In 2014, International Psychogeriatrics (IPG) for the first time introduced a “paper of the month” category as part of the 25th year's milestone celebrations. Papers of the month were chosen through an internal selection process by the IPG editorial team. Each month, the seven editors ranked suitable accepted papers from the categories “original research articles” and “reviews” according to scientific quality and clinical relevance. Each paper of the month was accompanied by a brief commentary written by one of the IPG editors, one of the reviewers for the paper, or an international expert on the specific topic of the paper. From the 12 papers of the month, an IPG paper of the year was selected after a ranking process involving three independent expert reviewers. Last year's winner was by Gilbert et al. on “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” (Gilbert et al., Reference Gilbert, Snyder, Corcoran, Norton, Lyketsos and Tschanz2014; Lautenschlager and Ames, Reference Lautenschlager and Ames2015). In 2015, the IPG editorial team did it all over again which led to ten papers of the months for 2015, as the special issues in July and October were not included in this process. The ten papers of the month for 2015 included eight that were original research articles and two reviews. As in 2014, the 2015 papers of the month again covered a diverse variety of psychogeriatric topics. Eight of the ten papers reported on cognition, cognitive deterioration, cognitive disorders or dementia, whereas the two others focused on delirium. The former discussed issues such as a provisional consensus clinical and research definition of agitation (Cummings et al., Reference Cummings2015), medication development for agitation and aggression in Alzheimer's disease (Soto et al., Reference Soto2015), awareness of memory deficits (Lehrner et al., Reference Lehrner2015), psychotic symptoms in frontotemporal dementia (Landqvist et al., Reference Landqvist, Gustafson, Passant and Englund2015), determinants of cognitive deterioration in late-life depression (Riddle et al., Reference Riddle, McQuoid, Potter, Steffens and Taylor2015), an activity of daily living tool for the diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (De Vriendt et al., Reference De Vriendt, Mets, Petrovic and Gorus2015), intentional and unintentional poisoning in dementia (Mitchell et al., Reference Mitchell, Harvey, Brodaty, Draper and Close2015) and prevalence and incidence of dementia in indigenous populations (Warren et al., Reference Warren, Shi, Young, Borenstein and Martiniuk2015). The latter included a comparison of delirium diagnoses in elderly medical inpatients using different classification criteria (Adamis et al., Reference Adamis, Rooney, Meagher, Mulligan and McCarthy2015) and using smartphone technology to detect attentional deficits in delirium (Tieges et al., Reference Tieges2015). As in 2014, the ten papers were truly international with authors coming from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Ireland, Sweden, the UK, and the USA.
This year, our three independent reviewers were Prof. Alexander Kurz from Germany, Prof. Martin Orrell from the UK, and Prof. Nancy Pachana from Australia and the highest ranked paper and, therefore, paper of the year 2015 was “Development of a smartphone application for the objective detection of attentional deficits in delirium” by Zoe Tieges, Antaine Stiohairt, Katie Scott, Klaudia Suchorb, Alexander Weir, Stuart Parls, Susan Shenkin, and Alasdair MacLullich from the UK (Tieges et al., Reference Tieges2015).
The feedback from the reviewers included the comments that Tieges et al. “provide a fresh and intelligent solution for an old problem: how to test attention at the bedside reliably? This is an example of how neuropsychological assessment can take advantage of modern technology. Similar apps should be provided for the testing of memory and executive functioning.” and [that] “the novel approach could assist in the diagnosis of delirium by providing a rapid and accurate assessment of inattention via a smartphone app.”
Ken Rockwood wrote an excellent commentary about the paper of the year, which appeared in the same issue (Rockwood, Reference Rockwood2015).
The IPG editorial team is excited that our second paper of the year uses a modern 21st century approach aiming to improve the diagnosis of delirium, one of the most common, but also difficult to recognize psychogeriatric conditions, in the hospital setting. There is no doubt that we will see increasingly more often publications investigating the potential benefit of modern technology for prevention, diagnosis, and management of psychogeriatric syndromes and disorders. We hope the work by Tieges et al. will inspire IPA members and IPG readers to embrace investigating young technologies as potential aids for tackling mental health challenges for older people.
We thank our three independent reviewers, congratulate the authors of the paper of the year 2015 and look forward to the IPG papers of the month of 2016.
Conflict of interest
NT Lautenschlager is the Editor-in-Chief of International Psychogeriatrics and therefore this editorial was assigned to one of the Deputy Editors of International Psychogeriatrics for the editorial review and approval process.
