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Javier E

What Cookies and Meth Have in Common - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-and-meth-have-in-common.html

food addiction drug stress plasticity reward environment psychology research brain science

shared by Javier E on 03 Jul 17 - No Cached
  • Why would anyone continue to use recreational drugs despite the medical consequences and social condemnation? What makes someone eat more and more in the face of poor health?
  • modern humans have designed the perfect environment to create both of these addictions.
  • the myth has persisted that addiction is either a moral failure or a hard-wired behavior — that addicts are either completely in command or literally out of their minds
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • Now we have a body of research that makes the connection between stress and addiction definitive. More surprising, it shows that we can change the path to addiction by changing our environment.
  • Neuroscientists have found that food and recreational drugs have a common target in the “reward circuit” of the brain, and that the brains of humans and other animals who are stressed undergo biological changes that can make them more susceptible to addiction.
  • In a 2010 study, Diana Martinez and colleagues at Columbia scanned the brains of a group of healthy controls and found that lower social status and a lower degree of perceived social support — both presumed to be proxies for stress — were correlated with fewer dopamine receptors, called D2s, in the brain’s reward circuit
  • The reward circuit evolved to help us survive by driving us to locate food or sex in our environment
  • Today, the more D2 receptors you have, the higher your natural level of stimulation and pleasure — and the less likely you are to seek out recreational drugs or comfort food to compensate
  • people addicted to cocaine, heroin, alcohol and methamphetamines experience a significant reduction in their D2 receptor levels that persists long after drug use has stopped. These people are far less sensitive to rewards, are less motivated and may find the world dull, once again making them prone to seek a chemical means to enhance their everyday life.
  • Drug exposure also contributes to a loss of self-control. Dr. Volkow found that low D2 was linked with lower activity in the prefrontal cortex, which would impair one’s ability to think critically and exercise restraint
  • Food, like drugs, stimulates the brain’s reward circuit. Chronic exposure to high-fat and sugary foods is similarly linked with lower D2 levels, and people with lower D2 levels are also more likely to crave such foods. It’s a vicious cycle in which more exposure begets more craving.
  • At this point you may be wondering: What controls the reward circuit in the first place? Some of it is genetic. We know that certain gene variations elevate the risk of addiction to various drugs. But studies of monkeys suggest that our environment can trump genetics and rewire the brain.
  • simply by changing the environment, you can increase or decrease the likelihood of an animal becoming a drug addict.
  • The same appears true for humans. Even people who are not hard-wired for addiction can be made dependent on drugs if they are stressed
  • Is it any wonder, then, that the economically frightening situation that so many Americans experience could make them into addicts? You will literally have a different brain depending on your ZIP code, social circumstances and stress level.
  • In 1990, no state in our country had an adult obesity rate above 15 percent; by 2015, 44 states had obesity rates of 25 percent or higher. What changed?
  • What happened is that cheap, calorie-dense foods that are highly rewarding to your brain are now ubiquitous.
  • Nothing in our evolution has prepared us for the double whammy of caloric modern food and potent recreational drugs. Their power to activate our reward circuit, rewire our brain and nudge us in the direction of compulsive consumption is unprecedented.
  • The processed food industry has transformed our food into a quasi-drug, while the drug industry has synthesized ever more powerful drugs that have been diverted for recreational use.
  • Fortunately, our brains are remarkably plastic and sensitive to experience. Although it’s far easier said than done, just limiting exposure to high-calorie foods and recreational drugs would naturally reset our brains to find pleasure in healthier foods and life without drugs.
ilanaprincilus06

'Drug Use For Grown-Ups' Serves As An Argument For Personal Choice : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...n-argument-for-personal-choice

