Families of New York residents suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or another form of dementia may want to take heed of findings showing the prevalence of doctor misdiagnosis. Treatments are few and many are still experimental, but a study’s authors state that the future treatments will likely be very specific to the type of dementia. Findings show that in the best of situations, nearly a quarter of total Alzheimer’s prevalence was misdiagnosed as either false negative or false positive. The presence of psychosis was a leading factor in a failure to diagnose correctly.

New York residents might like to know about the process involved when believing a doctor or hospital acted negligently. In one case, a $28.5 million judgment was awarded to a patient after a failure to diagnose her condition. The patient and her family filed a lawsuit against Mercy Clinic Springfield Communities because they said they begged specialists to perform diagnostic tests when she had severe symptoms of Wilson’s Disease.

Despite its name, people in New York and all over the country are at risk of tick-borne illnesses like Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Particularly widespread in the summer months when people camp, hike and engage in outdoor activities, they can be life-threatening for active individuals. Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever has been reported all over North and South America. The potentially fatal disease is caused by a bacterium, Rickettsia rickettsia. Physicians report that there has been a slow increase in cases of the disease over the years.

According to a report released on June 15 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an increasing number of patients in New York and the rest of the United States who have confusing medical symptoms are being diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease. They are also being prescribed dangerous, expensive and ineffective treatments. There have been cases in which patients have died from septic shock after being given the wrong, long-term treatment of intravenous antibiotics. For other patients, the misdiagnosis results in a dangerous delay of the treatment necessary to address the patient’s true underlying medical condition.