Drugs
sb admin | November 12, 2007There's a revolutionary mental health claim in a hot new article - Therapeutic Efficacy of Cash in the Treatment of Anxiety and Depressive Disorders: Two Case Studies (e-pub ahead of print).
The first case report involves a man who was laid off and lost his pension; after treatment with various SSRIs and sedatives with numerous side effects, the patient came into the office free of depressive symptoms. He claimed to have won the lottery, which fMRI brain scans [shown here] confirmed with evidence of a complete remission. In the second case, a single mother of four found her anxiety and…
angrytoxicologist | November 7, 2007A couple of weeks ago, as I'm sure you heard, the FDA held an advisory committee meeting that concluded that there should be no use of cough/cold products for children under 6. There is a good amount of evidence that the drugs (including antitussive, expectorant, nasal decongestant, antihistamine and combination products) were not effective and are harmful in some cases. Now what happens?
A couple of signs: Most manufacturers took all under 2 cough/cold medicines off the shelf. Many, like Wyeth who makes Dimetapp and Robitussin have recalled Children's Dimetapp and some Robitussin to replace…
grrlscientist | November 5, 2007tags: drugs, pharmaceuticals, Drugs and Pharmacology carnival, blog carnival
Hey you guys, the very first edition of the new blog carnival, Drugs and Pharmacology carnival, is now available for you to read. This is a monthly blog carnival that focuses on essays related to drugs -- ranging from the medicinal to the recreational.
revere | October 23, 2007If you have or have had small children you may be all too familiar with earaches. When our kids were small we felt as if we were single-handedly supporting the amoxicillin makers. A major cause of middle ear infection is the organism Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae), which sometimes it invades other tissues and causes bacterial meningitis (not the kind that you read about killing healthy teenagers, but bad enough) and sometimes other body sites. It is also a cause of pneumonia in adults and was a common cause of secondary bacterial pneumonia in the 1918 flu. That was then. Now there…
revere | October 20, 2007The Erectile Dysfunction (ED) drugs already carry the required warnings we know from our misspent youth: Warning: you can go blind doing this. Okay, it says you may experience sudden loss of vision. Same thing. Now a new warning is being added: Warning: it might make you hard -- of hearing:
The impotence drugs Viagra, Cialis and Levitra will get prominent warnings on the risk of sudden hearing loss, U.S. regulators said.
[snip]
The FDA found 29 reports of sudden hearing loss in people who took the erectile dysfunction drugs since 1996. More than 40 million people worldwide have used the…
mikethemadbiologist | October 11, 2007
It's bad enough that a plane which previously made non-stop flights from the continental U.S. to Guantanamo Bay crashed in the Yucatan with tons of cocaine aboard. What's even more ridiculous is the 'cover' story.
The plane was owned by Donna Blue Aircraft which is in the business of "Aircraft Consultance and Sales."
According to Boing Boing:
Mad Cow Morning News visited the owners of the plane, "Donna Blue Aircraft Inc" of Coconut Beach FL., and discovered that it's an "empty office suite with a blank sign out front."
There was no sign of Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc., at the address listed at…
moleculeoftheday | October 10, 2007Uracil mustard is a mimic of the RNA component and DNA precursor uracil, and it also has a few reactive ends that can do some damage.
Those chlorines amount to very reactive ends; the idea here is that they're hopefully a little better targeted than generally toxic molecules like the plain old nitrogen mustards. Hopefully, most of your cancer drug ends up in cancer cells, and targeting DNA bases (which they go through like crazy) has been a common strategy.
omnibrain | September 28, 2007Mind Hacks has alerted us to some amazing engineering from Harvard University:
A team from Harvard Medical School are interested in how smoked marijuana affects the brain, but have come to the inevitable conclusion that it's actually quite hard smoking a joint when you're lying on your back being brain scanned.
So the research team put their heads together (!), and realised they needed to design a bong - a water pipe for smoking marijuana - safe to use in an MRI scanner.
This isn't a trivial task. Apart from being free of metal parts that could be affected by the MRI scanner's strong magnet,…
sb admin | September 28, 2007
YT parody of an ad for HeadOn, a homeopathic topical analgesic for headaches that's smeared on the forehead.
The official HeadOn site (I won't link since "the site is for the use of US residents only;" sorry I inadvertently looked and I'm not American, I didn't know I wasn't supposed to) states, "The active ingredients in HeadOn are diluted much more than the minimum required dilution dictated by the monograph of the Homeopathic Pharmacopeia of the United States and therefore represent no health risk whatsoever." Yes, and likely no health benefit whatsoever either.
The video HeadOn…
moleculeoftheday | September 10, 2007Let's see if I can do better this week.
Tazarotene is a retinoid, or vitamin A analogue:
It's unusual because of its diarylacetylene moiety. Like most retinoids, it modulates some aspects of skin turnover and metabolism and finds use in dermatology.
moleculeoftheday | August 20, 2007I have alluded multiple times (see here and here) to the ubiquity of benzodiazepines in modern medicine. Xanax is one very popular one:
Xanax is just another benzodiazepine, but it's mostly used in antianxiety roles. Its triazole ring is unique; it's a heterocycle you don't see too often.
