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Article: Suicide risk highest early in Huntington's, before diagnosis confirmed.(Neurology)
- Article from:
- Internal Medicine News
- Article date:
- May 15, 2005
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 International Medical News Group. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Patients with Huntington's disease are most likely to consider suicide when soft neurologic signs start to develop but before diagnosis, and then again during initial disease progression, Jane Paulsen, Ph.D., and her colleagues reported.
This suggests that clinicians' tendency to "protect" patients by delaying diagnosis may actually increase their emotional distress, said Dr. Paulsen of the University of Iowa and her associates. "Perhaps the frequency of suicide may be reduced by the expedient diagnosis of Huntington's disease combined with appropriate treatment of depression," they said (Am. J. Psych. 2005;162:725-31).
The researchers studied 4,171 ...