Four issues added to stroke management guidelines
The living clinical guidelines for stroke management have been updated to include draft recommendations on antiplatelet therapy, rehabilitation, managing complications and community participation.
As part of the approval process, the Stroke Foundation are now seeking submissions on the draft guidelines. Feedback is invited by 5pm 30th April.
Concussion can be identified in saliva
Researchers have identified what they say are distinct chemical signatures for concussion in the saliva of elite rugby players.
The findings of the study, suitably called SCRUM, could potentially pave the way for a rapid diagnostic test that could be used pitch side and after the game at all levels of participation, suggest the researchers in their paper published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
They caution that because of the observational nature of the study, their findings cannot outperform the gold standard of clinical assessment.
Anxiety, depression screening may miss some seizure patients
Commonly used screening instruments for anxiety and depression among patients with seizure disorders can be unreliable, particularly in certain patient subgroups, researchers say.
Neurologists from Victoria found that the clinical utility of the Neurological Disorders Depression Inventory for Epilepsy (NDDI-E) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7) was particularly reduced in patients with greater dissociative symptoms, higher patient-reported adverse events, poorer subjective cognition, negative affect, detachment, disinhibition, and psychoticism.
When the analyses were restricted to only patients with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES) or epilepsy, the rate of discordant depression screening was higher in the PNES group (47%) compared to the epilepsy group (30%).
“Neurologists need to bear in mind that screening instruments may miss depressive and anxiety disorder diagnoses in these patient subsets; it may be prudent to proceed directly to formal psychiatric evaluation if these clinico-demographic factors are identified,” they advised in their paper published in Epilepsia.