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POPSWho Are We? Coming of Age on Antidepressants The reason has to do with the way drugs are tested and approved. To get F.D.A. approval, a drug has to beat a placebo in two randomized clinical trials that typically involve a few hundred subjects who are treated for relatively short periods, usually 4 to 12 weeks.So drugs are approved based on short-term studies for what turns out to be long-term — often lifelong — use in the world of clinical practice. What do I say to a depressed patient who is doing well after five years on such a drug but can’t stop without a depressive relapse and who wants reassurance that the drug has no long-term adverse effects?I usually say that we have no evidence that the drug poses a risk with long-term use; and since the risk of untreated depression is much greater than the hypothetical risk of the drug, it makes sense to stay on it.
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POPSDepressed astronauts might get computerized solace (AP) I couldn't help thinking how that the first paragraph is almost the same as that for a soldier. There are a lot more reasons for a soldier to become depressed though. And a lot less effort being made to help them, unless you consider a handful of a drug cocktail treatment.
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POPSCentral Control of Your Doctor and Your Health!
The House bill calls for this appointed board, dubbed the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, to be at least 50 percent "physicians or other experts with clinical expertise." However, there is no way the Council's 15 members - all of whom also must be employed in federal government agencies - can determine which drug or treatment is going to work . You are a unique human being, with genetic and environmental factors influencing your health. Your sister has severe depression, and she responds only to one antidepressant. What if it isn't the one that works for most people? Or it's the most expensive one? Peter Pitts, head of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest and a former FDA associate commissioner, explained why "one-size-fits-all" medicine doesn't work: Most comparative effectiveness studies "don't capture the genetic variations that explain differences in response to medicines by different patients."
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POPSEmpty Promises Many effects of antidepressants seem to be due to the placebo effect. And the published trials are only the tip of the iceberg of material that normally doesn't see the light of day. There are also clinical trials that have not been published. These are studies that have failed to show a significant benefit from taking the drug. When all of the data sets are combined " published and unpublished " the inescapable conclusion is that antidepressants may be little more than active placebos, drugs with very little specific therapeutic benefit, but with serious side effects. Not only this, but antidepressants are liberaly prescribed to treat very mild symthoms that rarely stand to the criteria of clinical depression. This does not make the drugs' effectiveness clearer.
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POPSFrom Stress to Depression (cont) "We see big differences in people who have experienced acute stress compared to chronic stress," he says. "The machinery becomes very different." If the stress remains long enough, a person may develop major depression. It is this kind of finding, say the UM researchers, that provides one reason to believe that depression has important connections to the stress axis, and why much research at the MHRI on this topic has involved clinical studies of people with major depression. Overall, says Akil, the stress axis uses "nested loops" of neurons and chemical messengers to provide many avenues for regulating the body's response to stress. Controls via the genetic machinery appear to "define the limits" of the stress response. Other pathways probably provide the various nuances of response. Many control mechanisms, however, remain to be discovered.
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POPSNY mayor to New Yorkers: You are now all involuntary lab rats
More: In the past year, researchers…have reported one of the most rigorous experiments so far: a randomized clinical trial of heart patients who were put on different diets. Those on a low-sodium diet were more likely to be rehospitalized and to die, results that prompted the researchers to ask, “Is sodium an old enemy or a new friend?” Those results…are a reminder that salt affects a great deal more than blood pressure. Lowering it can cause problems with blood flow to the kidneys and insulin resistance, which can increase the risk of strokes and heart attacks. Salt deprivation might also darken your mood, according to recent research…After analyzing the behavior and brain chemistry of salt-deprived rats, the psychologists found that salt, like chocolate and cocaine, affected reward circuitry in the brain, and that salt-deprived rats exhibited anhedonia, a symptom of depression characterized by the inability to enjoy normally pleasurable activities.
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POPSDespite Evidence That Salt Is Good For You . . . . If you were an academic researcher, you’d have to persuade your institutional review board that you had considered the risks and obtained informed consent from the participants. You might, for instance, take note of a recent clinical trial in which heart patients put on a restricted-sodium diet fared worse than those on a normal diet. In light of new research suggesting that eating salt improves mood and combats depression, you might be alert for psychological effects of the new diet. You might worry that people would react to less-salty food by eating more of it, a trend you could monitor by comparing them with a control group. But if you are the mayor of New York, no such constraints apply. You can simply announce, as Michael Bloomberg did, that the city is starting a “nationwide initiative” to pressure the food industry and restaurant chains to cut salt intake by half over the next decade.
