Just When You Thought American Healthcare Could Not Get Any Worse.....

I was on a vacation/family reunion last weekend about 150 miles north of the Twin Cities and 120 miles west of the only large northern metro area.  We were in the heart of lake country and about an hour from the closest emergency department (ED).  About 20 people of all ages there  for a few days to get reacquainted after a number of years, enjoy some good traditional foods, and outdoor activities.  Things were going very well until the last day.  Everyone was exiting the lake home to go to a local pizza establishment.  One of the family members missed the last step and fell hard to the pavement, knocking the lens out of his eyeglasses and sustaining a contusion/abrasion over the left supraorbital ridge.   No loss of consciousness.  He did sustain an abrasion on the left hand with some residual wrist pain.  He has some chronic medical problems but is not on anticoagulants.  Another family member is a nurse and applied an ice bag and cleaned a small laceration in the area of the abrasion.  It did not appear to need sutures and it was steri-stripped.

The only other bit of information that is necessary about the injured man is that he is 80 years old.  As a geriatric psychiatrist I ran down the usual considerations of the old approaching the old old - especially anatomic traction on bridging veins and subdurals from that injury.  I did not want to miss any needed brain imaging protocol based on these factors.  I decided to call the local hospital emergency department and run it by the triage nurse.  The call went like this (this is not a transcript).

Hospital:  "Can I help you?"
Me: "Yes - I am currently out at a lake cabin and a family member took a fall and struck his frontal area.  No loss of consciousnesses, headache, visual change, or neurological findings.  I would like to talk to your ED triage person to see whether imaging is indicated."
Hospital:  "Is he from Minnesota?"
Me:  "No he is not."
Hospital:  "We cannot allow you to talk with the ED if he is not from Minnesota.
Me:  "Are you sure about that?"
Hospital:  "Yes very sure."
Me:  "I am a physician - is there any way that I can talk directly physician-to-physician with an ED physician."
Hospital:  "No you can't.  You have to call the number on the back of the insurance card."

That was a precedent setting call for me.  I did not identify myself as a psychiatrist, but I have really never encountered this kind of administrative obstacle to medical care.  I viewed my question as an important one and one that an ED physician would probably know more about than me.  In that context there was something about an out of state resident not getting equal access to medical care.  I am sure it would be easier to get access in France or Germany than it was in Minnesota.  I collected the medical card and made a second call to the nurse triage line listed on the back of the call.  My experience with nurse triage lines is that they at least call the physicians on call and get some semblance of an answer to your question - even on the weekends.

Me:  Explaining the situation again in its entirety and giving all of the relevant insurance information both on and off the card.  The off card data included date of birth and three repeats of a call back number.  It was at that point the triage nurse said:
Triage RN:  "Well I am afraid I can't help you because you have to talk with a nurse who is licensed in the state where your relative resides.  But I will transfer you."
Me:  "OK"
Cricket sounds and bad muzak for about 5 minutes.
Triage RN (back on the line):  "The wait times are too long.  Let me just tell you that as long as he has no headaches, nausea, vomiting, visual changes or neurological symptoms - you can just watch him.  Bring him to the ED if any of those symptoms occur."
Me:  "OK - there is no imaging study given his age?"
Triage RN: "No".

As multiple posts on this blog can attest - I am openly critical of how business and government interests have rationed access to health care.  I had really never imagined obstacles to standard health care based on your state of residence.  I had never encountered a system that refused physician contact with another physician in their system.  I can see the gears turning on how to turn these calls into billable fees, even if it means a steep out-of-pocket payment by the patient.  But even in that case giving me the correct medical information is money in their pocket if it results in a CT scan.  Medical imaging generally covers about one-quarter of the operating budgets of hospitals these days.

For now it appears that after hours physician consultation may be rare and a sequence of calls based on legitimate concern needs to be answerable by a triage nurse's database or a visit to the emergency department.

And you better hope that you are in the right state.



George Dawson, MD, DFAPA




Supplementary (posted on August 23):

Getting back home and doing a little more research shows that both the Emergency Medicine (2) and Internal Medicine (1) literature say that age alone is an indication for a CT scan following a minor TBI.  UpToDate says that age 65 years of age or older is an indication.  The emergency medicine literature uses New Orleans Criteria suggesting an age of > 60 and the Canadian CT Rule suggesting an age of > 65 under CT if any criteria present.  According to these criteria - age alone is an indication for a CT scan.

1:  Randolf W. Evans.  Concussion and mild traumatic brain injury. In: UpToDate, Aminoff MJ, Moreira ME (Eds), UpToDate, Waltham, MA (Accessed on August 22, 2016). - see graphic 50743.

2:  Haydel M. Management of mild traumatic brain injury in the emergency department. Emerg Med Pract. 2012 Sep;14(9):1-24. Epub 2012 Jul 20. Review. PubMed PMID: 23101569. (full text online).


Attribution:

That's me walking on a dock in Lake Country.

