On December 4th, 2018 our dementia partnership sponsored a webinar by Dr. Maureen Nash, a nationally recognized Gero-psychiatrist who presented the PowerPoint presentation (handout provided below) on “Helping those with Serious Mental Illness who now live in a LTC setting”. She advocated for use of best practices for persons with serious mental illness who require institutional care, most commonly because of their very high risk for cognitive impairment.  CMS’s campaign to improve dementia care by reduce antipsychotics at times may seem to compromise known best practice. She recommended following the American Psychiatric Association’s free best practice guidelines for treating: Major Depressive DO, Bipoloar DO, PTSD, OCD, Schizophrenia, and dementia persons with agitation and aggression. In these guidelines, recommendations for use of antipsychotics (many have FDA approval) represent best practice even though they may not be recognized in the excluded category by the CMS campaign.  

In the October 4, 2018 issue of Diabetes Care, the ADA and EASD (European Association for the Study of Diabetes) published their consensus report for Management of Type 2 Diabetes, 2018.  Both organizations now favor the use of Incretin Receptor Agonists or SLG2 Inhibitors for persons with established macrovascular disease (or high risk for Cardiovascular Disease), for improving glycemic control, if metformin alone isn’t adequate or not appropriate.  

CALTCM Members and Friends,  As we greet 2019 with fresh ideas and educational programs, offering you the best one can offer in professional education and training for California’s post-acute and long-term care (PALTC) arena, I am proud to share with you our accomplishments in 2018.

Recently, both poor sleep and inflamed gums have been implicated in the pathophysiology of Alzheimer’s disease. But before we discuss that, I’d like to remind you of the free resource “Alzforum” – www.alzforum.org – where the latest papers and meeting presentations are presented along with active discussion by many of the leading researchers in the field. I do not know of any other field where such a central repository has been maintained over a long period of time. It’s common for colleagues, patients and even family members to ask me about “the latest breakthrough” that they hear about on the news or read about in the lay press. I find Alzforum the best place for me to get a balanced view of the research that triggered the news report.