The role of primary care in identification and ongoing management of dementia: a time of transition.

In this edition of International Psychogeriatrics, Pertrazzuoli et al. (2017) address attitudes to dementia by primary care physicians (PCPs) across a range of European countries. The article focusses on diagnosis, screening instruments and drug treatment, and finds a wide range of approaches to the PCPs' role in referral for diagnosis and medication prescription. The findings include that PCPs who are allowed to prescribe dementia drugs, engage in higher levels of diagnostic work up, despite all the barriers to identification ably summarized in the paper. Perhaps, this heterogeneity is not random: it may be that roles and responsibilities for PCPs in relation to dementia are in transition.