Posts Tagged ‘brain atrophy’

Scientific Proof: Antipsychotics Shrink Brains

Monday, February 28th, 2011

Note from CCHR: The bottom line is that there is no medical/scientific evidence that can verify a diagnoses of schizophrenia as a “brain abnormality.”  There is, however,  scientific evidence that the drugs being prescribed cause brain abnormality.

Alliance for Human Research Protection – Feb 26, 2011

A long-awaited, 14 year magnetic imaging (MRI) follow-up study by Dr. Nancy Andreasen, involving 211 patients, documents progressive shrinkage of brain tissue volume in patients prescribed antipsychotics when they first experienced an episode of psychosis.

The findings, published in The Archives of General Psychiatry show a direct causal relationship between dosage, duration of exposure to antipsychotics, and brain shrinkage:

  • Longer follow-up correlated with smaller brain tissue volumes and larger cerebrospinal fluid volumes.”
  • Greater intensity of antipsychotic treatment was associated with indicators of generalized and specific brain tissue reduction after controlling for effects of the other 3 predictors.”
  • More antipsychotic treatment was associated with smaller gray matter volumes. Progressive decrement in white matter volume was most evident among patients who received more antipsychotic treatment.”

Dr. Andreasen acknowledged, in an interview in The New York Times (2008), that she “sat on these findings for a couple of years”–deliberately holding back publication. “The reason I sat on these findings for a couple of years was that I just wanted to be absolutely sure it was true. My biggest fear is that people who need the drugs will stop taking them.”

“The big finding is that people with schizophrenia are losing brain tissue at a more rapid rate than healthy people of comparable age. Some are losing as much as 1 percent per year. That’s an awful lot over an 18-year period…Another thing we’ve discovered is that the more drugs you’ve been given, the more brain tissue you lose.”

http://www.ahrp.org/cms/content/view/606/9/

For a more detailed article on this study, click here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mad-in-america/201102/andreasen-drops-bombshell-antipsychotics-shrink-the-brain

For more information on diagnosing patients with schizophrenia, visit this website on Loren Mosher, M.D., former Chief of Schizophrenia Research, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) http://www.moshersoteria.com/

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Brain shrinkage seen in those taking antipsychotic medications

Monday, February 7th, 2011

Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2011

by Melissa Healy

A new study finds that one the fastest-growing classes of prescription drugs in the United States is linked to shrinkage in the brains of those who take it, raising some new questions about the widening use of antipsychotic medications.

Over a study period that spanned 14 years, 211 newly diagnosed schizophrenic patients had periodic brain scans that measured the volume of their brains overall, and of their brains’ principal component structures. Scanning each subject’s brain at least twice and as many as five times, researchers at the University of Iowa’s Carver College of Medicine sought to tease apart the factors that might contribute to a long-observed phenomenon: that patients with psychiatric disease—particularly those who suffer the delusional thinking, hallucinations and cognitive deficits of schizophrenia—appear to have smaller brains than those in good mental health.

What they found was that those whose treatment with antipsychotic medication was most “intensive”—those who took the largest doses over the longest time–had the greatest losses in brain volume. The intensity of a subject’s antipsychotic medication therapy was a far stronger predictor of brain-volume loss than was the severity of his or her psychiatric symptoms or of the extent of his or her illicit drug or alcohol abuse, the researchers found.

The volume losses were scattered throughout the brain, occurring in gray matter–the tightly packed clusters of brain cells that make up most of the brain’s lobes–as well as in the connective “white matter” that forms communication channels among the brain’s disparate regions and between its two hemispheres.

The study, published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, comes against the backdrop of growing use of antipsychotic medications by younger and younger patients, as well as by patients with a wider range of psychiatric troubles, including anxiety or depression that has not yielded to first-line antidepressant drugs. Aggressive marketing of a new generation of antipsychotic drugs called the “atypicals” have made this class of drugs the top sellers in the U.S. prescription drug market, raking in $300.3 billion in sales in 2009 alone, according to IMS Health, which tracks trends in the healthcare and pharmaceutical markets.

The use of antipsychotic medications in treatment of a wider range of illnesses is also exposing more patients to these drugs, which also have been linked to metabolic changes and weight gain that can be extreme. In 2009, IMS Health estimates that U.S. consumers filled 52 million prescriptions for atypical antipsychotic medications, which account for the vast bulk of antipsychotic medications prescribed today.

