Dendrimers as oral drug transporters
Dendrimers, those tree-like polymers formed from branched monomers, may one day turn up in prescription drugs. Several studies have already shown that they can act as carriers for poorly soluble drug molecules, and even for DNA in gene therapy.
Researchers at the University of Manchester, UK, have now shown that packaging a drug in a dendrimer host not only makes it soluble but also allows it to bypass the transporter protein that would normally stop it from being absorbed in the intestines after it has been taken orally.
Antony D’Emanuele’s group is studying the uptake of propranolol (a beta blocker and anti-anxiety drug) using monolayers of a human cell line known as...
Counselor Fights mental Illness With Comedy
Most people think you have to be nuts to do stand-up comedy. However, counsellor and stand-up comic David Granirer offers it as a form of therapy. Granirer is the founder of "Comedy Courage," a course where people with mental illness turn their problems into comedy, then perform their acts at a gala showcase.
Vancouver, B.C. (PRWEB) April 28, 2004 -– Most people think you have to be nuts to do stand-up comedy. However, counsellor and stand-up comic David Granirer offers it as a form of therapy.
Granirer is the founder of "Comedy Courage," a course where people with mental illness turn their problems into comedy, then perform their acts at a gala showcase.
Passage of “The Child Medication Safety Act” Would Prohibit Parents Being Coerced to Administer Suicidal Inducing Psychiatric Drugs
LOS ANGELES: With the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under federal investigation for suppressing evidence that antidepressants can lead to child suicide, alarmed parents across the U.S. are asking members of the U.S. Senate for Federal safeguards against coerced child drugging in schools.
In the wake of increasing reports by parents who had been threatened, pressured or forced to given their children psychiatric drugs as a condition of attending school, the U.S. House of Representatives acted swiftly in passing the Child Medication Safety Act by a landslide vote of 425 to one in May of 2003. The bill, which prohibits this abusive practice, was then introduced into the Senate in July 2003, yet despite increasing information on the dangers of the drugs and their lethal effects on children, the Senate has yet to pass the bill.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE VISIT THE CCHR SITE
A drug used to treat tuberculosis may also help people to overcome a fear of spiders or other phobias. Doctors in the United States believe D-cycloserine could also help people with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Tests on 30 patients terrified of heights has found the drug, when used in combination with therapy, helped them overcome their fears.
While further research is needed, experts told Chemistry & Industry magazine the findings were exciting.
Millions of people around the world suffer from phobias. Those with severe phobias sometimes...
Snakes, spiders, high places & public speaking make many people uncomfortable. But for some, these objects & settings cause overwhelming feelings of fear & apprehension – a reaction defined as a phobia.
“Phobias are fears which are excessive compared to the reactions most people might have to the same object or ín the same situation,” explains Dr. Stephen Dager, co-director of the University of Washington Center for Anxiety & Depression. “If a fear of something ís so strong you will do nearly anything to try & avoid ít, ít may be a phobia.”
Common phobias include...
Michelle LaPrise's email phobia
Hi Gary,
After talking with a fellow-tapper, I came to the realization I have "email phobia." I get panicky when I see all my unread emails - especially yours. So I avoid them all and don't look at emails til I "have time". If I try to pick out the urgent ones...
"Mass sociogenic illness" (MSI), a form of mass hysteria, demonstrates the process. In MSI, mere sight and sound, like disabling viruses, can make so many people feel so sick that within minutes an entire town's ambulances are summoned. One such case occurred in a summer program in Florida for disadvantaged kids (Desenclos, Gardner, & Horan, 1992). Every day at noon, the 150 children gathered in a dining hall where they were served pre-packaged lunches. As lunch began one day, a girl complained that her sandwich didn't taste right: she felt nauseated, and came back from the restroom reporting that she had thrown up. Others began to complain that their stomachs hurt too and that the sandwiches really did taste funny. Then a number of them described having headaches, tingling in their hands and feet, and abdominal cramping. The supervisor, obviously worried about all the complaints, announced to the horrified children that the food might be poisoned. They were told to stop eating immediately.
The teen-age years have never been easy. They can be especially difficult for girls, who experience hormonal influences that wreck their prepubescent physical equality with boys, cause radical changes in body shape and weight and sometimes touch off emotional and reproductive upheavals. But for many reasons, the challenges facing adolescent girls have never been greater than they are today.
An unprecedented number of girls fall from the grace of childhood innocence to discover cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, depression, eating disorders and unwanted pregnancies.
