Editor’s choice: the best of 2011–2012

Correspondence: Roger M Pinder 2 St Wilfrid’s Court, Monkgate, York YO31 7UQ, UK Tel +44 190 464 6684 Email [email protected] There were three papers in Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment that attracted the most attention in the last year, all recording more than 10,000 hits since publication. Varying widely in subject matter, by far the most popular of the trio, with almost 30,000 hits, was a publication on a new physical method for treating psychiatric disorders, in this case bipolar disorder, while publications on alcohol consumption and cognitive risk and dietary treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) were in second and third place, respectively. Physical methods for the management of neuropsychiatric disorders have a long history and predate both pharmacological and formal psychological treatments, with the possible exception of psychoanalysis. Currently available physical interventions were previously reviewed in the journal, where it was concluded that many of them are useful additions to the neuropsychiatrist’s therapeutic armamentarium. The radioelectric asymmetric conveyor is a new patented form of noninvasive brain stimulation, which has been used successfully to treat stress-related disorders, anxiety, and depression, while the current publication focused on the long-term treatment of bipolar patients who were already maintained on lithium. Addition of the radioelectric asymmetric conveyor to the standard treatment protocol resulted in a marked improvement in the number of manic and depressive episodes and a reduction in hospitalizations over periods of up to 16 months. Controlled trials in other settings and in other types of psychiatric disorder are clearly needed to confirm these promising initial results. A comparison with transcranial magnetic stimulation is also in order. It would be particularly interesting to see whether the radioelectric asymmetric conveyor is effective in treatment-resistant patients who qualify for electroconvulsive therapy or for other invasive modalities, such as deep brain stimulation, vagal nerve stimulation, and neurosurgery. The effect of moderate alcohol consumption on cognitive risk has been a hot topic in recent years, not least in our sister journal, the International Journal of Wine Research. In a much consulted paper in Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment, Neafsey and Collins carried out a thorough examination of 143 papers describing the relationship between moderate consumption of alcohol and some aspects of cognition, identifying two groups of publications. Those from 1977–1997 comprised neurosychological evaluations of mostly younger subjects, and suggested that moderate drinking either impaired cognition or that there was little difference between drinkers and nondrinkers. Later studies examined mental status in mostly older individuals, and have overwhelmDovepress