“Given the sharp rise in antipsychotic utilization, especially among geriatric and pediatric populations, examining the possibility of antipsychotic brain tissue loss has important implications for assessing the risk benefit ratio in a large number of psychiatric patients,” the researchers wrote.

read the rest of the article here:  http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-antipsychotic-drugs-020711,0,123296.story

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Pre-Crime? Try Pre-Diagnose and Pre-Drug: Psychiatrists target infants as mental patients

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

By CCHR International
June 23, 2010

A new study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and headed by psychiatrist John H. Gilmore, professor of psychiatry and Director of the UNC Schizophrenia Research, claims to be able to detect “brain abnormalities associated with schizophrenia risk”  in infants just a few weeks old.   We would like to point out the obvious flaw in this bogus study; there is no medical/scientific test in existence that schizophrenia is a physical disease or  brain abnormality to start with.  There is not one chemical imbalance test, X-ray, MRI or any other test for schizophrenia, not one.   So with no evidence of medical abnormality to start with, the “associated with schizophrenia risk” amounts to what George Orwell called Doublespeak (language that deliberately disguises, distorts, misleads)—it means nothing.

For decades, psychiatrists and Pharma have spouted lines to the press and public amounting to, “researchers now believe” they have medical evidence of schizophrenia as a physical/biological abnormality, or “new evidence suggests” evidence of schizophrenia as a real disease.   But despite millions of dollars in research funds and countless tales of “belief” —no evidence to support the theory.  One of the most common tricks employed by the Psycho/Pharmaceutical industry to mislead the public, legislators and the press, is to take X-rays or brain images of people who have been long-term users of antipsychotic drugs (known to cause brain atrophy/shrinkage) and then claim people with schizophrenia have smaller brains.   They’ve spouted similar studies on kids with ADHD having smaller brains, but the bottom line to that study was that the kids with smaller brains, were…smaller kids. These are just a few of the many PR spins employed by Psycho/Pharma to try and maintain the “belief” in psychiatry, in their credibility as a science.   As evidenced by the recent statement of psychiatrist Allen Frances, former DSM- IV Task Force Chairman, this belief is falling apart even within their own ranks, “There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.” —Allen Frances (And Frances isn’t the only psychiatrist exposing the fraud of the biological brain disease model; click here for more.)

The logical question the press should be asking is what are the American Journal of Psychiatry and “the Director of UNC Schizophrenic Research” really after?  What is their goal?

As we have exposed in the article “Australian Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry Wants His Pre-Drugging Agenda to Go Global” there is a concerted push being headed by Australian psychiatrist Patrick McGorry and other pharmaceutically funded psychiatrists for the global implementation of a new mental health paradigm; preventative mental health, i.e., pre-diagnosing (diagnosing children before they develop a “mental disorder”) and pre-drugging children ( before they show “signs” of the mental disorder).   There is an obvious push for the same pre-diagnosing and pre-drugging agenda with this latest study, which claims ”major cases of schizophrenia are usually not diagnosed until a person begins witnessing its related symptoms like delusions and hallucinations as a teenager or adult . However, by that time, the disease [notice the term disease despite no medical evidence of disease] crosses the stage of preliminary treatment and is difficult to treat.”   In other words, if we wait to administer drugs to them it may be too late.  That along with Gilmore’s statement,  “It allows us to start thinking about how we can identify kids at risk for schizophrenia very early and whether there are things that we can do very early on to lessen the risk.” This is the pre-diagnosing, pre-drugging agenda being pushed and the new “preventative” model of mental health that is more akin to a Brave New World than anything previously witnessed.  And this latest “study” tells us infants are also on the agenda.

And finally,  to psychiatrist and lead study author John H. Gilmore, we think you should take a lesson from the former National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Chief of the Center for Studies in Schizophrenia, the late Loren R. Mosher, M.D. who stated in his letter of resignation to the American Psychiatric Association, “The fact that there is no evidence confirming the brain disease attribution is, at this point, irrelevant.  What we are dealing with here is fashion, politics and money. This level of intellectual/scientific dishonesty is just too egregious for me to continue to support my membership…After nearly three decades as a member it is with a mixture of pleasure and disappointment that I submit this letter of resignation from the American Psychiatric Association. The major reason for this is my belief I am actually resigning from the American Psychopharmacological Association.  Luckily, the organization’s true identify requires no change in the acronym…”

To read more from Loren Mosher, including his two-year outcome study treating patients diagnosed “schizophrenic” without the use of drugs, his vehement stance against the biological psychiatric model of “disease” and more,  click here.