I'm Okay, If You Say So
I'm sane, no, really, I am.
I'm not insane. No, really, I'm not.
Except...I've struggled with clinical depression and drug addiction, and these are both diseases of the brain. For a long time I made the same mistakes in life over and over, knowing better each time -- but doing it anyway. I was married and divorced four times before I figured out that I was giving in to relationship-wrecking compulsive behavior.
But since I don't rave on the street, I don't stalk people or have delusions of grandeur or hallucinate or hear voices, let's pretend I'm not crazy.
When I was young, I was in a mental hospital because of an overdose of a powerful street drug.
The drug that put me there made me temporarily psychotic. I chased my mother around and smashed windows and I bit a cop on the leg as he cuffed me and I writhed vomiting and hallucinating in the back of his police car.
The number of children diagnosed with and treated for disruptive disorders including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has markedly increased over the last decade. Concurrent with this trend is a growing debate about the best way to treat such problems in children.
According to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in February 2000, the number of preschool children receiving stimulants, antidepressants and other psychiatric medications "rose drastically from 1991 to 1995." The study raised concerns about the increasing use of medications to manage ADHD disorders in young children because little is known about their safety and effectiveness for children of preschool ages. Few of these drugs, the study points out, are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for prescription to young children.
For parents, especially those parents of children who have been diagnosed with a behavioral or emotional disorder or those who suspect their children have been suffering from such a problem, these new concerns...
At the age of 8, Elyse Monti of East Greenwich, R.I., was staying up half the night to do homework. It's not that her teachers were piling it on. It's that in Elyse's mind, it had to be perfect.
"All my obsessions were on school," she says. "Am I doing this right? I'd spend hours on homework. If I couldn't get a math problem, I'd start crying."
Elyse has obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD, an anxiety disorder that affects about 1% of children and about 2.3% of adults. OCD causes intrusive, repetitive, often fearful thoughts, such as an excessive dread of germs. These fears result in compulsive behaviors, such as the need to constantly wash hands or the inability to eat in restaurants.
About a third of adults with the disorder say their symptoms began in childhood, but effective treatments for children are not widely known, and therapists familiar with OCD in children are rare. (Related quiz: Does your child have OCD?)
Alcohol
"Because alcohol has depressive & anxiolytic properties ‹diminishes anxiety mainly by depressing the higher centers of the brain›, acute intoxication rarely involves acute anxiety or panic. However, acute alcohol withdrawal, as a hyperadrenergic state..."
A hypochondria “checklist” can help you sort through many overlapping medical and psychiatric disorders and increase your chances of making an accurate diagnosis. Then—by addressing hypochondria’s cognitive dysfunction—you can help patients achieve partial or full remission and change their distressing behaviors.
We offer a checklist that is useful in our practice and suggest behavioral therapies and medications that can help calm these patients’ excessive, unwarranted fears.
Working as a team
Ideal approach. Because hypochondriasis has features of medical and mental illness, working with the patient’s primary care physician is ideal. Physicians often consider these patients difficult because they demand a lot of time, support, and reassurance. Together, you can:
A boy asks a girl to the school dance, and she says no. Will he decide that he is a social failure and begin to withdraw, or simply ask another girl and hope for a better result? If he is programmed for optimism, the boy will probably go to the dance with a date. What's not clear, however, is how he got programmed in the first place.
As it turns out, researchers say, the answer is a complex blend of psychology, physical sciences, and common sense. Hoping to explain why some adults bear up while others dwell on pain and slide into depression, researchers are discovering that resilience and a hopeful outlook begin-and must begin to take root-in childhood.
If children are optimistic, they are likely to have a happier, healthier life, with less illness, more success, and greater joy in their lives.
British GPs are prescribing drugs for depression in unprecedented quantities. But is this really the best cure? Luisa Dilner reports
Sunday April 18, 2004
The Observer
Death and taxes used to be the only certainties in life. For British women, we can now add another one: depression. Statistics may show that one in four women becomes depressed at some time, but a magazine survey this week claims that more than half of British women have taken antidepressants.
Unofficially at least, depression is an expected life experience for women, slipped in somewhere between having children, looking after elderly parents and either divorce or retirement. Is life now so difficult for women that it's normal to be depressed?
As more and more unhappy British youngsters take desperate action, a nationwide inquiry launches
A shocking rise in the number of young people deliberately harming themselves has prompted the first nationwide inquiry into a problem that mental health experts admit they do not fully understand.