Indexing Versus Diagnosis - A Non-trivial Difference?

There was an interesting article written by Kenneth S. Kendler, MD in this month's American Journal of Psychiatry.  It addresses a phrase that I have seen in typed evaluations that causes me to cringe: "The patient does/does not meet criteria for major depression."  I was asked why that phrase bothered me so much and I basically pointed out that I don't care whether a person "meets criteria" for a specific DSM criteria - the overall assessment was more important to me.  Kendler describes the difference in terms of phenomenology - are there other aspects of depression that merit further description than what is in the DSM?  That seems true to me as well as, the time domain of symptoms development and how some of the critical symptoms may have developed.  On a developmental basis - sleep, anxiety, and depression all may have different time frame and given the length of time that the DSM approach has been around - there has been very little discussion of some of the key convergences and divergences.  Is primary insomnia beginning in middle school associated with depression in the twenties - the same problem as no insomnia in childhood and depression in the twenties.

To study the issue Kendler looks at 19 textbooks and 18 symptoms domains described in each of those textbooks.  He has specific criteria for textbook selection that resulted in 19 texts from 5 countries published between 1899 to 1956.  He included full criteria published by Wendell Muncie in 1939 and Aubrey Lewis in 1934 as being particularly instructive.  He looks at the number of authors describing a particular symptoms and additional descriptors of the symptoms they found in depressive states.  Just looking at neurovegetative states, the results are interesting.  The atypical depressive symptoms of hypersomnia and increased appetite and weight gain were essentially absent. Fourteen authors described sleep problems as initial insomnia or non restorative sleep.  Three authors described early morning awakening.  Poor appetite was listed by 10 authors and weight loss by 9 authors.  Anhedonia was listed by seven authors.  Kendler provides a detailed analysis of the remaining symptoms and how many of the authors consider these symptoms to be representative of depression.

One of the most instructive aspects of the paper was a direct comparison with DSM5 criteria across 18 symptoms, whether they are covered in the DSM and to what extent.  The symptoms not covered included volition/motivation, speech, other physical symptoms, anxiety, and depersonalization/derealization.  Experienced clinicians commonly encounter depressed people with all of these symptoms in everyday practice.  As an example, some of the most severely depressed people that I have treated were somatically focused to one degree or another on a continuum to the point of somatic delusions.  Adhering to DSM5 criteria would leave out the most important feature of their illness.  A more complete description of these symptoms allows for a better demarcation of the line between depression and psychotic depression - a critical line for developing a treatment plan.  Another critical aspect is the relationship between anxiety and depression.  The DSM tends to sacrifice a broader phenomenological approach for narrow, easily determined diagnostic markers.  Instead of describing the anxiety associated with depression, depressed patients often end up with additional diagnoses of anxiety disorders and in the DSM field trials it appears that anxiety and depression morph into on another and the criteria appear to have low diagnostic reliability in that context.

The broader concept from Kendler's philosophical perspective is whether meeting criteria is that same thing as having the disorder.  From a phenomenological perspective it is certainly possible to produce detailed analysis of patients that do not resemble one another in many regards.  Considering the fact that depression is always mapped onto unique conscious states that should not be too surprising.  Kendler's idea is that the DSM5 criteria do a "reasonable but incomplete job of assessing the prominent symptoms and signs of depression in the western post Kraepelinian tradition  ".  The idea of indexing cases of depression from what is not depression is relevant here.  I think that he should have been a little more specific in his criticism.  I don't think they do a reasonable job when they are not part of a psychiatric assessment by a psychiatrist who has enough time to do a good job.  Taking the DSM5 criteria and converting them into a checklist and applying that to the masses comes to mind.  This is probably the most absurd conclusion to the indexing concept, surpassed only by telling those who are screened that "you meet criteria for depression and that meets our health plan criteria to start citalopram".

 Kendler points out the consequences of reifying diagnostic criteria to the point that they become distinct disorders in the absence of any quantitative markers.  Andreassen made similar arguments about DSM technology and the death of an interest in psychopathology in a previous paper (2).  Both authors seem to miss the mark in terms of what is really missed here.  The diagnostic nosology has shifted from a relative simple mind based paradigm to one that purports to pick up extreme conditions at the fringe of human behavior.  The accuracy of those diagnoses is less as the described disorders get more common.  Human consciousness appears to be the critical variable here and there remain very few commentators on this issue.  Psychiatric disorders become very complex once the psychiatrist goes far beyond symptom lists and even personality disorders and what is commonly considered personality traits to recognizing that the person in front of you is a truly unique conscious state associated with a unique neurobiological state.

              

George Dawson, MD DFAPA



References:

1: Kendler KS. The Phenomenology of Major Depression and the Representativeness and Nature of DSM Criteria. Am J Psychiatry. 2016 Aug 1;173(8):771-80. doi: 10.1176/appi.ajp.2016.15121509. Epub 2016 May 3. PubMed PMID: 27138588.

