Heart Attack Victims-Fifth Graders-Vaginal Odor-Tip Sheets-Depression

Spouses of Heart Attack Victims May Face Heightened Depression Risk

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 22 -- A new study finds that spouses of heart attack victims are at increased risk for depression, anxiety or suicide, even if their partner survives.The researchers also found that men are more susceptible than women to depression... read more..

source:http://drugs.com

Minority Fifth Graders Face Health Obstacles, Study Finds

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 22 -- Black and Latino fifth graders in the United States are more likely than white students to be obese, to get too little exercise, to witness violence and to ride without seatbelts and bike helmets, all signs of significant... read more..

source:http://drugs.com

GetRidofVaginalOdor.com Releases Tip Sheets on How to Eliminate this...

The Tip Sheets Include Reassuring Advice and Tips that Can Help Women Get Rid of Vaginal Odor, Itch, and Other Issues(PRWeb August 23, 2012)Read the full story at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/8/prweb9825211.htm (Source: PRWeb: Medical Pharmaceuticals) read more..

source:http://www.medworm.com

Metastatic Breast Cancer-Heart Failure Patients-Chronic Heart Failure-Postmenopausal Women

Exercise May Ease Depression Tied to Heart Failure

FRIDAY, Aug. 3 -- Exercise can help ease depression symptoms in people with chronic heart failure, according to a new study.Researchers randomly assigned more than 2,300 heart failure patients in the United States to receive either education and... read more..

source:http://drugs.com

Drug Combo Better for Common Type of Metastatic Breast Cancer, UCI-Led Study Finds

From Targeted News Service (August 1, 2012)DAVIS, Calif., Aug. 1 -- The University of California at Irvineissued the following news release:Postmenopausal women with the most common type of metastaticbreast cancer now have a new treatment option... (Source: Drugs.com - Pharma News)MedWorm Sponsor Message: Please have a look at this new site driven by MedWorm: The Breast Cancer Daily read more..

source:http://www.medworm.com

Siddhartha Mukherjee-Depression Levels-Serotonin Levels

Yet More on the Broken Serotonin Model of Depression

A psychiatrist colleague sent me, with his endorsement, an article in the New York Times Magazine on the science of depression:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/magazine/the-science-and-history-of-treating-depression.html
--whose author is Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee of Columbia, whose recent book, Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer was very well reviewed.
Since I have previously been dismissive of the serotonin theory of depression, Dr. Mukherjee's account of the history of the science of depression provides some potential balance. Dr. Mukherjee's basic hypothesis is that while it's clear that the idea that serotonin is a sort of magic bullet for depression is deeply flawed, two things are probably true--first, that serotonin plays an important role in at least some cases of depression in one way or another; and second, that drugs that change depression levels have been extremely helpful in our understanding of depression, not as cures, but as chemical probes that help us better understand what's going on in the brain--so long as we understand properly what the probes are telling us.
So I recommend the article, but I did find myself hiccuping at two places where I thought the author deviated from the careful and balanced tone he had established. The first such passage that caught my attention was: "But such a line of inquiry can’t tell us whether the absence of serotonin causes depression. For that, we need to know if depressed men and women have measurably lower levels of serotonin or serotonin-metabolites (byproducts of serotonin breakdown), in their brains."
Now, asking that question gets us a part of the way to an answer, but it's quite misleading if taken to represent the full answer. This is the old confusion between association and causation. Answering this question might reveal an association between serotonin levels and depression, but tells us nothing about whether that association plays a causal role, or whether some other thing is causing both the depression and the serotonin variations. Getting us messed up between association and causation is one of the primary ways that Pharma marketing manages to sell us a lot of ineffective and potentially harmful drugs.
The other passage that disturbed me relates to the newer theory of depression that excites Dr. Mukherjee the most, though he admits that depression is still very complicated and there may be no single "answer." The new theory is that while in most of the adult brain, no new cells grow, there seems to be an exception and new cells can grow slowly in one portion of the hippocampus, which seems to be related to mood. Experiments in mice show that behavior changes that are depression-related can be caused by enhancing or blocking the growth of these cells; and in humans, brain scans seem to indicate some similar function for cell growth in this region. Dr. Mukherjee then states about this cell-growth theory: "Nor does the theory explain why “talk therapies” work in some patients and not in others, and why the combination of talk and antidepressants seems to work consistently better than either alone. It is very unlikely that we can “talk” our brains into growing cells."
This passage seems a retreat back into another mode of flawed thinking that Pharma marketing exploits to mislead us--the old-fashioned mind/body dualism, which persists in treating the mind as foreign from the body and made up of different sorts of stuff, so that things that influence the body cannot affect the mind and vice versa. Dr. Mukherjee had just finished explaining to us that when mice are put in an enhanced environment with fun new stuff to explore, they become more adverturous and less depressed-seeming, and their brains also grow new cells in the hippocampus. He apparently forgets for a moment that if an enhanced environment can grow new brain cells in mice, then the enhanced environment provided by "talk therapy" in humans might have the sa read more..

Drug Withdrawal Symptoms-Antidepressant Drugs-Moderate Depression-Clinical Trials

60 Minutes Weighs In on Antidepressants

I was just checking out on line yesterday's "60 Minutes" segment--
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7399362n&tag=contentBody;storyMediaBox
--that features a friend, Dr. Irving Kirsch of Harvard, a psychologist whose work on placebo effect and expectancy I have long admired. But the segment is only peripherally about placebo effect; it's rather about Kirsch's now oft-repeated finding that except for severe depression, the difference between antidepressants and placebos in clinical trials is negligible.
As seems typical, the news program featured as "gosh golly gee whiz" news stuff that we've been over in this blog many times before:

The serotonin theory of depression, on which most antidepressant therapy is based, is either only a part of the story or else dead wrong

The drug companies selectively publish the drug trials that show benefit and selectively hide the trials that don't

Several independent investigations have agreed with Kirsch's original work that in mild to moderate depression, there is hardly any difference between drug and placebo effects

What I personally found new was an interview with a British psychaitrist reporting that the UK National Health Service had independently replicated Kirsch's studies and found the same results. So they are now actively discouraging the use of antidepressant drugs for mild-to-moderate depression (the categories for which prescriptions in the US have exploded in the past 20 years) and are now busy working hard to implement--guess what--psychotherapy counseling and exercise programs which work just as well for those patients.
If I had any major quibble with the program, it was that the magic words "side effects" were first mentioned at around 11:30 of the 13:40 segment (by the British psychiatrist). Those words tell the whole story. Placebos might be equivalent to drug in regards to benefits--but certainly not with regard to adverse reactions. We have been incredibly slow (aided by aggressive drug company marketing) to realize in medicine that most of these "nonaddictive" drugs actually have serious withdrawal syndromes, such that the worsening symptoms when patients go off their antidepressants--interpreted by the drug companies as sure proof that they work--might just as well be drug withdrawal symptoms as recurrence-of-depression symptoms.
The other fun part of the program was watching the US psychiatrist (and of course, consultant for several drug firms) who was put on to defend the track record of these drugs. He naturally made no mention of side effects whatever, but he did insist that in his own independent studies, 14% of moderately depressed patients do better on drug than on placebo. (He admitted that it was a wash in mild depression.) In his mind this justified current practice. Can you believe it--14%??? For a condition where the drugs have serious side effects and where talk therapy or exercise work as well? And that's apparently the best rebuttal the drug industry can come up with?
I must here repeat the usual disclaimer--don't try this at home--if you're depressed see your doctor and do what the doctor says, and above all don't discontinue any drug without the doctor's advice. read more..