Scores of teenagers across Britain will be interviewed to discover the exact nature and scale of the problem, in the 18-month inquiry to be launched on Tuesday as a joint initiative by the Mental Health Foundation and the Camelot Foundation, the grant-making body funded by the lottery company.
Statistics on self-harm are thought to be unreliable as many incidents end up being treated in the home, away from mental health experts.
WHAT ARE THE SYMPTOMS OF A DISSOCIATIVE DISORDER?
People with Dissociative Disorders may experience any of the following: depression, mood swings, suicidal tendencies, sleep disorders (insomnia, night terrors, and sleep walking), panic attacks and phobias (flashbacks, reactions to stimuli or "triggers"), alcohol and drug abuse, compulsions and rituals, psychotic-like symptoms (including auditory and visual hallucinations), and eating disorders. In addition, individuals with Dissociative Disorders can experience headaches, amnesias, time loss, trances, and "out of body experiences." Some people with Dissociative Disorders have a tendency...
Sunday April 25, 2004
The Observer
Many psychiatrists believe that schizophrenia's tendency to run in families implies that it is heritable. While less than one per cent of the general population are likely to get the illness in their lifetime, 17 per cent do so if one of their parents had it. The figure rises to 46 per cent if both parents did. But the view that just being raised by schizophrenics might be a cause of schizophrenia is...
New Study Contributes to Understanding Why Depression Is So Difficult
For Some People To Shake Off
Someone who is "down in the dumps" or feeling "blue" might welcome and be cheered by a kind word. Someone with clinical depression, however, not only might not welcome such a gesture, but might prefer to hear something negative. That's the finding of a new study published in the August edition of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Journal of Abnormal Psychology which suggests that depressed people not only avoid favorable feedback, they actively seek negative feedback.
Brooke Shields, the mother of a nearly 1-year-old daughter, is writing a book about postpartum depression. Hyperion plans to publish "Down Came the Rain" in the spring of 2005.
"By sharing my experience, I hope to shed light on a real, yet often hidden or ignored problem that affects women of all walks of life in varying degrees," the 38-year-old actress said in a statement Monday.
By JANE E. BRODY
Depression surrounds people with a life-draining cloud that typically saps their joy, energy and desire for work, play, food and sex. Once recognized and properly treated, depression can usually be relieved, restoring the zest for life and all it has to offer. Depression can be lifted in two-thirds to three-fourths of patients by antidepressant medications, including the tricyclics, like...
WASHINGTON -- Being stuck indoors, especially during the winter, is bad enough; it is even worse under crowded conditions. But, according to a new study that looks at the effects of household crowding on people's well-being, architecture can make all the difference.
This study, appearing in the current issue of the American Psychological Association's (APA) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and authored by psychologists Gary W. Evans, Ph.D., Stephen J. Lepore, Ph.D., and attorney Alex Schroeder, J.D., found that residents living in crowded homes with greater architectural depth...
Patients' symptoms were significantly lowered, study finds.
A type of talk therapy can help hypochondriacs recognize their illnesses are only in their heads, a study said Tuesday.
The condition, which afflicts one in 20 Americans and siphons $150 billion from the U.S. economy, is marked by persistent fear or a belief that one has a serious, undiagnosed illness.
Currently, there is no widely accepted treatment for hypochondria, which researchers said is often misunderstood and rarely studied.
It can be caused by just about anything - a horrific event at work, bullying, a road or rail accident, domestic violence, sexual abuse - and at any age. My oldest client was 83, my youngest eight.
An incident will have been so shattering that it dramatically changes the situation they're in and influences the way they'll behave and think for years. In contrast with other responses to disaster, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has delayed effects. Feelings of anger and terror don't go away; they are continually re-triggered in panic attacks and flashbacks.
Your heart pounds, you feel dizzy, everything makes you jump out of your skin. Adrenaline is pumped round your body. After an attack, you're lethargic; it's like letting air out of a balloon.
There is no cure, but there are ways of learning to cope. A simple thing like...
On September 2, the FDA approved Paxil (Seroxat) for yet another newly invented "condition." Inasmuch as those most likely to complain about premenstrual discomfort which has been labeled, premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD)--are likely to be pubescent girls, FDA's approval is bizarre.
Following disclosure that children and adolescents given Paxil in the manufacturer's own controlled clinical trials, the suicide rate was between twice and three times the rate of those given a placebo, FDA announced an investigation of the clinical trial data from all pediatric trials of Paxil and the other SSRI antidepressants-- such as, Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Effexor.
