March 20, 2015 – Choosing Alternatives

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Anchor lead:  Can another approach avoid use of antipsychotic medicines in people with Alzheimer’s? Elizabeth Tracey reports

The acronym DICE describes a new approach developed by Constantine Lyketsos, an Alzheimer’s disease expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues, to assist clinicians caring for those with the disease take an approach to managing behavior that may help avoid medications.  Lyketsos describes the strategy.

Lyketsos: Describe, investigate, create, evaluate. Describe really gives the clinician a systematic way of how to think about the behavioral problems.  The investigate is to look for causes that might be leading to these behavior problems, the create flows from the investigate and helps people decide what they can do based on the causes they’ve ascertained, and then the evaluate really reminds people to follow through and if something isn’t working they might need to modify their approach.   :30

Lyketsos says this method may eliminate or reduce the need to atypical antipsychotic medications in those with Alzheimer’s.  DICE was detailed recently in the British Medical Journal.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.