drugs crime

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In his new book Drug Use for Grown-Ups, the Columbia University professor of psychology and psychiatry zealously argues that drug use should be a matter of personal choice
  • personal choice can lead to positive outcomes.
  • "The practice spread widely...Many women and young girls, as also young men of respectable family, were being induced to visit the dens, where they were ruined morally and otherwise."
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  • Soon enough, however, articles appeared widely that tried to make a connection between African American cocaine use and criminality.
  • one of the book's most eye-opening aspects is its challenge of the long-running association between drugs and addiction.
  • It must also interfere with a person's job, parenting or personal relationships. Other indications of addiction may be high tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, or persistence in repeated failed efforts to quit.
  • "What about the notion that drugs led to poverty and crime in my neighborhood?" he asks. "Well, that is simply an ugly fantasy, an incredibly effective one to be sure.
  • that it's a pre-existing kind of personal vulnerability — psychological and/or circumstantial — that precedes the drugs themselves that can lead to addiction.
  • And when addiction does occur, there should be safe spaces for people to get help,
  • There are no cures in psychiatric medicine. We don't have a cure for depression, nor do we have a cure for schizophrenia or anxiety.
  • We merely have medications and therapies that treat symptoms, and this allows patients to function better, despite their illnesses."
  • "such issues affect only 10 percent to 30 percent of those who use even the most stigmatized drugs, such as heroin or methamphetamine."
  • but also because it seemingly provides a simple solution to complicated problems faced by poor and desperate people.
  • But he also so importantly emphasizes that anti-drug laws have disproportionately ruined the lives of people of color;
  • Drug Use for Grown-Ups makes the case for people having the right to use drugs if they want to.
  • What we have now, instead, is racist mass incarceration and social shame prevailing (and drugs hardly scarce anyway).
  • He persuasively argues for us, as Americans, to chart a more humane course for how we see drugs in our society — a course rooted in personal freedom without social stigma.
Megan Flanagan

Fearing Drugs' Rare Side Effects, Millions Take Their Chances With Osteoporosis - The N... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...osteoporosis-drugs-bones.html

drugs science research

shared by Megan Flanagan on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • terrified of exceedingly rare side effects from drugs that can help them.
  • thighbones to snap in two have shaken many osteoporosis patients so much that they say they would rather take their chances with the disease.
  • “Ninety percent of patients, when you talk to them about starting one of these drugs, won’t go on,”
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  • “Ninety percent who are on the drugs want to come off. The fear factor is huge.”
  • A 50-year-old woman has a 50 percent chance of having an osteoporotic fracture in her remaining years. The drugs, meant to be started when bone density falls very low and the chance of a fracture soars, can reduce that risk by half, studies show.
  • “You only need to treat 50 people to prevent a fracture, but you need to treat 40,000 to see an atypical fracture,”
  • hopes were dashed when Amgen announced the same problems in a clinical trial of a drug called romosozumab: a sudden shattering of a thigh bone in one patient and an area of jawbone that inexplicably rotted in two.
  • She worries about another spine fracture or, even worse, a fractured hip. But she resists taking osteoporosis drugs, she said, because she tends to have side effects with almost any drug
  • Many patients with osteoporosis have multiple fractures of their spines.
  • the drugs off patent, there is no longer an aggressive advertising push to make people aware of them.
  • “I hobble around on a cane,” she said. “I am a cripple.” She called the drug she took for osteoporosis “that wretched, dreadful stuff.”
dpittenger

Pharmaceutical pricing: Crippling | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...pharmaceutical-pricing

pharmaceutical pricing economist

shared by dpittenger on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • insurers low-balled their prices in the early days of the Affordable Care Act in order to gain market share. But there is another reason: higher drug prices. Prescription drug spending increased 13.1% in 2015
  • ASCO dryly remarked that she could find no economic theory to explain how companies price their drugs. 
  • First, pharmaceutical companies can advertise directly to patients in America, which helps ensure demand. Second, price increases have been largely invisible to both patients and their doctors, in part because health-insurance plans often shield buyers from the true costs of their drugs. Third, Medicare, the public-health programme for those aged 65 and older, is the country’s largest drug customer, yet it is not allowed to negotiate prices with drug companies—with predictable results.  The new drugs war
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  • Companies that are forced to pay higher health-insurance premiums for their workers are less inclined to raise salaries, says Steve Miller, the chief medical officer of Express Scripts, a company that manages drug benefits for insurers.
sissij

What does an LSD-style drug-induced 'higher state of consciousness' feel like? | Scienc... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ate-of-consciousness-feel-like

the guardian psychology research science

shared by sissij on 21 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • A study published this week that looked at brain scans of people on psychedelics suggested that one effect is “a mixing of the senses” – an accurate description.
  • “fountains of colour”
  • Can I see the colours begin to glow brighter, or are they humming loudly into new levels of vividness?
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  • synaesthesia
  • But tripping isn’t just about the drugs. As the shaman Julian Vayne explains in his manual for getting the best out of psychedelics, Getting Higher, all highs are products of their context.
  • sissij on 21 Apr 17
     
    I found it very interesting that LSD light patterns can actually be a kind of drug. Drugs are not limited to the ones we eat. It includes the ones that we feel. As we know, there are all kinds of addictions. Some people are addicted to certain object or certain pattern. There are even music drugs. -- Sissi (4/21/2017)
kushnerha

