other neurologic disorders triggered by infections,” the investigators reported.

The findings were published online August 10 in Annals of Internal Medicine.
 

First patients

The first patient described in the report was a 64-year-old man who had a fever as high as 39° C (102.2° F) for 4 days. Five days after fever onset, he developed diplopia and muscle fatigue. The patient’s neurologic examination was “unremarkable.” Computed tomography (CT) of the thorax excluded thymoma, and findings on chest radiograph were normal. He tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 on nasopharyngeal swab and real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR).

The patient’s symptoms led the investigators to suspect myasthenia gravis. Repetitive stimulation of the patient’s facial nerve showed a 57% decrement, confirming involvement of the postsynaptic neuromuscular junction. The concentration of AChR antibodies in serum was also elevated (22.8 pmol/L; reference range, <0.4 pmol/L). The patient was treated with pyridostigmine bromide and prednisone and had a response “typical for someone with myasthenia gravis,” the researchers wrote.

The second patient was a 68-year-old man who had a fever as high as 38.8° C (101.8° F) for 7 days. On day 7, he developed muscle fatigue, diplopia, and dysphagia. Findings of a chest CT and neurologic exam were normal. Nasopharyngeal swab and RT-PCR testing for COVID-19 were positive. As with the first patient, myasthenia gravis was suspected because of the patient’s symptoms. Repetitive nerve stimulation revealed a postsynaptic deficit of neuromuscular transmission of the facial (52%) and ulnar (21%) nerves. His serum AChR antibody level was elevated (27.6 pmol/L). The patient improved after one cycle of intravenous immunoglobulin treatment.
 

Possible mechanisms

The third patient was a 71-year-old woman with cough and a fever up to 38.6° C (101.5° F) for 6 days. She initially tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 on nasopharyngeal swab and RT-PCR. Five days after her symptoms began, she developed bilateral ocular ptosis, diplopia, and hypophonia. CT of the thorax excluded thymoma but showed bilateral interstitial pneumonia. On day 6, she developed dysphagia and respiratory failure, and was transferred to the ICU where she received mechanical ventilation.

Repetitive nerve stimulation revealed a postsynaptic deficit of neuromuscular transmission of the ulnar nerve (56%), and her serum AChR antibody level was elevated (35.6 pmol/L). Five days later, a second nasopharyngeal swab test for SARS-CoV-2 was positive. The patient improved following plasmapheresis treatment and was successfully extubated.

The investigators noted that this patient received hydroxychloroquine the day after the onset of neurologic symptoms, but the drug was withdrawn a day later, so they do not believe that it caused the symptoms of myasthenia gravis.

The observations in these three patients are “consistent with reports of other infections that induce autoimmune disorders, as well as with the growing evidence of other neurologic disorders with presumed autoimmune mechanisms after COVID-19 onset,” the researchers wrote.

They offered several possible explanations for the link between COVID-19 and myasthenia gravis. “Antibodies that are directed against SARS-CoV-2 proteins may cross-react with AChR subunits, because the virus has epitopes that are similar to components of the neuromuscular junction; this is known to occur in other neurologic autoimmune disorders after infection. Alternatively, COVID-19 infection may break immunologic self-tolerance,” the investigators wrote.

“The main message for clinicians is that myasthenia gravis, as well as other neurological disorders associated with autoimmunity, could occur in the course of SARS-CoV-2 infection,” Dr. Restivo said. Prompt recognition of the disease “could lead to a drug treatment that limits its evolution as quickly as possible,” he added.
 

An “unmasking”

Commenting on the findings, Anthony Geraci, MD, director of neuromuscular medicine, Northwell Health, Great Neck, N.Y., said these case reports of myasthenia gravis after SARS-CoV-2 infection are “not unique or novel as there has been a long understanding that seropositive [AChR antibody-positive] myasthenia gravis can and is frequently ‘unmasked’ in the setting” of several viral and bacterial infections.

“Antibodies in myasthenia gravis are of a type that take several weeks to develop to measurable levels as in the reported cases by Restivo et al., giving strong support to the notion that subclinical myasthenia gravis can be immunologically upregulated in the setting of viral infection and this is a far more likely explanation of the observed association reported,” added Dr. Geraci, who was not involved with the research.

He noted that, at his institution, “we have also observed ocular myasthenia gravis emerge in patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection, with similar double vision and lid droop, as we have seen similarly in patients with Zika, West Nile, and other viral infections, as well as a multiplicity of bacterial infections.”

“Most of our observed patients have responded to treatment much the same as reported by the three cases from Restivo and colleagues,” Dr.Geraci reported.

The authors of the study disclosed no conflicts of interest.

A version of this article originally appeared on Medscape.com.