In Alzheimer’s disease, the problem is amyloid-β, a protein that accumulates in the brain and causes nerve cells to weaken and die. Drugs designed to eliminate plaques made of amyloid-β have a fatal problem: they need to enter the brain and remove the plaques without attacking healthy brain cells. A new breakthrough from the laboratory […]
Insomnia and other sleep disorders are very common, yet are not generally well understood by doctors and other health care professionals. Now the British Association for Psychopharmacology (BAP) has released up-to-the-minute guidelines in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, published by SAGE, to guide psychiatrists and physicians caring for those with sleep problems.
Depression is actually defined by specific clinical symptoms such as sadness, difficulty to experience pleasure, and sleep problems that are present for at least two weeks with impairment of psychosocial functioning. These symptoms guide the physician to make a diagnosis and to select antidepressant treatment such as drugs or psychotherapy.
Adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who received medication and individual sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) showed greater improvement in symptoms through 12 months compared to patients who did not receive CBT, according to a study in the August 25 issue of JAMA.
If you want to know how people become addicted and why they keep using drugs, ask the people who are addicted. Thirty-one of 75 patients hospitalized for opioid detoxification told University at Buffalo physicians they first got hooked on drugs legitimately prescribed for pain. Another 24 began with a friend’s left-over prescription pills or pilfered […]
Following up a pioneering 2007 proof-of-concept study, a University of Utah biochemist and colleagues have developed a promising new anti-HIV drug candidate, PIE12-trimer, that prevents HIV from attacking human cells. Michael S. Kay, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of biochemistry in the University of Utah School of Medicine and senior author of the study published Wednesday, […]
Yale researchers have discovered how a novel anti-depressant can take effect in hours, rather than the weeks or months usually required for most drugs currently on the market. The findings, described in the August 20 issue of the journal Science, should speed development of a safe and easy-to-administer form of the anti-depressant ketamine, which has […]
The pharmaceutical industry is a “market for lemons,” a market in which the seller knows much more than the buyer about the product and can profit from selling products less effective and less safe than consumers are led to believe, according to an analysis by sociologist Donald Light that will be presented at the 105th […]
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