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. …
Researchers found that, for uninsured patients, the percentage of medications
prescribed as generics rose from 12 percent to 30 percent after the clinic
closed its drug sample closet. For Medicaid patients, however, there was no
significant change in generic prescribing. …