Pharmacology
A reformulation of OxyContin made it harder to abuse and that has curtailed the drug's illicit use but some 25 percent of drug abusers entering rehab still find a way - or at least said they still abused the prescription painkiller on surveys despite package labeling that emphasizes its abuse-deterrent properties.
Scholars surveying almost 11,000 drug users at 150 drug-treatment facilities in 48 states found that an abuse-deterrent formulation of the prescription drug OxyContin was successful in getting abusers and addicts to stop using the drug, but only to a point - and then others switched…
This year marks the 50th anniversary of cisplatin’s accidental discovery as an anti-cancer drug. Despite its horrible side effects, and the ability of cancers to become resistant to it, the drug remains as relevant now as it was when it first reached the market.
And the good news is that the drug can, and is, being made better. New formulations are being designed to make it more effective and less toxic.
The history of cisplatin
The history of cisplatin starts not in 1965, but in 1844, when it was first created by Italian chemist Michele Peyrone. For a long time it was known as Peyrone’s…
Drug discovery is an expensive, bureaucracy-laced process. Due to more restrictions requiring a lot more trials, drug discovery is an average 14 year process costing $2 billion and only 1 out of 5,000 drugs will get approved and out to the market. It's easy to imagine why once a company knows the product is not viable or safe, it is abandoned.
But a group of academics think that information should be retained and even shared - of course, they do not want to pay for any of those things so companies are unlikely to listen. They say the information is critical for effective care and protecting…
Hot off the presses: The FDA just approved the first biosimilar drug in the United States. Sandoz's Zarxio is used to boost the production of certain white blood cells in patients who are undergoing cancer chemotherapy, and are immunocompromised. Sarxio will compete with Amgen's Neupogen, which has been used for this purpose since its approval in 1991.
The thrust of the news is mostly regulatory and economic:
Unlike generic drugs, which are chemically identical in every way to their brand name counterparts, biosimilars are not. They are similar, which really ought to be…
An experimental compound known as GC-1 causes loss of weight and fat in mice in lab tests. The drug speeds up metabolism, or burning off, of fat cells, by activating the receptors for thyroid hormone, which play a role in regulating metabolism - the body's conversion of food into energy. Thyroid hormone receptors also help with adaptive thermogenesis, in which the body converts excess energy (calories and fat) to heat.
Until recently, there was no evidence that human adults had
energy-burning, "good" brown fat.
It was only known that animals and human infants did but now…
Every fertility specialist seeks to design the most effective treatment strategy possible for each couple seeking to become pregnant. Treatment is usually a complex process and fertility drugs are often part of the regimen. Along with the benefits of such drugs, however, come risks such as multiple gestation or pregnancy.
Fertility drugs target specific fertility issues. For example, approximately 25% of women unable to conceive have ovulation problems -- including the inability to mature and release an egg regularly (oligo-ovulation) or to ovulate at all (anovulation). Drugs may be used to…
Rates of substance use are higher in people with mental health problems compared to the general population and particularly in people with bipolar disorder, with cannabis the street drug most frequently used.
Estimates suggest that up to 64% of this group have tried cannabis at least once in their lives, against about 30% of those without the disorder, despite only being about 2% of the overall population.
Specific reasons for the high levels of cannabis use in bipolar disorder are not yet fully understood. Retrospective studies (using case histories and qualitative interviews) suggest that…
Medical marijuana usage has been proliferating across the United States, primarily due to claims about pain management, but the demographics are baffling. Though women have 60 percent of medical visits for pain, 80 percent of medical marijuana prescriptions for pain have been men.
Yet in instances where the prescriptions have been real, tolerance develops quickly, which means people are inhaling more and more carcinogens, and there are numerous other side effects.
The side effects which limit the therapeutic value of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ9-THC), the major psychoactive…
Extra virgin olive oil is believed to have heart health benefits but a new paper takes that one better and shows why it has been identified for its rapid destruction of cancer cells.
While scientists have shown that the oleocanthal compound found in extra virgin olive oil causes cell death in cancer cells, they have been unable to provide an explanation for this phenomenon until now.
In a recent study,
Paul Breslin, David Foster, and Onica LeGendre
discovered that the key to understanding the toxic effect of oleocantha in cancerous cells lies in its reaction…
Antipsychotic medications for pediatric patients climbed 62 percent for children on Medicaid between 2002 and 2007, reaching 2.4 percent of those youth. Unless we really believe that poor kids are undergoing an epidemic of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, it's time to examine prescription practices.
More kids nationwide are taking medications designed to treat such mental illnesses as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and pediatricians and psychiatrists at the University of Vermont want to know why.
David Rettew, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at…