Approval of PMDD is bizarre given the renewed debate and growing concern about ...
GPs know they are overprescribing antidepressant drugs such as Prozac and Seroxat, but believe the lack of other forms of help for those suffering from mild depression and stress leaves them no choice, a survey reveals today.
The survey shows that 80% of GPs believe they are writing too many prescriptions for the SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors), as the class of drugs made famous by Prozac is known.
Women who eat chocolate while they are pregnant give birth to happier and more active babies. Chocolate also seems to benefit the babies of women who are stressed during pregnancy, making the infants less fearful, a study suggested yesterday.
For today's news item, we have come up with a list of free software that you may find useful. There's even free anti-spyware and free virus scanners, as the list of viruses and spyware grows ever longer.
ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a web page. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries). Even if your web application already includes spell checking functionality, you might still want to install this utility because it is definitely much faster than a server-side solution. Plus you get to store and use your personal word list across all your applications, instead of maintaining separate ones on each application.
Free on line virus scanners
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/housecall/start_corp.asp
http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/co...n_principal.htm
Free anti virus software
http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php
Free software firewall
http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/cata...lid=home_zainfo
Gibson Research Corporation - includes Shields Up
BigFix - fix it before it fails
http://bigfix.com/download/download.html
Spyware/adware removers
http://lavasoft.element5.com/software/adaware/
http://security.kolla.de
online checker
SpamPal
The links have all been checked, but if anything is down, please let one of the News team staff know by clicking on our names in the left column.
Study: Tuberculosis medication useful in treating phobias
NEW ORLEANS, Nov. 10 - Scientists say a pill may help people overcome their worst phobias. In a small study released Monday, a drug already on the market for tuberculosis helped people who were terrified of heights get over that fear with only two therapy sessions instead of the usual seven or eight.
The study, led by Michael Davis, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Emory University School of Medicine, was described at a session about unlearning fears at the Society for Neuroscience meeting.
Davis based his work on research...
A FALSE ALARM. NO...IT'S MORE FREUDIAN.
Publication Date: Sep/Oct 93
Summary: Compares two theories regarding panic attacks. Donald Klein (Columbia University) claims panic attacks are the result of faulty wiring, a defect in the way our brains warn against suffocation. False alarm sets off cascade of events that culminate in a panic attack; Work of Katherine Shear (University of Pittsburgh) and colleagues, who claim both biology and early experience combine to cause panic; Their report in 'American Journal of Psychiatry'; Details.
Panic, 1
Panic attacks. The anxiety and panic are real. And terrifying. But they've been a mystery to researchers and clinicians who've been trying for years to pinpoint the cause...
People with trimethyaminuria lack the enzyme flavin-containing monooxygenase 3 (FMO3), which is produced by the liver and is part of a family of similar enzymes responsible for breaking down compounds that contain nitrogen, sulfur or phosphorous. Not all of the functions of FMO3 are known, so physicians don't know what other symptoms besides odor may be associated with trimethyaminuria.
Researchers suspect (and non-human studies have suggested) that FMO3 breaks down other substances beyond trimethylamine, such as antidepressant drugs, nicotine and tamoxifen (an anticancer drug). If this is true, people with trimethyaminuria may have side effects when taking these other drugs that people without the condition don't experience (or experience with less severity).
Here's the scene: my doctor's office, packets of trial-size Viagra in ridiculously erect stacks upon his desk; in a bowl, a scramble of candied goods in blister pouches — the by-now-passe Prozac, the mild, middle of the road Zoloft, the newer, niftier stuff like Remeron and Effexor; it's all mixed together in a foiled, tinselly heap. My doctor reaches out — he is a tall, lanky man with black hair that falls like fresh ink before his eyes — and tosses me six free panels of the Prozac. "One hundred twenty milligrams a day," he says. "Let's see if that does it."
Drug companies have deliberately suppressed evidence that many antidepressants are unsuitable or even dangerous for children, according to psychiatrists and child health experts.
Researchers uncovered unpublished data about clinical trials of the most popular antidepressants on the market, known as selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which raise serious doubts about prescribing them to children.
Published studies have so far indicated that the benefits have outweighed risks for all five drugs studied...
What is Seasonal Affective Disorder?
Some people suffer from symptoms of depression during the winter months, with symptoms subsiding during the spring and summer months. This may be a sign of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). SAD is a mood disorder associated...