2: Andreasen NC. DSM and the death of phenomenology in America: an example of unintended consequences. Schizophr Bull. 2007 Jan;33(1):108-12. Epub 2006 Dec 7. PubMed PMID: 17158191; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC2632284. (full text)


Attribution:

Quote at top is from reference 1 by Dr. Kendler.

Open Psychiatric Units Mean Fewer Suicides and Elopements ?!!

There is a headline making the rounds in the media about whether or not locked psychiatric units are useful in preventing suicides and "absconding" behavior in inpatient psychiatric units.  Absconding is running away before the formal discharge and in the US it is referred to as elopement.  The media handling of this article is a bit less scholarly than you might expect from the average psychiatrist reading this article.  Even media circulating to psychiatrists sends out the headlines from a news service:  "Locked psychiatric wards may mean more suicide or escape attempts." Since I have spent the majority of my career on locked psychiatric units and consider myself an expert in this area - reading the article and looking at its deficiencies comes naturally to me.

The article looks at a coalition of 22 German psychiatric hospitals and their affiliated psychiatric services.  Sixteen of the hospitals had at least one locked psychiatric unit over the course of the study.  Four hospitals had no locked wards over the course of the study.  One of the hospitals started out with no locked wards but "had to introduce locked wards for legal reasons" in November 2000. organized under a central agency that looks at quality assurance and quality management.  Twenty one of the hospitals participated in data analysis by a central quality assurance/management agency the Dokumentationsverbund Psychiatrie (DVP).  The study period ran from January 1, 1998 to December 31, 2012.  This was  an entirely retrospective analysis based on anonymized data.  During the study period there were 271,128 admissions to locked wards and 78,446 admissions to open wards.

Primary outcome variable was completed suicide and secondary outcome variables were suicide attempts during treatment, elopement without return, and elopement with return.  Some of the characteristics of the populations were described and they appear to have diagnoses similar to what might be found on inpatient units in the US with major difference - some of the primary diagnoses listed would likely not be admitted - like somatoform disorder or personality disorder as a primary diagnosis, but the study says very little about admission criteria.  On American inpatients psychiatric units pure substance use disorders are actively discriminated against, by insurers and government agencies that govern hospitalizations and in the German sample. they constitute 18-25% of the primary diagnoses.  The authors do a statistical comparison between the locked ward and open ward groups across the outcome variables.               

There are two logical flaws with the study and the researchers comment on one.

The first is generalizability of the data.  The authors seem to recognize this in their use of OECD data and the rates of psychiatric bed utilization in Germany (2.8 per 1,000 population) versus the UK (0.5 per 1,000) and the US (0.3 per 1,000)  suggesting that there is greater acuity in the populations with fewer beds and that there is a greater proportion of acutely ill patients.  The other parameter that is critical in American inpatient psychiatry is the number of aggressive and homicidal patients.  At large metropolitan hospitals units comprised almost entirely of highly aggressive patients are not unusual.  Other patients are generally considered too vulnerable to be admitted to these units.

Aggressive behavior can create near riot conditions on units like this and an unlocked door would create numerous situations leading to violent confrontations with staff.  The striking part about this comparison to the German system was that this paper left out all mention of aggression, violence and homicide suggesting that these patients were not being admitted to these hospitals.  The only line containing these words in the entire paper was in one of the references.  That makes this study impossible to compare with any set of metropolitan psychiatric units in the US.  There is the associated question of what the Germans do with their aggressive patients?  Are they sent to forensic hospitals or specialized units?  It would be very unlikely to not encounter thousands of highly aggressive patients in any American sample this large even at a time when the largest psychiatric hospitals in the country are county jails.

The second is that the implicit notion about a randomized controlled trial.  For the reason I previously mentioned it is not likely to be ethical, amenable to human subjects approval or therefore doable.  The authors suggest that being under a mandate to treat all patients in a certain geographic area reduces selection bias.  That is difficult to accept if potential for aggression and overt aggressive behavior is not an admission criteria and if it not compared between the locked and unlocked units.      

That said, what can American psychiatric units learn from the German experience?  The first and most important is that unlocked units are possible.  I worked at a facility that typically had 4 psychiatric units and when we started one unit was open.  It was a transitional unit where people were sent after their acute disorder, agitation, aggressive behavior. and suicide risk was treated but they were not quite ready for discharge.  The management of psychiatric units by business managers eventually dictated that these partially stabilized people should just be discharged - frequently when there had been an almost imperceptible improvement.  This was all based on the fallacious "dangerousness" argument by managed care companies.  They decided about 20-25 years ago that the only reason anyone should be hospitalized on an inpatient psychiatric unit was if they were dangerous to themselves or others.  That also led to locked hospital wards, if not by implication by explicit managed care feedback as in: "If the patient does not need to be on a locked unit - they don't need to be in the hospital and therefore we are denying payment for this admission."  Have these managed care tactics dumbed down inpatient treatment and adversely affected the atmosphere of these units?  Of course it has.  It has created a palpable corrections-like atmosphere in many units.  The only reason people are there is to figure a way to get out.  This reinforces the thought that the people there really don't have any problems in the first place they are just being discriminated against.  So the first lesson from Germany is to restore the running of hospitals to psychiatrists and not business managers.