More importantly, Xanax is special enough to warrant HOLOGRAM ADS (Fair use image from Wikipedia, see contact link for removal requests):
moleculeoftheday | August 17, 2007AM404 is an active metabolite of acetaminophen:
Acetaminophen is an unusual painkiller - it isn't quite like ibuprofen or other NSAIDs. AM404 is its arachidonic acid conjugate, which has some cannabinoid activity (as well as COX activity).
Anyone who knows anything interesting about cannabinoids in analgesia (please, not people who say "you have to just smoke the plant," I'm much more interested in knowing what's doing the job), I'd love to hear from!
moleculeoftheday | August 16, 2007Carfentanil is an absurdly strong opiate - ca 10^4 times stronger than morphine.
It's so strong a ug will have effects on you, and it's really only good for tranquilizing lions and Jurassic Park dinosaurs. I spent one summer in a medchem lab synthesizing potential opiates and often wondered what would happen if i stumbled upon something like this. Technique aside, its not hard to take in a ug or two of something just by being near a powder (or getting a drop of an NMR sample in chloroform or DMSO on your glove!)
Fortunately, none of my stuff was anywhere close to a drug lead and I mostly ran…
revere | August 16, 2007A new paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine underlines a point we have tried to make multiple times (e.g., see here, here and here). Naive and unthought out therapeutic responses to the idea that bird flu kills via a "cytokine storm" is a bad idea. Cytokine storm is also a common feature of sepsis, which accompanies some pneumonia and other infections and has a high case fatality ratio. I haven't read the original paper because I am at the beach where the Annals of Internal Medicine isn't carried at the local convenience store and my internet connection is barely adequate for email, but I…
moleculeoftheday | August 14, 2007Clenbuterol is a phenethylamine, like adrenaline, tyramine, ecstasy, sudafed, wellbutrin, and methamphetamine. Don't let anyone ever tell you all these drugs are the same again.
Clenbuterol is a potent beta-adrenergic agonist with a long half-life. It's very long-lived and has found some use as an asthma medication. Like many other drugs in the class, it has some efficacy in weight loss - clen appears to be pretty good. Bodybuilders often use it illicitly; more recently, it's gotten a little attention outside the community. Like all beta-adrenergic agonists, it can increase blood pressure…
mikethemadbiologist | August 14, 2007Erm, maybe not so much. From Clinical Infectious Diseases:
BACKGROUND: Over the past 20 years, the use of zinc as an over-the-counter alternative therapy for the common cold has vastly grown in popularity. Recent reports of potentially permanent anosmia caused by intranasal zinc therapy warrant careful analysis of the therapeutic effects of zinc.
METHODS: A search of the Medline database (including articles published during 1966-2006) for studies of zinc and the common cold produced 105 published reports. Fourteen were randomized, placebo-controlled studies that examined the effect of zinc…
moleculeoftheday | August 8, 2007Methyl salicylate, much like aspirin (ASS to the Germans) is an analgesic drug.
It's structurally quite similar to aspirin, but less polar and doesn't ionize in water. This affords it some vapor pressure (it smells of wintergreen, and is actually used as a flavoring agent in low concentration!).
However, it's quite toxic, and it is only used as an analgesic in creams (as far as I know). Stuff like Ben-Gay. Earlier this year, a young athlete actually absorbed a lethal dose from topical methyl salicylate cream.
It looks like she was drastically overusing the stuff. Creams may seem like "lesser…
moleculeoftheday | July 30, 2007Friday, I alluded to a chemical in the House version of the farm bill. It's calcium nitrate.
Many meth cooks use a modified version of the birch reduction, which involves using an alkali metal (lithium here) in liquid ammonia. Lot of farmers use anhydrous ammonia (which is just barely a gas - put it in a tank much like a propane tank, and it's a liquid) to fertilize their crops. Predictably, this has led to a lot of meth cooks stealing ammonia from farmers.
This is dangerous not only because of the drugs, but because of the ammonia - anhydrous ammonia is an entirely different beast than…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007Are you shocked? I'm not:
Drinking malt liquor -- the cheap, high-alcohol beverage often marketed to teens -- may put young adults at increased risk for alcohol problems and use of illicit drugs, particularly marijuana, according to a new study of malt liquor drinkers and marijuana use by scientists at the University at Buffalo's Research Institute on Addictions (RIA).
"In our study of young adults who regularly drink malt liquor," reports lead researcher R. Lorraine Collins, senior research scientist at RIA, "we found that malt liquor use is significantly related to reports of alcohol…
purepedantry | July 30, 2007A healthy debate rages as to whether Restless Legs Syndrome is actually a disease, or whether it was something contrived by drug companies in order to sell drugs.
Nicholas Wade reports in the NY Times that two separate studies have found a gene that is linked with the disease:
Kari Stefansson, chief executive of Decode Genetics, said his company had linked variations in the gene known as BTBD9 with periodic leg movements during sleep and with low iron levels in the blood, two clinical features already associated with the syndrome. He said Decode had missed, but subsequently confirmed, the…