Alberta has followed through on a promise to drop homosexuality from its diagnostic guide, mere hours before the Edmonton Journal reported the province was still listing it as a mental disorder decades after the psychiatric profession abandoned the label.

"It was done late Tuesday afternoon. The minister was made aware of it and it was changed," said Alberta Health and Wellness spokesman Howard May.

Until Tuesday, Alberta listed homosexuality as a "mental disorder" along with bestiality and pedophilia, and doctors used the diagnostic code to bill the province for treating gays and lesbians more than 1,750 times between 1995 and 2004, government records show.

May said the change will not result in any "interruption in service" for psychiatrists and psychologists, but he could not say whether health professionals could still bill the province for the cost of 'treating' homosexuality.

He said the code existed purely to allow mental health professionals to identify sexual identity as a factor in treatment — but was not intended to describe it as a disease in itself.

"Say you have a youth having problems with being bullied in school. His doctor might diagnose depression and anxiety, but might also note that he's being persecuted by his peers because he's come out as homosexual," said May. "The code would allow the doctor to identify homosexuality as a factor in his diagnosis."

The province has known about the classification for more than a decade and the Conservative government first promised to change it in 1998. On Tuesday, Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky repeated that promise.

The American Psychiatric Association stopped considering homosexuality a disorder in 1973.

Alberta's current diagnostic codes were last updated in 2005, the same year that British Columbia removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders and four years after China did so.