The second issue is infrastructure and length of stay (LOS).  Most EU countries have significantly more psychiatric beds available to their populations.  The most likely reason is that they are not rationed (nearly out of existence) by managed care companies or the government like they have been in the US.   Lengths of stay are also significantly greater.  The interesting dimensions for comparison would be the functional status of patient at discharge as well as the therapeutic milieu in comparing German to American units.  That would require a more sophisticated research approach but it might bring some science to inpatient psychiatric care.  It would also be interesting to know if the German hospitals have state of the art specialized programs for specific conditions and whether their environment is designed to emphasize the therapeutic rather than containment aspects.

There is also the opportunity to look at the administrative aspects of these units more specifically the impact of a business management approach to a more clinical or at least less of a short term profit approach.

We have all witnessed what healthcare businesses can do to inpatient care in the US - and it is never good. 

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA

References:

1: Huber CG, Schneeberger AR, Kowalinski E, Fröhlich D, von Felten S, Walter M, Zinkler M, Beine K, Heinz A, Borgwardt S, Lang UE. Suicide risk and absconding in psychiatric hospitals with and without open door policies: a 15 year, observational study. Lancet Psychiatry. 2016 Jul 28. pii: S2215-0366(16)30168-7. doi: 10.1016/S2215-0366(16)30168-7. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 27477886.

News Flash From the StarTribune - Psychiatric Patients Have "Nowhere To Go"

Not to be outdone by the local television stations, the Minneapolis StarTribune came out with their own stunning analysis of the problems with psychiatric care in the state.  At least the opening line was stunning:

"Hundreds of Minnesotans with mental health problems are languishing in hospital psychiatric units for weeks, even months, because they have nowhere to go for less intensive care, according to a comprehensive study to be released this week. " 

Notice the expertise in this sentence - we now have a comprehensive study.  We have a comprehensive study of what every inpatient psychiatrist in the state of Minnesota has known for the past 30 years!  There is a lot behind this headline that is not included in the story.  For example, they left out the part that inpatient psychiatrists and social workers are routinely scapegoated by administrators and government officials for the problem.  The system is not blamed for patients staying in the hospital too long - the doctors are.  I had the opportunity to work with outstanding social workers when I was in this setting and at some point they have to quit.  One of my social work colleagues spent all day, calling over 30 facilities to try to get the patient discharged and she failed.  She failed for two reasons.  First, the infrastructure for accepting patients with chronic psychiatric disabilities has been rationed out of existence by state and county officials.  Second, the existing facilities do not want to accept people with psychiatric problems especially if they have had a history of aggression or suicidal behavior.  The next sentence makes even less sense:

"As a result, private hospitals are absorbing millions of dollars in unreimbursed costs, while patients who are well enough to be released are being deprived more appropriate care at a fraction of the cost."

The author here clearly does not know how state and county officials think.  There is an assumption that they want cost effective and appropriate care.  In my 23 years on an inpatient unit - there is no evidence that those motivations exist.   To any career long student of the system, it should be abundantly clear that all of these administrators and bureaucrats want free care.   Only the Orwellian rhetoric of managed care could spin free care into appropriate care.  I will elaborate on free care instead - how does that happen?  It basically happens in four ways:

1.  The patient is admitted to a psychiatric unit and is too disabled to be discharged to either the street, an apartment, or their original living situation .  The hospital needs to get the patient out in 6 days or less in order to make a profit on the limited payment they get for admissions or discharges (a DRG payment).  The patient is stranded for much longer.  The patient's care is essentially free at that point.  Not only that but if the county rations placement options - they don't spend any money on placements.

2.  The patient is admitted and ends up on a probate court hold or a civil commitment.  In this case they can be stranded for months waiting to get to a state hospital.  Insurance companies and the state do not pay for people in this situation.  The care again is for free.  

3.  Homeless psychiatric patients circulate in an out of the emergency department.  They come in because they are in distress.  They know that they need to verbalize serious problems in order to get admitted.  If not they are discharged back to the street only to appear in the emergency department at a later date.  There is a large circulating population of these patients who may get briefly admitted but never get stabilized.  Apart from the nominal emergency department fee - their care is free.  But of course they are really getting no care.  

4.  Up to 2/3 of people with substance use problems have psychiatric disorders.  Many of them will show up in the emergency department with various levels of symptomatology.  If they are intoxicated they will be sent to county detox facilities - where once again the care is free but it is not psychiatric care.  

These are well hidden secrets of modern psychiatric care.  First, psychiatrists have nothing to do with how the system is managed.  Second, the myth that care is expensive.  People would always ask me if they were being charged a mythical "$1,000/day" fee to be on a mental health unit.  I can assure anyone that when all of the discounts and free care is rolled into the meager reimbursement from insurance companies, the actual reimbursement is more like hotel rates without the hotel accommodations.