A Placebo Treatment for Pain - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...lacebo-treatment-for-pain.html

new york times medicine research placebo effect

shared by kushnerha on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • This phenomenon — in which someone feels better after receiving fake treatment — was once dismissed as an illusion. People who are ill often improve regardless of the treatment they receive. But neuroscientists are discovering that in some conditions, including pain, placebos create biological effects similar to those caused by drugs.
  • Taking a placebo painkiller dampens activity in pain-related areas of the brain and spinal cord, and triggers the release of endorphins, the natural pain-relieving chemicals that opioid drugs are designed to mimic. Even when we take a real painkiller, a big chunk of its effect is delivered not by any direct chemical action, but by our expectation that the drug will work. Studies show that widely used painkillers like morphine, buprenorphine and tramadol are markedly less effective if we don’t know we’re taking them.
  • Placebo effects in pain are so large, in fact, that drug manufacturers are finding it hard to beat them. Finding ways to minimize placebo effects in trials, for example by screening out those who are most susceptible, is now a big focus for research. But what if instead we seek to harness these effects? Placebos might ruin drug trials, but they also show us a new approach to treating pain.
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  • It is unethical to deceive patients by prescribing fake treatments, of course. But there is evidence that people with some conditions benefit even if they know they are taking placebos. In a 2014 study that followed 459 migraine attacks in 66 patients, honestly labeled placebos provided significantly more pain relief than no treatment, and were nearly half as effective as the painkiller Maxalt.
  • With placebo responses in pain so high — and the risks of drugs so severe — why not prescribe a course of “honest” placebos for those who wish to try it, before proceeding, if necessary, to an active drug?
  • Another option is to employ alternative therapies, which through placebo responses can benefit patients even when there is no physical mode of action.
  • a key ingredient is expectation: The greater our belief that a treatment will work, the better we’ll respond.
  • Individual attitudes and experiences are important, as are cultural factors. Placebo effects are getting stronger in the United States, for example, though not elsewhere.
  • Likely explanations include a growing cultural belief in the effectiveness of painkillers — a result of direct-to-consumer advertising (illegal in most other countries) and perhaps the fact that so many Americans have taken these drugs in the past.
  • Trials show, for example, that strengthening patients’ positive expectations and reducing their anxiety during a variety of procedures, including minimally invasive surgery, while still being honest, can reduce the dose of painkillers required and cut complications.
  • Placebo studies also reveal the value of social interaction as a treatment for pain. Harvard researchers studied patients in pain from irritable bowel syndrome and found that 44 percent of those given sham acupuncture had adequate relief from their symptoms. If the person who performed the acupuncture was extra supportive and empathetic, however, that figure jumped to 62 percent.
  • Placebos tell us that pain is a complex mix of biological, psychological and social factors. We need to develop better drugs to treat it, but let’s also take more seriously the idea of relieving pain without them.
ilanaprincilus06

Manipulating memory to treat addiction | Mo Costandi | Neurophilosophy blog | Science |... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...1

brain manipulation addiction extinction exposure therapy

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the procedure involves manipulating addicts' memories of past drug use, and could lead to non-pharmacological therapy for addiction, as well as psychiatric conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and phobia.
  • the procedure involves manipulating addicts' memories of past drug use, and could lead to non-pharmacological therapy for addiction, as well as psychiatric conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and phobia.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      Could this manipulation affect other parts of the brain?
  • addicts quickly associate paraphernalia and other drug-associated cues with the pleasurable effects of the drug, so that seeing these cues triggers cravings and drug-seeking behaviour.
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  • Current treatments effectively relieve cravings in the clinic, but not when addicts return to their usual environment
  • This process – called 'extinction' – forms the basis of cue exposure therapy, in which addicts are repeatedly exposed to drug-associated cues and prevented from responding to them in the usual way of using the drug.
  • It combines cue exposure with manipulation of a process called memory reconsolidation, in which information is retrieved from long-term storage and then reactivated so that it can be strengthened.
  • "We did the extinction training during reconsolidation, and what seems to have happened is that we somehow updated the old fear memory,"
  • also manipulates reconsolidation of addicts' memories of past drug use to weaken their habitual responses to paraphernalia and other drug-related stimuli.
  • so it remains to be seem whether the procedure will be effective in preventing cravings outside of the clinical setting.
Javier E

