Posts Tagged ‘prescriptions’
Monday, August 2nd, 2010
OpEdNews
By Martha Rosenberg
August 1, 2010
Why are troops killing themselves?
The long awaited Army report, “Health Promotion, Risk Reduction, Suicide Prevention” considers the economy, the stress of nine years of war, family dislocations, repeated moves, repeated deployments, troops’ risk-taking personalities, waived entrance standards and many aspects of Army culture.
What it barely considers is the suicide-inked antidepressants, antipsychotics and antiseizure drugs whose use exactly parallels the increase in US troop suicides since 2005.
In the report Chief of Staff General Peter W. Chiarelli acknowledges antidepressant risks, saying there’s “fair quality evidence that second generation antidepressants (mostly SSRI) increase suicidal behavior in adults aged 18 to 29 years” but adds that “other research evidence shows the benefit of antidepressant use”.
And nowhere does he acknowledge the suicide potential of antiseizure drugs so widely used for pain and as “mood stabilizers” by troops even though the FDA mandated suicide warnings on Lyrica, Topamaz, Depakote, Lamictal, Tegretol, Depakene, Klonopin and 16 others in 2008.
(Lamictal also has the distinction of wasting more taxpayer money than any other drug according to a July American Enterprise Institute report. Medicaid spent an unnecessary $51 million on Lamictal instead of buying a generic last year, thanks to GSK salesmen. You go, guys,)
When asked by NPR’s Robert Siegel if the high number of medicated troops contributed to suicide, Gen. Chiarelli said, “The good thing about those numbers is…the prescriptions were all made by a doctor.” Asked why troops who had not even deployed were among the suicides, Chiarelli said there were other stressors involved.
In June Marine Times reported 32 deaths on prescription drugs in Warrior Transition Units (WTUs) since 2007 and said an internal review “found the biggest risk factor may be putting a soldier on numerous drugs simultaneously, a practice known as polypharmacy.”
But instead of citing dangerous drugs and drug cocktails for turning troops suicidal (and accident prone and at risk of death from unsafe combinations) the Army report cites troops’ illicit use of them along with street drugs. (The word “illicit” appears 150 times in the Army report and “psychiatrist” appears twice.)
No, it’s not the 8,000 urine samples in 2009 which showed prescription drug traces according to the Army report — it’s the fact that 21 percent of the drugs were “illicit.”
No wonder the revised suicide report form suggested by the Army report doesn’t even have a box to enter “adverse reactions to drug or drug combinations.” Instead, it has a box that asks how long before a suicide a patient was “compliant” with the prescription. Was the medication “taken as prescribed? Skipped?” Taken “In excess of prescription? In different manner (e.g., crushed instead of in capsule)?”
Read entire article here: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Army-Suicide-Report-Ignore-by-Martha-Rosenberg-100801-596.html?show=votes
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Tags: Adverse reactions, antidepressants, antipsychotics, antiseizure drugs, army, Chief of Staff General Peter W. Chiarelli, dangerous drugs, Depakene, Depakote, FDA, GSK, Health Promotion, Klonopin, Lamictal, Lyrica, Marine Times, Medicaid, mood stabilizers, polypharmacy, prescriptions, psychiatrist, research, risk of death, Risk Reduction, soldiers, ssri, suicidal behavior, Suicide, suicide prevention, Tegretol, Topamaz, troops
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Friday, July 30th, 2010
OpEdNews
By K. L. Carlson
July 30, 2010
“Unlimited spending! Schedule all the programs you can.” That was the management directive announced at the regional business meeting I attended when I first became a pharmaceutical rep. When I heard the announcement I felt like I was on an Enron train that was roaring down the tracks, and the company expected everyone to be on board. The company was giving its sales force unlimited funds to hire physicians as paid speakers, sometimes to influence other physicians to prescribe the company’s drugs, at other times to simply financially reward physicians who wrote high volumes of prescriptions every month for the company’s drugs.
Former Merck regional sales manager, Gene Carbona, told the New York Times that the only thing the company considered when selecting physicians to provide presentations was “the volume or potential volume of prescribing that the doctor could do.” This is true of all pharmaceutical companies. According to The Wall Street Journal (August 31, 2009), Eli Lilly alone paid physicians $22 million dollars in just the first quarter of 2009.