The article also discusses the differences between general medical surgical care and psychiatric care. The question is asked if cancer patients were stranded and could not get to tertiary cancer care - would it be as acceptable as the case for psychiatric care?  That question minimizes the scope of the problem.  The problem with the "bottlenecks" described in the article is that they are all a result of rationing of psychiatric services.  There is nobody rationing cardiology or oncology services.  Any middle aged person who goes into an emergency department with chest pain will get state of the art care for chest pain and have all of the necessary testing.  There are no similar services available for psychiatric illnesses.  As soon as a person is admitted the current goal is to get them stabilized and discharged as soon as possible.  The resources are so meager that people frequently do not get the care that they need, because it is rationed.   The article also points out that inpatient treatment at some level is little more than containment.  With administrators rather than clinical psychiatrists running the system, there is no longer an emphasis on a therapeutic environment.  In many cases the experience is sitting around in a facility with little to do, waiting to talk with a doctor about getting released.

So - don't believe what you read in the papers.  Nothing in this article is news.  The system of psychiatric care in the state of Minnesota is dysfunctional by design.  It has been designed by managers at all levels who routinely ignore what psychiatrists have to say and who don't want to spent an additional penny on psychiatric care.

That produces deficiencies at both ends of the spectrum - the people who need to be admitted for psychiatric care as well as the people who need to be discharged.  People with mental disorders should get the same level of care as people with medical and surgical disorders.  That will never happen as long as rationing psychiatric care is justified as being "cost effective".

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA 

References:

Chris Serres.   Nowhere to go, psychiatric patients languish in Minnesota hospitals.  StarTribune August 10, 2016.

George Dawson.  News Flash From Channel 5:  "There is a shortage of psychiatrists."  Link

Supplementary 1:

Every now and then the news media comes up with a shocking story about the rationing of psychiatric services at least they are hyping it that way.   One of my favorites is on Greyhound Therapy and yes this also happens in Minnesota and probably every other state in the USA.  When it comes to rationing and denying care - nothing beats the cost of a bus ticket.

Supplementary 2:

For a look at how modern medical managers and bureaucrats running managed care organizations view psychiatric services - read this post on the Dog Quadrant.

Supplementary 3:

I posted two brief sentences and a link to this post on the page with this story on the StarTribune website.  It was deleted.  If you are reading this please direct anyone interested to this post of what is really happening with mental health and psychiatric care in the state of Minnesota and everywhere.

Hutterite Dust versus Amish Dust

From previous posts, I consider asthma to be a good comparison illness with mental illnesses for a number of reasons.  The diagnosis is frequently unclear.  There are no specific diagnostic tests for asthma.  Attending even a state of the art clinic for asthma usually consists at some point of filling out a subjective checklist of symptoms and disability - including the frequency that a rescue inhaler is used.  The majority of asthmatics are symptomatic with wheezing.  The symptomatic state is often considered a sign of compliance with treatment measures, but the reality is that asthma is difficult to treat and there is a strong environmental component to treating it.  Depending on the physician, environmental engineering like air filters, dust removal, and avoidance of certain allergens is typically discussed but less often than in the past.  The mainstay of treatment is corticosteroid inhalers with long acting beta agonists where the corticosteroid inhaler alone is not enough.  Some authors have defined endophenotypes that may represent different disease mechanisms.  The overall prevalence of asthma has increased significantly suggesting an environmental component.

Additional epidemiology has shown that exposure to high microbial environments such as livestock exposure on traditional farms confers some protection in terms of the development of asthma.  The Amish are noted to have a decreased rate of asthma and allergic sensitization than non-farmers.  These factors led to a very interesting study in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.  In this study the authors elected to compare schoolchildren from both Amish and Hutterite families on a number of genetic and immunologic markers.  Sixty children were studied from both communities.  They were sex and age matched to within one year.  Half of the children were from an Amish community and half from a Hutterite community.  Both groups are from a similar European geography and on an SNP analysis of genetic association were strikingly similar in terms of comparison groups.  The main environmental variable was that the Amish farms were single family dairy farms and the Hutterite farms were communal mechanized farms.   Previous reports had determined that the Hutterite children had a higher prevalence of asthma (21.3% versus 5.2%) and allergic sensitization (33.3% versus 7.2%) than the Amish children.

Blood tests were done on the children to determine immune markers.  The Hutterite group had higher levels of IgE to common antigens.  The Hutterite children also had increased eosinophils, decreased neutrophils and about the same number of monocytes as the Amish children.  Blood samples were screened for 26 cytokines and 23 were found.  Median cytokine levels of each were higher in the Hutterite group even when the known asthmatics were excluded (there were no asthmatics in the Amish group).  Gene expression profiles were also generated for all of the subjects and pathway analysis was done with a standard informatics based approach.  From these analytics the authors concluded that the most significant module in both the Hutterite and Amish children contained 43 genes.  Eighteen of the genes resulting in overexpression of tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and and interferon regulatory factor 7 (IRF7) were present in the Amish children.  Both of these proteins are important in the innate response to microbial stimuli.  

