Psychiatric clearance for patients started on interferon-alpha-based therapies.

摘要

Increasingly, psychiatrists are asked to provide "psychiatric clearance" for patients who are to be treated with a regimen that includes recombinant preparations of interferon-alpha (IFN-a), often in combination with other antiviral medications. The most common use for IFN-a is in the treatment of chronic hepatitis C, which affects about 2% of the general U.S. population and about 20% of people with severe mental illness (1). Each year, more people in the United States die from hepatitis C complications, such as severe cirrhosis and hepatocellular cancer, than from HIV. IFN-a is also used, in combination with other medications, to treat some cancers, such as metastatic melanoma.