The higher a physician is on the influential ladder, the greater the financial rewards to be reaped. Pharmaceutical companies pay influential leaders who can sway public opinion and influence research. And the area of medicine receiving the greatest amount of pharmaceutical money is psychiatry. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the most drug industry financially supported medical association. In July 2008, Senator Charles Grassley’s demands that the APA provide an accounting of its finances revealed that in 2006 the pharmaceutical industry accounted for about 30 percent of the APA’s financing; more than $20 million dollars.
Read entire article here: http://www.opednews.com/articles/Pharmaceutical-Industry-an-by-K-L-Carlson-100727-454.html
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Tags: conflicts of interest, Conjoined Twins, drug company, drugs, Eli Lilly, Kay L. Carlson, Merck, paid speakers, pharmaceutical companies, pharmaceutical industry, pharmaceutical rep, prescriptions, psychiatry, Wallet, whistleblower
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Thursday, June 17th, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
June 17, 2010
Antidepressant use more than doubled in the United States between 1996 and 2005, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Columbia and University of Pennsylvania and published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
“Significant increases in antidepressant use were evident across all sociodemographic groups examined, except African Americans,” the researchers wrote. “Not only are more U.S. residents being treated with antidepressants, but also those who are being treated are receiving more antidepressant prescriptions.”
The number of people being treated with antidepressants increased from 13 million in 1996 to 27 million in 2005, rising from 6 percent to 10 percent of the population. More than 164 million antidepressant prescriptions were given out in 2008, generating $9.8 billion for pharmaceutical companies.
Not only selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac have seen rises in use, but also other varieties of antidepressant and psychoactive drugs.
“During this period, individuals treated with antidepressants became more likely to also receive treatment with antipsychotic medications and less likely to undergo psychotherapy,” the researchers wrote.
Read entire article: http://www.naturalnews.com/029010_antidepressants_SSRI.html
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Tags: antidepressants, antipsychotics, depression, pharmaceutical companies, prescriptions, psychiatric drugs, psychotherapy, University of Columbia
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Wednesday, June 16th, 2010
Politics Daily
By David Sessions
June 16, 2010
Seven-year-old Gabriel Meyers didn’t want soup for lunch one Thursday in April, 2009. When his 23-year-old foster brother sent Gabriel to his room for dumping his soup in the trash, Gabriel threatened to kill himself. He kicked his toys around his room, then locked himself in the bathroom.
Police reports say Gabriel was home sick that day from his elementary school in Margate, Fla., under the care of Miguel Gould, his foster father’s son. Around 1:00 p.m., city police responded to Gould’s frantic 911 call and found Gabriel had hanged himself.
A troubled child who had previously suffered from neglect, sexual assault, and abusive parenting, Gabriel spent the previous year shuttling among several foster parents while taking a constellation of antipsychotic medicines, including Lexapro and Vyvanse, to control his depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Like most children in Florida state foster care, Medicaid paid Gabriel’s medical expenses.
Just one month before his suicide, Gabriel’s doctor prescribed him Symbyax, an anti-depressant restricted for treatment of children. The medication’s FDA-required label features a warning that use of the drug by children or teenagers can lead to suicide.
Symbyax does not meet criteria established by Congress for Medicaid reimbursement., so it is illegal for Medicaid to pay for a prescription of the drug to a child. Sohail Punjwani, the doctor who prescribed Gabriel’s Symbyax, received a stern letter from the FDA about his history of over-prescribing mental health drugs.
According to a number of foster care experts who spoke with Politics Daily, children in foster care, who are typically concurrently enrolled in Medicaid, are three or four more times as likely to be on antipsychotic medications than other children on Medicaid. Alarmingly, many of these drugs are medically prohibited for minors and dangerous to the children taking them. Often young patients under state supervision are also prescribed three or four high-risk drugs at a time — all paid for by Medicaid.
State foster care programs and child protective services have had mixed success addressing the pervasiveness of dosing their clients with prescription psychotropic drugs. Using federal Medicaid monies to purchase dangerous prohibited prescriptions for children, which cost the government up to $600 per dose, is technically a violation of the law.
Now, the Senate Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, chaired by Democratic Sen. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, has asked the Government Accountability Office to look into the drugging of foster care children. The investigators will attempt to account for estimates in the hundreds of millions of dollars of possible fraud arising from prescriptions for drugs explicitly barred from Medicaid coverage. The GAO is collecting data from Oregon, Massachusetts, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, and Texas, to search for patterns of abuse. This effort marks the first time suspicion of Medicaid fraud related to psychotropic drugs has been examined at the federal level. According to Senate staffers working on the investigation, the committee will likely hold hearings on the matter later this year.