The house dust experiment was conducted in a mouse model of asthma.  Dust extracts were administered intranasally over 4-5 weeks.  Hutterite dust produced airway hyperresponsiveness and eosinophilia in bronchoalveolar lavage specimens from the mice but the Amish dust did not.  Mice deficient in MyD88 and Trif - proteins required for innate immunity signaling (5a) did not respond to the inhibitory effects of Amish dust extract on airway hyperresponsiveness or eosinophilia as further evidence that innate immunity is involved.                          

The authors and the accompanying editorial by Chatila (2) emphasize the importance of this study.  Amish dust is able to activate innate immunity by very specific mechanisms that led to its protective effects against allergic sensitization and allergic asthma. The authors cite the main deficiencies of the study as not looking at children younger than 6, limited dust sampling, and a sampling strategy of asthmatics that resulted in a higher numbers of Hutterite children with asthma.  The editorial suggests that the dose of dust to prevent or possible moderate asthma is not really determined.

This was a very elegant study that has the potential to create novel therapies for an illness that is currently not very well treated.  It highlights that fact that polygenic illnesses, especially those representing complex systems and complex interacting systems are difficult to characterize but with modern methods of analysis we are getting closer.  It was not too long ago that many of the molecules listed in the diagrams at the top of this page were not known to exist.  The best example I can think of is the leukotrienes that were collectively known as Slow Reacting Substance of Anaphylaxis or SRS-A. (4).  Cytokines were also unknown.  The fact that all asthmatics are not alike and that some authors believe that clear endophenotypes exist suggests that in the genes and proteins mentioned in this article significant variation should be expected.  If these findings are accurate, it also points out the importance of slight differences in the environment in the development of asthma.          


George Dawson, MD, DFAPA


References:


1: Michelle M. Stein, B.S., Cara L. Hrusch, Ph.D., Justyna Gozdz, B.A., Catherine Igartua, B.S., Vadim Pivniouk, Ph.D., Sean E. Murray, B.S., Julie G. Ledford, Ph.D., Mauricius Marques dos Santos, B.S., Rebecca L. Anderson, M.S., Nervana Metwali, Ph.D., Julia W. Neilson, Ph.D., Raina M. Maier, Ph.D., Jack A. Gilbert, Ph.D., Mark Holbreich, M.D., Peter S. Thorne, Ph.D., Fernando D. Martinez, M.D., Erika von Mutius, M.D., Donata Vercelli, M.D., Carole Ober, Ph.D., and Anne I. Sperling, Ph.D. Innate Immunity and Asthma Risk in Amish and Hutterite Farm Children N Engl J Med 2016; 375:411-421; August 4, 2016; DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1508749

2:   Talal A. Chatila, M.D., M.Sc. Innate Immunity in Asthma. N Engl J Med 2016; 375:477-479; August 4, 2016;  DOI: 10.1056/NEJMe1607438.

3:  Chapter 2:  Innate Immunity in Peter Parham.  The Immune System, Third Edition.  Garland Science, Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.  New York.  2009.  pp 31-70.

4:  Roitt I.  Essential Immunology, Third Edition.  Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford. 1977, p 157.

5:  Links to Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG):

a) KEGG (MyD88-3 and trif):  Link

                

b) Toll like receptor signaling:  Link

                

c) NF- Kappa B signaling:  Link

                

d) Innate immunity:  Link

                

e) Adaptive immunity:  Link

Attribution:

Both graphics at the top of this page are from VisiScience.com and posted per their user agreement.

Catastrophic Thinking About Catastrophes

A storm rolls into Minneapolis - photo by Eduardo Colón, MD

Like most psychiatrists, I have spent a lot of time listening to anxieties about hypotheticals.  Are people judging me when I am out in public?  Will I fail an examination?  Will I end up penniless and homeless?  Am I really dying of something that the doctors can't diagnose? Am I going to lose control and drive off a bridge on the way in to work?  Now that my relationship is over will I ever find another person who will love me?  The human mind is set up to obsess about the improbable and if you have the predisposition to create a hypervigilant approach to this anxious stream of consciousness it will lead to much less sleep and a number of physical symptoms.  Many  people have had these patterns of thoughts for years or decades before they decide to see a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist.  This kind of anxiety can be disabling even without any panic attacks or significant physical manifestations.  It is an outstanding example of how emotion impacts decisions - in this case the decision to worry about something that is recognized as illogical.   One of my standard questions of the anxious person involves catastrophizing or jumping to the worst possible conclusion.  It is also a universal human experience.  The best example is assuming the worst if a family member is late when driving over to your place.  Are they in a ditch?  Are they in the emergency room?  Have they been in an accident?  Are they dead?  Common thoughts that various people get in that situation.  When it comes to real catastrophes, the thought patterns change significantly.

