Now on ScienceBlogs: A study that oversells massage therapy
The Corpus Callosum is an occasional journal of armchair musings, by a suburban, reality-based, slightly-left-of-center guy, who reserves the right to be highly irregular at times. Topics: social commentary, neuroscience, politics, science news. Mission: to develop connections between hard science and social science, using linear thinking and intuition; and to explore the relative merits of spontaneity vs. strategy.
Corpus Callosum is written by a psychiatrist at a small community hospital somewhere in the USA. Email to cc.scienceblogger at gmail dot com.
Category: Psychiatry
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a treatment for major depression. It was approved (PDF) by the FDA in 2008. However, it has remained somewhat of a niche treatment. Some providers remain unimpressed by studies of efficacy. One problem is...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:46 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
The article describes a technique that it said to show a priori which patients are at risk for developing suicidal thoughts after starting an antidepressant. Of course the usual interpretive caveats apply: it is a small study, needs to be...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 1:19 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Objective diagnosis is in some ways the holy grail of medicine. It has been maddeningly elusive in psychiatry. Now comes a paper in which the authors suggest that they may have found this treasure. The paper details a method of...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:08 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
I've been mulling this over for a few days, finally deciding to write about it. There was an article in the NYT on 13 January 2010 about an NEJM article: Morphine May Help Traumatic Stress By BENEDICT CAREY Published: January...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:39 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
Those of us who watch the drug development pipeline have been pining for a nonaddictive anti-anxiety drug. Occasionally there are glimmers of hope. One candidate is emapunil, aka XBD-173 or AC-5216. In 2004, there was an article in the British...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:41 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
The article I am discussing in this post is the 2008 Heinz Lehmann Award paper, published in the open-access Canadian journal, Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience. It really covers two topics: translational research, and antipsychotic polypharmacy in which one of...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:57 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
The new drug is called iloperidone; the brand name in the USA will be Fanapt. It is yet another antipsychotic that blocks D2 and 5HT2 receptors. Although there is no universally accepted way of classifying drugs into families, it will...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:51 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
A recent report refers to the increasing number of Alzheimer patient an "emergency." Yet, despite an enormous amount of research, and a handful of drugs, we are not particularly close to having a robust intervention for this condition. Perhaps the...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:43 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
Poets on Prozac is the short title of a book by psychiatrist-poet Richard M. Berlin, MD. The full title is: Poets on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process. Berlin was an associate professor of psychiatry at the University...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:44 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
It is refreshing to see something like this. Both drugs are available as generics, so the financial motivation for a study like this is not great. But the clinical benefit could e substantial, albeit for a small subset of patients....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:34 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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