The marketing team sued over a drug’s alleged side effects tried to suppress key data, an ex-employee has claimed. Seroquel’s former UK medical adviser told the BBC he was pressured to approve promotional material which said weight gain was not an issue. Maker AstraZeneca, which faces fresh legal action next month, said it took concerns about its conduct seriously.
Obesity is an epidemic–or at least a major concern for many Americans. We obsess over diet fads, exercise machines, portion control, and The Biggest Loser, all in an effort to get our ballooning waistlines in check. However, according to some researchers, we are looking in all the wrong places for the reason why we’re so fat. Instead of oversized and calorie-laden fast food meals, at least one expert is starting to wonder if the cause of our nation’s weight gain is prescription psychiatric drugs.
Taking Prozac, Paxil, or other antidepressants from the class of drugs called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) can cause delays in lactation in new mothers and difficulty in breast-feeding newborns, a new study says. Researchers from the University of Cincinnati found SSRIs can result in delayed secretory activation after giving birth. SSRIs regulate the hormone serotonin in the body to stave off depression, but the hormone also is crucial to the breasts’ ability to deliver milk when it is needed, the study’s authors said.
As scientific as the name may sound ‘Attention Deficit Disorder’ and ‘Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder’ (AD/HD) are alleged and somewhat mysterious ‘diseases’ of which, despite numerous studies dedicated to investigating their cause, no convincing evidence of any brain malfunction or other biological or genetic abnormality has been discovered.
TALK ABOUT death panels. The US attorney in Boston recently filed suit against the world’s largest maker of health products, Johnson & Johnson, for using kickbacks to get more nursing home patients onto its drugs, including one that was later found to be so lethal to the elderly it had to carry a black-box warning. The government’s complaint leaves little doubt that the drug company acted in a predatory way to increase sales and market share for its products, especially Risperdal, an antipsychotic often used to keep Alzheimer’s and dementia patients under control.