I have always been interested in catastrophes - ever since I read a book as a kid about a meteor hitting earth.  In those days we used to have to go to a bookmobile stop, get on a large recreational vehicle that functioned as a mobile library and borrow books to read every week.  That book caught my eye, because it had a picture of the collision on the cover and a detailed description of events on the inside.  At the time, the real risk of massive destruction was a standoff between the US and the USSR in the Cuban missile blockade and a decision by a Soviet submarine commander - but taxpayers are always the last to know.  We were worried plenty about that real crisis, but at about the same time - I was reading my first 400 page novel on a meteor hitting earth and all of the destruction that would involve.  Over the years it has lead to a focus on how to survive, the unsurvivable,  I have referred to myself as a survivalist at times but realize the I am half joking.  Real survivalists tend to see catastrophic events as impacting on the food supply.  I have heard the credo that "We are only 5 meals away from chaos."  The associated strategies are food hoarding, secure locations, and plenty of firearms if necessary.  I think it is logical to think that the food supply may be constrained, in quantity and volume - but I think that is also logical to take an approach that involves that maximizes the survival of the human race - from anything just short of the destruction of the planet.

My personal involvement with disaster planning peaked about 8-10 years ago.  At that time I was involved in 2 avian influenza task forces - one localized to the hospital where I was working and the other metro and statewide.  An influenza pandemic is a very lethal event that can result in tens of millions of deaths.  The last time the world population was subjected to a highly lethal strain in 1918, people were going to work in the morning and dropping dead in the streets on the way home in the evening.  My participation in these task forces was highly instructive on a number of issues.  I was involved in teaching psychological first aid (PFA).  The theory was fairly simple.  Most people who suffer the psychological trauma of a mass event like an epidemic will recover psychologically.  The focus is reassurance, providing information, and preventing surges of activity in hospitals and emergency departments that would overwhelm resources.  That theory was based on what happened after the concern about anthrax being sent to the US Capitol building occurred.  In that event emergency department (ED) services were immediately overwhelmed by people who thought they were exposed to anthrax.  To prevent that - trained PFA staff would be in ED areas to assist with keeping people moving.  The unfortunate reality was that the real infrastructure, ventilators and isolation rooms would be almost immediately overwhelmed even with the appropriate surge protection.   Nobody had adequate infrastructure to treat high numbers of people with respiratory failure who were infected with a highly virulent strains of influenza virus.  Nobody was interested in building that infrastructure.  Nobody was interested in HVAC (heating, ventilating, air conditioning) systems that did more than isolate a few infected people.  There was an interest in getting oseltamivir phosphate (Tamiflu ®) to whoever needed it.  I saw a slide several times of large pallets of boxed oseltamivir sitting in a large government hangar somewhere and being told that it was ready to be shipped to whoever might need it.  There was also an interest in what to do with large numbers of dead bodies and fairly specific plans for that detail.  In the end, the only logical conclusion was that the planners of this event were fairly hopeless about the outcome and trying to quell either the expected mass hysteria, the inability to marshall any realistic resources, or both.  From what I have seen, I would not expect a better outcome than 1918, unless there are effective vaccines immediately available.    

Non-Biological catastrophes are broader in scope and potentially more devastating.  The recent overview by Julia Rosen in Science (1) illustrates the possibilities.  An interesting aspect of the non-biological catastrophes is that they necessary need some kind of a hard fix.  There needs to be a basic shelter or someone has to figure out how to go out into space and either destroy or displace that asteroid hurtling toward the Earth.  There is no imaginary hospital bed capacity like with a biological epidemic.  If you don't have a real shelter or a real intercept device - all or part of the human race perishes. According to Rosen,  even these scientists are subjected to a "pervasive giggle factor".  Many do not see the study and prevention of catastrophes as mainstream science.

The body of Rosen's article discusses natural events that can decimate the infrastructure and other that could lead to the extinction of humans.  An example of an event that is probably not directly harmful to humans is a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the sun.  High energy particles are ejected from the sun and into the Earth's magnetic field.  The particles can destroy power grids and other electrical transmission gear.  CME events have occurred on Earth, one of the largest in 1859 called the Carrington Event.  Any similar event today might place power transformers at risk and create widespread havoc with the power grid resulting in large section of continents going dark for as long as years.

Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) are a more clear danger and probably have the most scientific investigation.  The Spaceguard survey by NASA identified 90% of the NEOs larger than 1 kilometer by 2010.  They are currently working on identifying 90% of the NEOs greater than 140 meters by 2020.  No NEO identified so far is on a colleion course with Earth.  The article contains a graph of Damage/Fatalities versus Recurrence Period in Years for Volcanoes, Impacts, Earthquakes, Floods and Tsunamis.  According to that graphic - a global catastrophe from an NEO impact recurs about once in 100,000 years.  From the graphic below, that event would have been the eruption of Mt. Toba in Indonesia about 74.000 years ago.  That may have killed most humans and led to a bottleneck event in human evolution where climate change led to a rapid paring of certain populations and more rapid adaptive changes.  Interestingly some fossil evidence suggests that native people in the vicinity of the eruption survived it and adapted to it.  The 1980 Mt. St. Helen's eruption is shown for relative scale.  That event killed 57 people and covered 22,000 square miles.  At 10 miles the ash was 10 inches thick.         

