Pharmacology

The latest outbreak of Ebola virus disease has caused the deaths of more than 9,400 people worldwide and created an international outcry so loud even the National Institutes of Health decided to start funding work on it again.  Ebola virus causes hemorrhagic fever in humans and currently has no approved therapy or vaccine but stopping the virus before it has a chance to enter or interact with cellular factors could a critical first step to combating infection. A new paper in Science magazine finds small molecule called Tetrandrine, a a bisbenzylisoquinoline alkaloid from the Chinese herb…

Each year millions of infants, toddlers and preschool children require anesthesia or sedation for various procedures and a new review suggest caution about their use. A team of anesthesiology investigators and toxicologists writing in the New England Journal of Medicine reviewed existing animal and human studies for the impact of anesthetics on developing brains.  Observational studies of children have been weak, but they still suggested a correlation between children who had received anesthetics and long-term cognitive impairments such as learning disabilities. Children…

A pre-clinical study of ANAVEX 2-73 found that it prevents mitochondrial dysfunction and blocks resulting oxidative stress and apoptosis (cell death) in a nontransgenic mouse model of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Mitochondrial damages have been consistently reported as an early cause of Alzheimer's disease and appear before amyloid-beta plaques and memory decline in Alzheimer's patients and transgenic mice. If so, by preserving mitochondrial functionality and reducing other key Alzheimer's disease hallmarks, it has the potential to prevent, stop, slow or reverse the disease, in addition to…

Competition between doctors' offices, urgent care centers and retail medical clinics that cater to wealthy elites often leads to an increase in the number of antibiotic prescriptions written per person, finds a new analysis. The number of physicians per capita and the number of clinics are significant drivers of antibiotic prescription rate, they found, with the highest per capita rates of antibiotic prescriptions found in the southeastern U.S. and along the West and East coasts. The team's comparative analysis of data for the years 2000 and 2010 were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau and…

A pill may nullify some of the negative effects of alcohol. David Goehring, CC BY-SA Each year over three million people die due to alcohol-related causes. To put that in perspective, that’s a whopping 5.9% of all deaths worldwide. Meanwhile, countless others endure the adverse health effects of alcohol use. Unfortunately, current psychological and pharmacological treatments for alcohol-use disorders are only marginally better than placebo in reducing intake. Imagine, then, if problem drinkers could be given a pill that makes them less likely to drink, less intoxicated if they do drink and…

Statins, cholesterol-lowering drugs prescribed to prevent heart attacks for the last two decades, are not as effective nor as safe as claimed, according to a review by Dr. David M. Diamond, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, and Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, an independent researcher. According to Diamond and Ravnskov, statins produce a dramatic reduction in cholesterol levels, but they have "failed to substantially improve cardiovascular outcomes." They further state that the many studies touting the efficacy of statins have not accounted for the adverse side effects of the drugs, but…

Picture this: For the past two weeks you have felt continuously dejected. You have lost interest in what normally makes you happy. Perhaps you’ve slept poorly or lost your appetite. There is a risk that you have one of the most common maladies in the world: Depression. You decide to see a doctor. She considers different treatments and finally she gives you a prescription for a small box of antidepressants. Whether they will help you is unclear. Some patients report an effect after two or three weeks, others don’t notice any change at all. Some even get even more depressed. More depressed? If…

Diabetes is a significant risk factor for developing eye diseases and the most common diabetic eye disease and a leading cause of blindness is diabetic retinopathy, which is caused by elevated blood sugar levels damaging the blood vessels of the retina and affects approximately 7.7 million Americans. About 750,000 Americans with diabetic retinopathy have diabetic macular edema (DME) in which fluid leaks into the macula, the area of the retina used when looking straight ahead. The fluid causes the macula to swell, blurring vision. In the first clinical trial directly comparing three drugs…

Human papillomaviruses (HPV) infect epithelial cells in the skin and mucosal tissue and can cause tumor-like growth. Some of these viruses also develop malignant tumors, especially cervical cancer in women, which kills around 4,000 women each year.  A quadruple HPV vaccine has been available since 2006 and it protects against the most dangerous oncogenic HPV strains that cause cervical cancer and other types of cancer in the genital and throat area, but which also cause genital warts. Yet the current human papillomavirus vaccines have had indifferent uptake in the U.S. Critics say that…

A nicotine metabolite once thought to be inactive, cotinine, instead supports learning and memory, by amplifying the action of a primary chemical messenger involved in both, finds a new study. The new findings indicate cotinine makes brain receptors more sensitive to lower levels of the messenger acetylcholine, which are typical in Alzheimer's, and may boost effectiveness, at least for a time, of existing therapies for Alzheimer's and possibly other memory and psychiatric disorders. The neurotransmitter acetylcholine is produced by cholinergic neurons, a target in diseases such as Alzheimer's…