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.
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 �n the same situation,� explains Dr. Stephen Dager, co-director of the University of Washington Center for Anxiety & Depression. �If a fear of something �s so strong you will do nearly anything to try & avoid �t, �t 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.
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?)
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?
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.
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...
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.
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...
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...