How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist - BBC Future - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...ransformed-a-white-supremacist

psychology research brain science connections empathy

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch in healthy volunteers
  • The latest participant in the double-blind trial, a man named Brendan, had filled out a standard questionnaire at the end. Strangely, at the very bottom of the form, Brendan had written in bold letters: "This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do."
  • They googled Brendan's name, and up popped a disturbing revelation: until just a couple of months before, Brendan had been the leader of the US Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a notorious white nationalist group rebranded in 2019 as the American Identity Movement. Two months earlier, activists at Chicago Antifascist Action had exposed Brendan's identity, and he had lost his job.
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  • "Go ask him what he means by 'I now know what I need to do,'" she instructed Bremmer. "If it's a matter of him picking up an automatic rifle or something, we have to intervene."
  • As he clarified to Bremmer, love is what he had just realised he had to do. "Love is the most important thing," he told the baffled research assistant. "Nothing matters without
  • When de Wit recounted this story to me nearly two years after the fact, she still could hardly believe it. "Isn't that amazing?" she said. "It's what everyone says about this damn drug, that it makes people feel love. To think that a drug could change somebody's beliefs and thoughts without any expectations – it's mind-boggling."
  • Over the past few years, I've been investigating the scientific research and medical potential of MDMA for a book called "I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World". I learnt how this once-vilified drug is now remerging as a therapeutic agent – a role it previously played in the 1970s and 1980s, prior to its criminalisation
  • He attended the notorious "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville and quickly rose up the ranks of his organisation, first becoming the coordinator for Illinois and then the entire Midwest. He travelled to Europe and around the US to meet other white nationalist groups, with the ultimate goal of taking the movement mainstream
  • some researchers have begun to wonder if it could be an effective tool for pushing people who are already somehow primed to reconsider their ideology toward a new way of seeing things
  • While MDMA cannot fix societal-level drivers of prejudice and disconnection, on an individual basis it can make a difference. In certain cases, the drug may even be able to help people see through the fog of discrimination and fear that divides so many of us.
  • in December 2021 I paid Brendan a visit
  • What I didn't expect was how ordinary the 31-year-old who answered the door would appear to be: blue plaid button-up shirt, neatly cropped hair, and a friendly smile.
  • Brendan grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb in an Irish Catholic family. He leaned liberal in high school but got sucked into white nationalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he joined a fraternity mostly composed of conservative Republican men, began reading antisemitic conspiracy books, and fell down a rabbit hole of racist, sexist content online. Brendan was further emboldened by the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. "His speech talking about Mexicans being rapists, the fixation on the border wall and deporting everyone, the Muslim ban – I didn't really get white nationalism until Trump started running for president," Brendan said.
  • If this comes to pass, MDMA – and other psychedelics-assisted therapy – could transform the field of mental health through widespread clinical use in the US and beyond, for addressing trauma and possibly other conditions as well, including substance use disorders, depression and eating disorders.
  • A group of anti-fascist activists published identifying information about him and more than 100 other people in Identity Evropa. He was immediately fired from his job and ostracised by his siblings and friends outside white nationalism.
  • When Brendan saw a Facebook ad in early 2020 for some sort of drug trial at the University of Chicago, he decided to apply just to have something to do and to earn a little money
  • At the time, Brendan was "still in the denial stage" following his identity becoming public, he said. He was racked with regret – not over his bigoted views, which he still held, but over the missteps that had landed him in this predicament.
  • About 30 minutes after taking the pill, he started to feel peculiar. "Wait a second – why am I doing this? Why am I thinking this way?" he began to wonder. "Why did I ever think it was okay to jeopardise relationships with just about everyone in my life?"
  • Just then, Bremmer came to collect Brendan to start the experiment. Brendan slid into an MRI, and Bremmer started tickling his forearm with a brush and asked him to rate how pleasant it felt. "I noticed it was making me happier – the experience of the touch," Brendan recalled. "I started progressively rating it higher and higher." As he relished in the pleasurable feeling, a single, powerful word popped into his mind: connection.
  • It suddenly seemed so obvious: connections with other people were all that mattered. "This is stuff you can't really put into words, but it was so profound," Brendan said. "I conceived of my relationships with other people not as distinct boundaries with distinct entities, but more as we-are-all-on
  • I realised I'd been fixated on stuff that doesn't really matter, and is just so messed up, and that I'd been totally missing the point. I hadn't been soaking up the joy that life has to offer."