Graphic From US Geological Survey - Public Domain

I took the above events and tried to order them chronologically in the following graph.  For comparison with human evolution the first ancient humans (Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis) started out in East Africa about 200,000 years ago and started to migrate north.  The evolutionary changes necessary for modern humans happened about 50,000-75,000 years ago - sometime after the Mt Toba eruption.  The fossil evidence from Mt. Toba suggests that a supervolcano eruption in Yellowstone is survivable.  The critical question is how?  Various scenario have suggested that the sulfur dioxide content in the air will lead to climate change and a much higher prevalence of pulmonary illness.  Climate change will likely be a problem.  Fossil evidence suggests that there was a decade long period of cooler drier weather after the Mt. Toba eruption.    Computer simulations of the ash distribution from a Yellowstone supervolcano event would cover most of a triangular area from Los Angeles to Chicago to Calgary would be covered in ash varying in depth from 40 inches or more at the center to about an inch at the periphery.  With volcanos there is also a significant environmental impact from both the direct blast and and toxic gases like sulfur dioxide.

Whenever I discuss some of the issues with friends or coworkers - I get the same nervous laughter mentioned in the Science article. People can't seem to believe that there is anyone out there thinking about these things. The endpoints of the spectrum include: "You are nuts!" at one end to "I am just going to run outside and stand under the mushroom cloud. I would rather be dead than living in my basement for a year." at the other.   These sentiments were captured by Cormac McCarthy in his post-apocalyptic novel The Road. In the novel a boy and his father wander a dangerous post-catastrophe countryside. The actual event is never specified but there is widespread famine, climate change, and primitive behaviors including constant confrontations about food and cannibalism. There are flashbacks about the wife and mother of this dyad and we learn that she was not able to cope with the new reality and committed suicide. At one point they encounter an old man along the road who wants some of their food. There is tension between the father and son - the father wants to move on and the son is still altruistic and wants to help the old man. At some point there is a conversation and the old man sums up the situation when asked if he tried to "get ready for it":

"What would you do?....Even if you knew what to do you wouldn't know what to do. You wouldn't know if you wanted to do it or not. Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?" (p168-169).

McCarthy does a masterful job of capturing the attitudes of the resilient, the hopeless, and the altruistic after a catastrophe. He also illustrates that in truly catastrophic conditions nihilism may be a logical conclusion, but hope still lives on in the minds of others.  I have encountered all of these attitudes in discussing the prospects for survival, but my anecdotal experience is that most of the people planning to survive seem to be planning on confrontations and shoot outs that are directly out of The Road.

I think the outcome can be much more positive, survival enhancing and optimal when it comes to the survival of the human race.  It does take a more enlightened approach to food and shelter. It requires generations of planning. It requires multidisciplinary planning to gradually change the infrastructure. I was not able to get a critical reference to complete this post that was listed in the Rosen article (5). This book has been widely reviewed as a possible solution when food storage is not possible. Their suggested food sources would be useful in any sun blocking catastrophe like a supervolcano, nuclear winter or high speed impact by an NEO where vegetation could not be grown. Gradual but large scale changes to the infrastructure could also result in permanent dwellings designed to provide fresh food and water to the occupants as well as waste disposal and HVAC systems that would function in a highly adverse environment and supply clean air in the absence of any major power disruptions.

Encouraging gradual change with these goals in mind is a much better position to take than preventing post catastrophe panic. As a psychiatrist who has been involved in disaster planning - having a real solution is always superior to meaningless reassurance. That would never work in one-to-one psychotherapy. Why would anyone expect it to work for agitated crowds?

George Dawson, MD, DFAPA




References:

1: Rosen J. Thinking the Unthinkable. Science. 2016 Jul 15;353(6296):232-7. doi: 10.1126/science.353.6296.232. PubMed PMID: 27418500.

2: United States Geological Survey (USGS). Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. Questions about supervolcanoes. Accessed August 2016.

3: United States Geological Survey (USGS). Fact Sheet 2005-3024. Steam Explosions, Earthquakes, and Volcanic Eruptions—What’s in Yellowstone’s Future? Accessed August 2016.

4: Cormac McCarthy. The Road. Vintage Books, New York, 2006. 287pp.

5: David Denkenberger and Joshua Pearce. Feeding Everybody No Matter What: Managing Food Security After Global Catastrophe, First Edition. Academic Press, 2014

Appendix 1: Estimated ash distribution from a Yellowstone supervolcano event.

From United States Geological Survey - Public Domain

Appendix 2:

I wrote a brief science fiction piece about psychiatric treatment after a supervolcano eruption in both original and annotated forms.