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POPSchild abuse & silent witnesses Child abuse 'impacts stress gene' Child abuse has long-lasting effects Abuse in early childhood permanently alters how the brain reacts to stress, a Canadian study suggests. Analysis of brain tissue from adults who had committed suicide found key genetic changes in those who had suffered abuse as a child. It affects the production of a receptor known to be involved in stress responses, the researchers said. The Nature Neuroscience study underpins the impact of stress on early brain development, experts said. Previous research has shown that abuse in childhood is associated with an increased reaction to stressful circumstances. Whilst these results obviously need to be replicated, they provide a mechanism by which experiences early in life can have an effect on behaviour later in adulthood Dr Jonathan Mill But exactly how environmental factors interact with genes and contribute to depression or other mental disorders in adulthood is not well understood.
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POPSFirst 'placebo gene' discovered 
To see if there were genetic differences between responders and non-responders, Furmark screened them for a variant of the gene for tryptophan hydroxylase-2, which makes the brain chemical, serotonin. Previous studies suggested that people with two copies of a particular "G" variant are less anxious in standard "fear" tests. Sure enough 8 of the 10 responders had two copies, while none of the non-responders did (Journal of Neuroscience (DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2534-08.2008). Furmark believes the effect of the gene may extend to other conditions where the amygdala is involved, such as phobias, pain disorders and even depression. However, he cautions that only further studies will reveal whether the gene influences the placebo effect more generally. Echoing Furmark's caution is Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin, Italy. "We know that there's not a single placebo effect but many." Some may work through genetics, he adds, others through the expectation of a reward.
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POPSThe Cost of Alcohol in UK A fifth of all hospital beds. These bare figures, dreadful as they are, do not begin to convey the devestation caused by alcohol to individuals and their families.
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POPSDrug use is a Health Issue, not a Law Enforcement issue We waste a lot of money fighting the drug trade in the U.S. What do we have to show for it? Over-crowded jails, bloated law enforcement budgets devoted to fighting drug use instead of helping the user fight the habit, a criminal underworld that is profitting from drug traffic and an ever increasing crime rate surrounding drug trafficking. This issue needs to be seriously addressed and changes need to be made, because what we are doing is NOT WORKING. For what other health issues do we use police, prosecutors, and prisons as the primary means of 'helping' a sick person? Isn't that just as silly as using a baseball bat to cure someone of clinical depression? (Smile and get happy or I'll whack you again)
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POPSRedefining Depression "What is the “real” trigger for this patient’s depression? Perhaps it is a combination of psychological and neurological factors. In short, the notion of “reacting” to adverse life events is complex and problematic."
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POPSThe debate over mammograms for elderly women "The mammography study, published in May in The Journal of Clinical Oncology, looked at the records of more than 12,000 patients aged 80 and older who were given diagnoses of breast cancer from 1996 to 2002. It found that among those who had a mammogram every year or two before their diagnosis, 68 percent found the cancer at an early stage, compared with 33 percent of those who skipped mammograms altogether. "Five years after the breast cancer diagnosis, 75 percent of the frequent screeners were alive, compared with only 48 percent of those who had not been screened for at least five years before their cancer was found. "But those who had frequent mammograms were not only more likely to survive breast cancer, the study’s authors said, they were more likely to survive other illnesses as well, meaning that they may simply have been healthier to begin with."
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POPS10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong And the two last ones: IX. We Love Sunlight But Fear Nuclear Power Why "natural" risks are easier to accept. X. We Should Fear Fear Itself Why worrying about risk is itself risky. Though the odds of dying in a terror attack like 9/11 or contracting Ebola are infinitesimal, the effects of chronic stress caused by constant fear are significant. Studies have found that the more people were exposed to media portrayals of the 2001 attacks, the more anxious and depressed they were. Chronically elevated stress harms our physiology, says Ropeik. "It interferes with the formation of bone, lowers immune response, increases the likelihood of clinical depression and diabetes, impairs our memory and our fertility, and contributes to long-term cardiovascular damage and high blood pressure."
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POPSIs feeling Low Depression? epression has lots and lots of meanings to different people. It can mean feeling low, low mood. Long term depression or short term.....
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