  • Brendan hired a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant to advise him, enrolled in therapy, began meditating, and started working his way through a list of educational books. S still regularly communicates with Brendan and, for his part, thinks that Brendan is serious in his efforts to change
  • "I think he is trying to better himself and work on himself, and I do think that experience with MDMA had an impact on him. It's been a touchstone for growth, and over time, I think, the reflection on that experience has had a greater impact on him than necessarily the experience itself."
  • Brendan is still struggling, though, to make the connections with others that he craves. When I visited him, he'd just spent Thanksgiving alone
  • He also has not completely abandoned his bigoted ideology, and is not sure that will ever be possible. "There are moments when I have racist or antisemitic thoughts, definitely," he said. "But now I can recognise that those kinds of thought patterns are harming me more than anyone else."
  • it's not without precedent. In the 1980s, for example, an acquaintance of early MDMA-assisted therapy practitioner Requa Greer administered the drug to a pilot who had grown up in a racist home and had inherited those views. The pilot had always accepted his bigoted way of thinking as being a normal, accurate reflection of the way things were. MDMA, however, "gave him a clear vision that unexamined racism was both wrong and mean," Greer says
  • Encouraging stories of seemingly spontaneous change appear to be exceptions to the norm, however, and from a neurological point of view, this makes sense
  • Research shows that oxytocin – one of the key hormones that MDMA triggers neurons to release – drives a "tend and defend" response across the animal kingdom. The same oxytocin that causes a mother bear to nurture her newborn, for example, also fuels her rage when she perceives a threat to her cub. In people, oxytocin likewise strengthens caregiving tendencies toward liked members of a person's in-group and strangers perceived to belong to the same group, but it increases hostility toward individuals from disliked groups
  • In a 2010 study published in Science, for example, men who inhaled oxytocin were three times more likely to donate money to members of their team in an economic game, as well as more likely to harshly punish competing players for not donating enough. (Read more: "The surprising downsides of empathy.")
  • According to research published this week in Nature by Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Gül Dölen, MDMA and other psychedelics – including psilocybin, LSD, ketamine and ibogaine – work therapeutically by reopening a critical period in the brain. Critical periods are finite windows of impressionability that typically occur in childhood, when our brains are more malleable and primed to learn new things
  • Dölen and her colleagues' findings likewise indicate that, without the proper set and setting, MDMA and other psychedelics probably do not reopen critical periods, which means they will not have a spontaneous, revelatory effect for ridding someone of bigoted beliefs.
  • In the West, plenty of members of right-wing authoritarian political movements, including neo-Nazi groups, also have track records of taking MDMA and other psychedelics
  • This suggests, researchers write, that psychedelics are nonspecific, "politically pluripotent" amplifiers of whatever is going on in somebody's head, with no particular directional leaning "on the axes of conservatism-liberalism or authoritarianism-egalitarianism."
  • That said, a growing body of scientific evidence indicates that the human capacity for compassion, kindness, empathy, gratitude, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation are core features of our natures
  • As Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal wrote, "Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire that can rid us of the curse of xenophobia."
  • Ginsberg also envisions using the drug in workshops aimed at eliminating racism, or as a means of bringing people together from opposite sides of shared cultural histories to help heal intergenerational trauma. "I think all psychedelics have a role to play, but I think MDMA has a particularly key role because you're both expanded and present, heart-open and really able to listen in a new way," Ginsberg says. "That's something really powerful."
  • "If you give MDMA to hard-core haters on each side of an issue, I don't think it'll do a lot of good,"
  • if you start with open-minded people on both sides, then I think it can work. You can improve communications and build empathy between groups, and help people be more capable of analysing the world from a more balanced perspective rather than from fear-based, anxiety-based distrust."
  • In 2021, Ginsberg and Doblin were coauthors on a study investigating the possibility of using ayahuasca – a plant-based psychedelic – in group contexts to bridge divides between Palestinians and Israelis, with positive findings
  • "I kind of have a fantasy that maybe as we get more reacquainted with psychedelics, there could be group-based experiences that build community resiliency and are intentionally oriented toward breaking down barriers between people, having people see things from other perspectives and detribalising our society,
  • "But that's not going to happen on its own. It would have to be intentional, and – if it happens – it would probably take multiple generations."
  • Based on his experience with extremism, Brendan agreed with expert takes that no drug, on its own, will spontaneously change the minds of white supremacists or end political conflict in the US
  • he does think that, with the right framing and mindset, MDMA could be useful for people who are already at least somewhat open to reconsidering their ideologies, just as it was for him. "It helped me see things in a different way that no amount of therapy or antiracist literature ever would have done," he said. "I really think it was a breakthrough experience."
Javier E