Read entire article: http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/06/17/psychotropic-drug-abuse-in-foster-care-costs-government-billions/
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Tags: antipsychotic drugs, child drugging, Child Protective Services, federal level, foster care, Foster children, Gabriel Myers, GAO, Government Accountability Office, Jim Gottstein, Medicaid, Medicaid fraud, prescriptions, psychiatric drugs, psychotropic drugs, Sen. Daniel Akaka, Senate, Senate Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, Sohail Punjwani, Suicide, symbyax
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Monday, June 14th, 2010
The Vancouver Sun
By Sharon Kirkey
June 14, 2010
The risk of coronary heart disease and a cluster of conditions known as metabolic syndrome increases soon after otherwise healthy, but depressed people are started on psychiatric drugs, putting them at risk for an early death, Canadian researchers are reporting.
Antidepressants, antipsychotics and other psychoactive drugs are the second most-prescribed drug class in the country, second only to cardiovasculars, according to prescription drug-tracking firm IMS Health Canada.
Across Canada, retail pharmacies last year dispensed 61.2 million prescriptions for psychotherapeutics, worth nearly $2.4 billion.
“Usually five of the top 10 prescribed medications worldwide are psychiatric drugs. We need to start looking at the impact of these medications on other systems,” says Dr. Valerie Taylor, an assistant professor in psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at St. Joseph’s health care and McMaster University in Hamilton.
In a study published this week in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, Taylor and her colleagues followed 52 patients, age 16 to 40, newly diagnosed with bipolar disorder or major depressive disorder.
Many were university students who had become ill for the first time. All were “treatment naive” — they had never before been treated for a psychiatric illness.
At the start of the study, researchers measured waist circumference, blood pressure, blood fats and other markers of metabolic syndrome — the name for a grab-bag of health problems that increase the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
People with metabolic syndrome are twice as likely to die from, and three times as likely to have a heart attack or stroke compared to people without the disorder. They also have up to a nine-fold greater risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
Read entire article: http://www.vancouversun.com/health/Psychiatric+drugs+carry+serious+physical+health+risks/3153278/story.html
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Tags: antidepressants, antipsychotics, at risk, behavioral neurosciences, bipolar disorder, Canada, Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, Canadian researchers, coronary heart disease, depressed, early death, healthy, IMS Health, Major Depressive Disorder, McMaster University, metabolic syndrome, prescription drug, prescriptions, psychiatric drugs, psychiatric illness, psychiatry, psychoactive drugs, psychotherapeutics, retail pharmacies, treatment naive
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Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is a list that can be abused to the detriment of patients and benefit of drug companies.
Miller-McCune
By Arnie Cooper
June 8, 2010
“My dear Sir, take any road, you can’t go amiss. The whole state is one vast insane asylum.” — James L. Petigru
Spend just a few minutes watching prime time television with its endless pageant of commercials for antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds and you start to wonder if USA really means the United States of Affliction.
Such “direct to consumer” drug advertising ties into one of the most far-reaching criticisms in revising the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: the potential to transform normal human behavior into a mental disorder.
This issue didn’t arise with the ongoing revision of the DMS-V. It’s long been a concern for psychiatry, which must exist uneasily alongside pharmaceutical companies’ hopes of expanding their markets and Americans’ desire for take-a-pill quick fixes. But past experiences suggest new diagnoses will reap a harvest of not fully intended consequences of patients larded with labels — and prescriptions.
Christopher Lane, an intellectual historian who has written extensively on psychiatry and culture, detailed the inclusion of “social anxiety disorder” in the DSM-III in his 2007 book, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness.
Lane revealed how the 15-member DSM-III task force, in its quest to establish psychiatry as a legitimate science (and riding the wave of drug companies looking to expand their markets for anti-psychotics and tranquilizers), spit out “almost over night” various new disorders, including one for those uncomfortable with social situations.
No longer need shyness be a variant of normal. Now it can be a neurochemical disorder addressable with GlaxoSmithKline’s multibillion-dollar marvel Paxil. Before safety concerns and patent expirations raised their ugly heads, antidepressants had become the second-largest selling class of drugs in the United States.
“In this desire to biologize and medicalize, with the idea that every personal crisis or problem is due to a disorder of the brain, we’ve lost sight of the vast complexity of behavioral responses to external stresses,” Lane says. Add to that some possibly dangerous side effects. Along with Prozac and Zoloft, Paxil was found to increase thoughts of suicide, especially among teens, prompting an FDA warning in 2004.
