drugs
You are viewing stuff tagged with drugs.
You are viewing stuff tagged with drugs.
Ben Goldacre: What doctors don’t know about the drugs they prescribe:
Publication bias affects every field of medicine. About half of all trials, on average, go missing in action, and we know that positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings.
Steve Silberman, in Wired: “Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.” Here’s the part of the article I found most fascinating:
In one study, Benedetti found that Alzheimer’s patients with impaired cognitive function get less pain relief from analgesic drugs than normal volunteers do. Using advanced methods of EEG analysis, he discovered that the connections between the patients’ prefrontal lobes and their opioid systems had been damaged. Healthy volunteers feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost. Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests that because Alzheimer’s patients don’t get the benefits of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.
The patent for Abacavir (ABC) (trade name Ziagen), a reverse transcriptase inhibitor (RTI) effective against some resistant strains of HIV, expires this December. Incidentally, a guest lecturer in microbiology came to us to speak about HIV. Here’s where it gets interesting:
Using public funds, researchers at the University of Minnesota analyzed primary literature and hypothesized a novel RTI. After testing revealed its efficacy, Abacavir was patented. GlaxoSmithKline then sold the drug as Ziagen… without proper rights to do so. Mark Yudof, president of the University in the late 90s (and a lawyer), decided to sue for royalties. Settlement: 400 million dollars. This is the largest intellectual property case in the U of M’s history.
90 percent of U.S. bills carry traces of cocaine:
Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine.
“When I was a young kid, my mom told me the dirtiest thing in the world is money,” said the researcher, Yuegang Zuo, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “Mom is always right.”
Mykala recently commented about the doping substance EPO… and I started writing a comment in response. Unfortunately, the comment got so long that, well, it turned into a full post. I recently revisited a first-person account of EPO and other chemicals for enhancing human performance — we now join this comment already in progress…