VIDEO: Lessening the high health care burden of TD

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify iwaters@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Yeah, that's absolutely true. The burden of TD can really be quite high, both for patients, their caregivers, their families. I can't stress enough the importance of early recognition. I think being able to have TD on your radar and smile, the sign that patient is developing a movement disorder, knowing that they're exposed to these drugs it's important to recognize that and then do it systematically. I think it's easy to follow patients for long periods of time and especially if they're stable, not to question whether they're experiencing side effects of the medications that they're taking, particularly if the main symptom for which they're being prescribed is being controlled, but really being mindful that this is very true and sometimes permanent, consequences of the use of these agents, I think is the key. And I think early recognition will probably lead to a reduction in permanent tardive dyskinesia and if it goes away of course the burden is reduced, but the more patients we have out in the community with permanent tardive dyskinesia, then the higher the burden it would be for everybody involved. So early recognition really involves the entire care team. I think when patients are sent to us often time, the horse is out of the barn as they say, patients sometimes have had these movements for years at a time, and they're only being sent to us now, so I would say that our field... Actually they text these patients, oftentimes when it's too late. So definitely the physicians who are prescribing these medications, be it psychiatrist, primary care physician, gastroenterologist. I think it's really on them to be able to screen for these symptoms periodically and probably starting with the first follow-up visit after starting the medication. And to continue to do so it doesn't really take that long, I would say it just takes a few minutes to think about it, well is my patient developing any signs of these movements and trying to go through the mental exercises of screening for them, both asking the patient, whether they've seen the development of these movement at home, but also looking and seeing whether they see it, in their office. There is a scale which is a validated scale, it's the AIM scores, which guides the person who delivers this scale through a number of different examination points that can be useful to screen for subtle signs of tardive being developed. I realized that it is time consuming and that it's not feasible for everybody to do, but I would say if the practitioner has the time, it's always worth to doing the scale and to keeping the scale in the records so that you can always go back and compare whether there's been a change in the scores that would suggest that patients are developing this condition.