Drugs
scientificactivist | July 20, 2006From the archives:
(19 January 2006) Which of the following does not belong?
(a) abortion
(b) medical marijuana
(c) physician-assisted suicide
Although all three are contentious and litigious medical issues, the answer seems to be choice (b), medical marijuana, according to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On January 17, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Gonzales v. Oregon that the U.S. Attorney General did not have the authority to criminalize the prescription of lethal doses of drugs, currently allowed under Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, originally approved in 1994. The act, approved again in a…
scientificactivist | July 14, 2006Although a given scientific paper probably has at least something fairly interesting or unique about it, most people aren't going to be too interested in reading about, for example, the structural details of the protein-protein interactions between cytoplasmic integrin tails and focal adhesion-associated proteins (my work).
But this paper... man, this is completely different. Not only could I not wait to read it, hell, I wished I was there when the experiments were taking place!
On July 7th, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine published a paper in Psychopharmacology…
purepedantry | July 12, 2006What is the deal with the stories showing brain lesions that end addiction? First, there was this one. Then, today in Nature there was another one:
Strokes often change a person's character, depending on where the damage hits. Some may become more impulsive, others depressed. Now researchers have shown that damage to a small but very specific brain area can wipe out an addiction to smoking.
Antoine Bechera, of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has identified 14 patients who all stopped smoking immediately after having a stroke that damaged their insular cortex. This seems to be not…
mikethemadbiologist | July 10, 2006There is a winner in the War on Drugs: methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA. A recent article in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology reached the following conclusion:
Injecting drug users accounted for 49% of CA-MRSA infections but only 19% of the HA-MRSA infections (odds ratio, 4.2; 95% confidence interval, 2.4 to 7.4). Our study shows that a single clone of CA-MRSA accounts for the majority of infections. This strain originated in the community and is not related to MRSA strains from healthcare settings. Injecting drug users could be a major reservoir for CA-…
purepedantry | June 19, 2006PLoS Medicine is reporting a paper that compares the declining suicide rate in the US to the increasing number of prozac prescriptions since the drug's introduction in 1988. They find that the two are very well correlated:
The steady decline in suicide rates for both men and women is associated with an increasing number of fluoxetine prescriptions from 2,469,000 in 1988 to 33,320,000 in 2002. A cross-correlation analysis of fluoxetine use and suicide rates in the period 1988-2002 shows a significant negative correlation: rs = â0.92, p < 0.001.
Granted (as many of you will likely point…
purepedantry | June 13, 2006Researchers report that drinking coffee cuts the risk of cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol -- by 22 percent per cup each day -- but they stopped short of saying doctors should prescribe coffee for that reason.
The report from the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Oakland, California, was based on a look at data from 125,580 people.
"These data support the hypothesis that there is an ingredient in coffee that protects against cirrhosis, especially alcoholic cirrhosis," concluded the report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
You will be fine if you are an alcoholic; just…
purepedantry | June 9, 2006Here is a interesting idea about how to treat pain without addicting people to pain killers.
There is some back story to this business that you should know before we discuss why this is a cool idea, though.
Opioid drugs -- like codeine, morphine, and heroine -- act in the nervous system by activating receptors in specific regions of the brain that result in pain relief. If you were wondering though why evolution would be so kind as to make natural receptors to get yourself high, they are there because there are actually natural compounds that act at these receptors and do some similar…