International Psychogeriatricspaper of the year 2014: a new tradition and the first candidate for a 2024 paper of the decade?

Abstract

In 2014, the International Psychogeriatric Association (IPA) celebrated the fact that IPA's flagship scientific journalInternational Psychogeriatrics(IPG) has matured, attaining 25 years of existence since its foundation in 1989. The IPG editorial team introduced several new features in the 2014 issues to celebrate this significant quarter century milestone. One of them was the new “paper of the month” category. Following an internal selection process amongst the editorial team, who ranked available accepted papers focusing on their scientific quality and clinical relevance each month, one paper was selected as paper of the month from the categories “original research articles” and “reviews”. This resulted in 12 papers of the month, of which eight were original research articles and four were reviews or meta-analyses. Each paper of the month was accompanied by a short commentary highlighting its importance, written either by an editorial team member, one of the reviewers of the paper, or an external international expert on the topic of the paper. The editorial team aimed to highlight various psychogeriatric topics, so there are papers covering the wide spectrum of cognitive impairment, from risk factors such a hippocampal atrophy (Ferrariniet al., 2014) and traumatic brain injury (Gilbertet al., 2014), via transition between diagnostic categories on the cognitive continuum (Elliset al., 2014) to variations in symptom expression (Rockwoodet al., 2014) and apathy (Theleritiset al., 2014) to exercise interventions for people with Alzheimer's disease (AD) (Farinaet al., 2014) or antipsychotic use for patients with dementia living in residential care (Kleijeret al., 2014). Other papers reported on topics relevant to the aging process in general, such as neuroplasticity (Valkanovaet al., 2014), loneliness (Yanet al., 2014) or attitudes to aging (Shenkinet al., 2014). Other psychogeriatric topics covered were delirium (Ritchieet al., 2014) and geriatric depression (Steffenset al., 2014). In the international spirit of IPA, authors of the 12 papers come from Australia, Canada China, Greece, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA. From those 12 papers an IPG paper of the year 2014 was selected with the help of three independent reviewers: Dr Doh Kwan Kim from South Korea, Dr Gill Livingston from the UK, and Dr Daniel Weintraub from the USA. Our three reviewers ranked all 12 papers of the month independently from each other and the highest ranked paper overall was “The association of traumatic brain injury with rate of progression of cognitive and functional impairment in a population-based cohort of Alzheimer's disease: the Cache County Dementia Progression Study” by Mac Gilbert, Christine Snyder, Chris Corcoran, Maria C. Norton, Constantine G. Lyketsos, and JoAnn T. Tschanz. The reviewers emphasized that traumatic brain injury (TBI) is recognized as an important risk factor for AD which needs more research, and that the study by Gilbertet al.contributes important new knowledge to the area with the specific strength of reporting long-term follow up. In this context, we refer to the excellent commentary on the paper of the year by Dr David Sharp (Sharp, 2014), which was published alongside the paper of the year when it was paper of the month in the October 2014 issue.