Read entire article: http://www.miller-mccune.com/health/are-you-normal-or-finally-diagnosed-17073/
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Tags: anti-anxiety meds, antidepressants, biologize, Christopher Lane, diagnoses, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental disorders, Direct to Consumer, disorder of the brain, drug advertising, dsm, DSM-III, DSM-IV, DSM-V, DSM5, FDA, labels, medicalize, mental disorder, normal human behavior, Paxil, pharmaceutical companies, pills, prescriptions, prozac, psychiatric diagnoses, psychiatry, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, side effects, social anxiety disorder, Suicide, United States of Affliction, warning, Zoloft
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Monday, June 7th, 2010
NewsTimes.com
By Eileen FitzGerald
June 7, 2010
Here’s just one statistic that Danbury school psychologist Charles Manos worries about: 42 percent of all kids in foster care are taking three or more mood-altering drugs.
“All kids in foster care have some story of trauma, like abuse or neglect, so we need to ask the question `How are we dealing with trauma?’” Manos asked.
Overall, children are receiving more prescriptions than ever before to treat medical, emotional and psychological problems, according to a May report from Medco Health Solutions.
More than one in four children with health insurance in the U.S., and nearly 30 percent of all children from 10 to 19, take at least one prescription to treat a chronic condition. The most substantial increases over the past nine years have been in antipsychotic, diabetes and asthma drugs, according to the Medco report.
In some cases, students take medications at home. In many cases, school nurses dispense it.
For instance, Danbury schools health coordinator Sue Levasseur said 80 middle school students receive asthma medication each day at school and another 14 to 15 children receive a psychotropic drug at school.
Part of the school system’s job is to educate parents, said Manos, who has worked in local schools for more than 30 years and also has a private practice.
“I think we have become a society that says it’s OK to medicate the symptoms of kids. Medication is easier. I think as a society we are quick to change behavior rather than understand it,” Manos said.
Behavior medications can be destructive if used improperly, he said.
“Say there is abuse or trauma, and we don’t do an adequate analysis. Then we silence the symptoms through the medications,” Manos said.
“The fact is that medication does not treat a disorder, it treats the symptoms of the manifestation, and people don’t understand that. I think there is a myth that medication treats the disorder.”
Read entire article: http://www.newstimes.com/news/article/Growing-numbers-of-children-on-medication-514614.php
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Tags: antipsychotic, Behavior, Behavior medications, Charles Manos, child drugging, diabetes, foster care, Foster children, foster kids, Medco Health Solutions, Medicaid, medications, mood-altering drugs, prescriptions, psychological problems, psychotropic drugs, symptoms
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Thursday, June 3rd, 2010
Lawyers & Settlements
By LucyC
June 2, 2010
A new study out yesterday—June 1, 2010—has revealed a higher rate of miscarriages in women who were taking antidepressants during pregnancy. How much higher? Sixty-eight percent—yes —that’s 68%—higher. Frankly, that is nothing short of shocking.
Published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the study was done in Canada through the University of Montreal. FYI—This was no small study either—the investigators used data from 5,124 women who are part of a large, population-based study of pregnant women who had clinically verified miscarriages, and a large sample of women from the same registry who did not have a miscarriage. Among the women who miscarried, 284 or 5.5 percent, had taken antidepressants during their pregnancy.
In fact the findings are so robust that the physicians who did the study are suggesting that this is a class effect—in other words the effect could be attributed to all selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors—or SSRIs. Here’s what’s being reported in the press:
“These results, which suggest an overall class effect of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, are highly robust given the large number of users studied,” the study’s senior author, Dr. Anick Berard, said in a statement. (UPI.com)
The antidepressants that showed a particular association with miscarriage in the study were paroxetine (trade names: Seroxat and Paxil) and venlafaxine (trade names: Effexor, Efexor, Alventa, Argofan, Trevilor). The investigators also found that the risk of miscarriage doubled with a combination of different antidepressants.
Just for the record, the antidepressants “investigated” in the University of Montreal study are serotonin reuptake inhibitors (citalopram, fluoxetine, fluvoxa-mine, paroxetine and sertraline); tricyclic antidepressants (ami-triptyline, clomipramine, desipramine, doxepin, imipramine, nortriptyline, trimipramine), serotonin– norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (venlafaxine) and “other antidepressants” (serotonin modulators, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, tetracyclic piperazino-azepines, and dopamine and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors).
