Editor's Note

VOLUME 35, NO. 2 • JUNE 2018

Tzung-Jeng Hwang, IPA Bulletin Editor-in-Chief

Firstly, I would like to update our readers on recent IPA activities. The “Sleep & Healthy Aging” meeting in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA, has been rescheduled to 14-15 September 2018, and the planning is going well. IPA just finished a  meeting in Argentina (see President’s message), which provided an opportunity to collaborate with Universidad Favaloro in Buenos Aires to launch a new Spanish-language online course to provide initial training in Psychogeriatrics to address growing needs in Latin America. For the upcoming Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) in Chicago, IPA will have a social event to bring together friends and colleagues, and update on IPA’s activities and publication opportunities. The event is scheduled on 25 July 2018 at the Shedd Aquarium. You are very welcome to join. Finally, the first IPA Digital Editor Teleconference was conducted on 12 April 2018, with conclusions to streamline activities of the IPA website, IPA Bulletin and the monthly journal International Psychogeriatrics. We are looking forward to all these exciting new developments.

We are very happy to announce that we have invited Dr. Yung-Jen Yang (Taiwan) to write articles for the “Technology Corner,” which our recent survey indicated was the most desired new feature of the IPA Bulletin. Dr. Yang is an experienced senior geriatric psychiatrist at the Tsaotun Psychiatric Center in central Taiwan. Currently, he is a member of the Board of Directors for the Taiwanese Society of Geriatric Psychiatry and a lifetime member of the IPA. He has special interests in long-term care and new technology.

In this issue, there are eight wonderful articles, five in “Research and Practice”, two in “Around the World” and one in “Technology Corner”.

In “Research and Practice”:

• Dr. Mark Rapoport (Canada) provides two thought-provoking updates on current research. First, he reports that in a prospective Danish cohort with patients admitted for mood disorder, ECT was not associated with increased risk of dementia after adjusting for potential confounders. This supports continued use of ECT in patients with severe episodes of mood disorder, including elderly patients. In his second article, he introduces an American study on whether governmental transportation policy prevents motor vehicle trauma in patients with dementia.
• Dr. Gillian Stockwell-Smith (Australia) discusses the recruitment and retention challenges in early-stage dementia research, and some ways to overcome these difficulties.
• Dr. Laura Valzolgher (Italy) describes a patient with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) for whom the FDG-PET imaging proved to be a useful aid for diagnosis.
• Finally, in the second part of her review of executive function, Dr. Karen Reimers (USA) summarizes commonly used screening tests for executive function in older people.

In “Around the World”: 

• Dr. Cliff Singer (USA) highlights how sleep, wake and circadian disorders accelerate neurodegeneration and may drive the pathology of Alzheimer disease. Recognizing the importance of these problems, IPA has organized the “Sleep & Healthy Aging” meeting in 14-15 September 2018.
• In another report, Dr. Clarissa Giebel (UK) shares with us how patient and public involvement plays an important role in shaping research at every stage of a project and greatly benefits research.

In “Technology Corner”:

• Dr. Yung-Jen Yang (Taiwan) introduces the Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) and other exoskeleton robots, which can be applied in medical and long-term care at reasonable costs.

These articles are useful and interesting. They cover many aspects in psychogeriatrics, from clinical to research and from practice to policy. With our active editors and contributors, we hope we can further improve the content of the Bulletin and make it a useful platform for communications and exchanging experiences among IPA members. You are always welcome to submit articles to express your thoughts and feelings in this great IPA community. Please reach us at IPABulletin@ipa-online.org.