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Of all clinical pharmacy topics, neurology is one of the most intriguing.  It is fairly complex and diverse, with many unknowns remaining regarding the optimal use of medications.  It is definitely an area that has multiple opportunities for pharmacists to provide their medication expertise! 

One of my favorite TED talks of all time is "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist who describes how she studied her own stroke as it happened.  I won't be able to do it justice by describing it in detail here (and I don't want to ruin it!).  If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend that you take 20 and watch it.  It's genius.

This module, titled Neurologic Disorders and Geriatrics, included the 2014 Guidelines for the Prevention of Stroke and Transient Ischemic Attack (TIA), a study examining the effect of citalopram on Alzheimer's dementia, and a study on the use of clopidogrel and aspirin in acute ischemic stroke or TIA.  I was most familiar with the stroke guidelines and the clopidogrel/aspirin article, as it was my chosen article during weekly journal club during my PGY2 residency.  The module contained a few questions requiring the use of outside resources to answer some patient specific questions.  This added a level of "real world" pharmacy practice, as the answer to a clinical question is not always available at the ready in a patient's chart. The assessment questions were all well written and pertinent to not only geriatric patients, but in other patient populations as well.  It was great to see questions on stroke prevention options for pregnant women.

Overall, the module took me about 1.5 hrs to complete, with most of the focus on the citalopram article as it was not familiar to me.  I did use the pdf voice reader to cover this article.  It doesn't work so well with documents with varied formatting, tables and graphs, but it does provide some great laughs hearing the gibberish!

Thoughts?  Feel free to comment here on Connect or reach out to me on Twitter: @renagosser