This study is just the latest to show an association between, well, for lack of a better term let’s say “serious adverse events” and SSRIs and SNRIs in particular.
Read entire article: http://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/blog/mom-alert-would-you-want-a-68-higher-risk-of-miscarriage-03819.html
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Tags: Alventa, ami-triptyline, antidepressants, Argofan, Canadian Medical Association Journal, citalopram, clomipramine, depression, desipramine, dopamine, doxepin, effexor, expectant mothers, Fetus, fluoxetine, fluvoxa-mine, imipramine, increased risk, miscarriage, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, mothers, norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors, nortriptyline, paroxetine, Paxil, Pregnancy, pregnant women, prescriptions, psychiatric drugs, risks, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, serious adverse events, serotonin modulators, Seroxat, sertraline, SSRIs, tetracyclic piperazino-azepines, Trevilor, tricyclic antidepressants, trimipramine, University of Montreal, venlafaxine
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Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
Los Angeles Times
By Thomas H. Maugh II
May 31, 2010
Taking antidepressants during pregnancy increases the risk of spontaneous abortions by about two-thirds, Canadian researchers reported Monday. The increased risk was greatest with the family of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), especially paroxetine and venlafaxine, and when more than one family of drugs were used.
Depression in women is most common during the child-bearing years, and estimates suggest that as many as 15% of pregnant women suffer from it. Because of fears about the effects of drugs, particularly psychiatric drugs, during pregnancy, only about 3.7% of women use them during the first trimester. Most studies looking at the use of antidepressants during pregnancy have focused on their effects on the fetus. Small studies of their effects on abortion have produced inconsistent results. Expecting mothers cannot routinely stop using the drugs, however, because that also presents risks to both the mother and the fetus.
Producing a controlled clinical trial examining the effects of the drugs is virtually impossible because few women would be willing to participate, experts said. The only way to get at the data is to examine it retrospectively.
In the new study, Dr. Anick Berard, director of the University of Montreal’s Research Unit on Medications and Pregnancy at University Hospital Center Sainte-Justine used information from the Quebec Pregnancy Registry to identify 5,124 women who had a spontaneous abortions between 1998 and 2003 — before warnings about the risks of the drugs became more common — and compared them with about 10 times that many carefully matched women who did not have abortions. A separate database provided information about prescriptions the women had filled.
Read entire article: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2010/05/antidepressants-during-pregnancy-increase-risk-of-sponaneous-abortion-study-finds.html
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Tags: abortion, antidepressants, child-bearing years, depression, Doubles Risk of Miscarriage, Dr. Anick Berard, expectant mothers, Expecting mothers, Fetus, first trimester, increased risk, miscarriage, mothers, paroxetine, Pregnancy, pregnant women, prescriptions, psychiatric drugs, Research Unit on Medications and Pregnancy, risks, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, spontaneous abortions, SSRIs, University of Montreal, venlafaxine
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Monday, May 31st, 2010
True/Slant
By David DiSalvo
May 29, 2010
I came across the graphic below in Good Magazine online. Each pill represents one million psychiatric drug prescriptions. Of the 10 drugs shown, three are benzodiazepines prescribed for anxiety (Xanax, Ativan and Valium), and by far the most prescribed drug of the group is Xanax with 44 million prescriptions in 2009.
What surprises me about this is that of all the benzos, Xanax is the one most often criticized by the psychiatric community for its addictive potential and severe withdrawal effects.
The half life for Xanax is extremely short (6-20 hours) compared to all of the other drugs in its class, and it’s rapidly absorbed by the brain. On the face of it, this seems like a great combination–you get a quick hit of anxiety relief and the drug leaves your system within a 24-hour period. But in practice what often happens is that because the drug acts so quickly and dissipates quickly, the patient begins taking more of it to maintain the effect. Two pills a day turns into four, which turns into six and on and on.
That’s bad news, but it gets worse. As more of the drug is absorbed by the brain, the brain reacts by decreasing its production of GABA–the naturally occurring chemical that slows down brain activity when your cerebral gaskets start overheating. With so much of the sedative (Xanax) available, the brain’s efficiency process kicks in and turns down the GABA tap.
Read entire article: http://trueslant.com/daviddisalvo/2010/05/29/despite-its-infamous-reputation-xanax-is-still-the-most-prescribed-psychiatric-drug/
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Tags: addictive, anxiety, Ativan, benzodiazepines, benzos, brain activity, pills, prescriptions, psychiatric drugs, psychiatry, sedative, side effects, Valium, withdrawal effects, Xanax
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