This year’s report from the Attorney General’s Office showed that Vermont
doctors received $3.1 million in gifts and donations from the pharmaceutical and
medical industry — an increase of 33 percent over the previous year. …
Again, patients showed lower brain volume and larger fluid-filled spaces on MRI
scans, with no differences between those who began treatment either a few months
or more than 1,year after an initial period of psychosis. …
“Our new study is very promising because it suggests that we could alleviate
pain by targeting the cannabinoid receptor CB2 without causing the kinds of
side-effects we associate with people using cannabis itself.”
…
That’s bad news for the companies that make leading atypicals–Johnson & Johnson Risperdal, Eli Lilly (Zyprexa), Bristol-Myers Squibb (Abilify),Pfizer (Geodon), AstraZeneca(Seroquel). Prescription rates for these meds have enjoyed a
strong growth curve, increasing more than fivefold among children over the past
15 years. …
The lawsuit was filed for the Attorney General’s Office in the 1st Judicial
District Court in Santa Fe by a Houston civil litigation firm, Bailey Perrin
Bailey, which specializes in lawsuits over the new generation of antipsychotic
drugs known as atypical antipsychotics. …
“They are interested in pharmacogenetic purposes to do case control studies of
adverse drug reactions,” said John Novembre, a co-author of the study published
in Nature. …
the public doesn’t trust pharma to share adverse info on their meds, further undermining that faith–and hurting
pharma’s rep. …
Eli Lilly will face a class-action suit over Zyprexa, now that a federal judge
has certified a group of insurance companies, pension funds, and unions that
want the drugmaker to repay them for the billions they spent on the
controversial antipsychotic drug. …
Until now, all the evidence for long-term maintenance of efficacy of Sativex has
come from long-term open-label exposurei. The results reported today confirm in
the context of a placebo-controlled double-blind study that efficacy is indeed
maintained in long-term use. …
The FDA has already warned patients and docs about some of the drugs on the
first list of 20 under scrutiny, such as TNF
blockers, in the news last week. …