To read the latest bogus psychiatric study, click here.

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Pre-Crime? Try Pre-Diagnose and Pre-Drug: Psychiatrists target infants as mental patients

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

By CCHR International
June 23, 2010

A new study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and headed by psychiatrist John H. Gilmore, professor of psychiatry and Director of the UNC Schizophrenia Research, claims to be able to detect “brain abnormalities associated with schizophrenia risk”  in infants just a few weeks old.   We would like to point out the obvious flaw in this bogus study; there is no medical/scientific test in existence that schizophrenia is a physical disease or  brain abnormality to start with.  There is not one chemical imbalance test, X-ray, MRI or any other test for schizophrenia, not one.   So with no evidence of medical abnormality to start with, the “associated with schizophrenia risk” amounts to what George Orwell called Doublespeak (language that deliberately disguises, distorts, misleads)—it means nothing.

For decades, psychiatrists and Pharma have spouted lines to the press and public amounting to, “researchers now believe” they have medical evidence of schizophrenia as a physical/biological abnormality, or “new evidence suggests” evidence of schizophrenia as a real disease.   But despite millions of dollars in research funds and countless tales of “belief” —no evidence to support the theory.  One of the most common tricks employed by the Psycho/Pharmaceutical industry to mislead the public, legislators and the press, is to take X-rays or brain images of people who have been long-term users of antipsychotic drugs (known to cause brain atrophy/shrinkage) and then claim people with schizophrenia have smaller brains.   They’ve spouted similar studies on kids with ADHD having smaller brains, but the bottom line to that study was that the kids with smaller brains, were…smaller kids. These are just a few of the many PR spins employed by Psycho/Pharma to try and maintain the “belief” in psychiatry, in their credibility as a science.   As evidenced by the recent statement of psychiatrist Allen Frances, former DSM- IV Task Force Chairman, this belief is falling apart even within their own ranks, “There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.” —Allen Frances (And Frances isn’t the only psychiatrist exposing the fraud of the biological brain disease model; click here for more.)

The logical question the press should be asking is what are the American Journal of Psychiatry and “the Director of UNC Schizophrenic Research” really after?  What is their goal?

As we have exposed in the article “Australian Psychiatrist Patrick McGorry Wants His Pre-Drugging Agenda to Go Global” there is a concerted push being headed by Australian psychiatrist Patrick McGorry and other pharmaceutically funded psychiatrists for the global implementation of a new mental health paradigm; preventative mental health, i.e., pre-diagnosing (diagnosing children before they develop a “mental disorder”) and pre-drugging children ( before they show “signs” of the mental disorder).   There is an obvious push for the same pre-diagnosing and pre-drugging agenda with this latest study, which claims ”major cases of schizophrenia are usually not diagnosed until a person begins witnessing its related symptoms like delusions and hallucinations as a teenager or adult . However, by that time, the disease [notice the term disease despite no medical evidence of disease] crosses the stage of preliminary treatment and is difficult to treat.”   In other words, if we wait to administer drugs to them it may be too late.  That along with Gilmore’s statement,  “It allows us to start thinking about how we can identify kids at risk for schizophrenia very early and whether there are things that we can do very early on to lessen the risk.” This is the pre-diagnosing, pre-drugging agenda being pushed and the new “preventative” model of mental health that is more akin to a Brave New World than anything previously witnessed.  And this latest “study” tells us infants are also on the agenda.

And finally,  to psychiatrist and lead study author John H. Gilmore, we think you should take a lesson from the former National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Chief of the Center for Studies in Schizophrenia, the late Loren R. Mosher, M.D. who stated in his letter of resignation to the American Psychiatric Association, “The fact that there is no evidence confirming the brain disease attribution is, at this point, irrelevant.  What we are dealing with here is fashion, politics and money. This level of intellectual/scientific dishonesty is just too egregious for me to continue to support my membership…After nearly three decades as a member it is with a mixture of pleasure and disappointment that I submit this letter of resignation from the American Psychiatric Association. The major reason for this is my belief I am actually resigning from the American Psychopharmacological Association.  Luckily, the organization’s true identify requires no change in the acronym…”

To read more from Loren Mosher, including his two-year outcome study treating patients diagnosed “schizophrenic” without the use of drugs, his vehement stance against the biological psychiatric model of “disease” and more,  click here.

To read the latest bogus psychiatric study, click here.

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