Coronavirus Treatment: Hundreds of Scientists Scramble to Find One - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-treatment.html

treatment Covid-19 research science

shared by Javier E on 22 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Working at a breakneck pace, a team of hundreds of scientists has identified 50 drugs that may be effective treatments for people infected with the coronavirus.
  • Many of the candidate drugs are already approved to treat diseases, such as cancer, that would seem to have nothing to do with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus.
  • If the research effort succeeds, it will be a significant scientific achievement: an antiviral identified in just months to treat a virus that no one knew existed until January.
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  • Dr. Krogan and his colleagues set about finding proteins in our cells that the coronavirus uses to grow. Normally, such a project might take two years. But the working group, which includes 22 laboratories, completed it in a few weeks.
  • In 2011, Dr. Krogan and his colleagues developed a way to find all the human proteins that viruses use to manipulate our cells — a “map,” as Dr. Krogan calls it. They created their first map for H.I.V.
  • That virus has 18 genes, each of which encodes a protein. The scientists eventually found that H.I.V. interacts, in one way or another, with 435 proteins in a human cell.
  • In February, the research group synthesized genes from the coronavirus and injected them into cells. They uncovered over 400 human proteins that the virus seems to rely on.
  • The flulike symptoms observed in infected people are the result of the coronavirus attacking cells in the respiratory tract.
  • The new map shows that the virus’s proteins travel throughout the human cell, engaging even with proteins that do not seem to have anything to do with making new viruses.
  • Kevan Shokat, a chemist at U.C.S.F., is poring through 20,000 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration for signs that they may interact with the proteins on the map created by Dr. Krogan’s lab.
  • If promising drugs are found, investigators plan to try them in an animal infected with the coronavirus — perhaps ferrets, because they’re known to get SARS, an illness closely related to Covid-19.
  • Even if some of these drugs are effective treatments, scientists will still need to make sure they are safe for treating Covid-19. It may turn out, for example, that the dose needed to clear the virus from the body might also lead to dangerous side effects.
  • In past studies on animals, remdesivir blocked a number of viruses. The drug works by preventing viruses from building new genes.
  • In February, a team of researchers found that remdesivir could eliminate the coronavirus from infected cells. Since then, five clinical trials have begun to see if the drug will be safe and effective against Covid-19 in people.
  • Other researchers have taken startling new approaches. On Saturday, Stanford University researchers reported using the gene-editing technology Crispr to destroy coronavirus genes in infected cells.
johnsonel7

We're Being Bombarded by Ads for Drugs | Psychology Today Canada - 0 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...were-being-bombarded-ads-drugs

knowledge claims ads

shared by johnsonel7 on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • "Next time you see a TV commercial for a prescription drug, remind yourself that you know nothing about medical treatment and that everybody who made the commercial has a financial interest in your future behavior." —Eric Horowitz, Psychology Today, How Pharmaceutical Ads Distort Healthcare Markets
  • "According to Kantar Media, a firm that tracks multimedia advertising, 771,368 such ads were shown in 2016, the last full year for which data is (sic) available, an increase of almost 65 percent over 2012."
  • What catches my ears is the way in which drug presentations are made, often beginning with a personal story about someone suffering from a specific disease and how a particular drug helped them along. All well and good, until we learn that the players are usually fake patients called "actor portrayals" and fake doctors, often referred to as "actor portrayals" or "doctor dramatizations." After learning what a drug might be good for, the ads consist of rapid staccato-like talk about possible side-effects and lists in tiny text that are virtually impossible to read.
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  • The cost of the drugs also isn't given, although there has been a push that commercials offer this vital information. Furthermore, we're not offered quantitative information about risks or side-effects.
  • When you think about it, it’s actually the perfect cycle for the pharmaceutical companies whereby an increase in sales of one medication directly increases the demand of the other with the only losers being us, the consumers."
Emily Horwitz

U.S. Stockpiles Smallpox Drug in Case of Bioterror Attack - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-case-of-bioterror-attack.html

smallpox bioterrorism fear

shared by Emily Horwitz on 14 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • The United States government is buying enough of a new smallpox medicine to treat two million people in the event of a bioterrorism attack, and took delivery of the first shipment of it last week. But the purchase has set off a debate about the lucrative contract, with some experts saying the government is buying too much of the drug at too high a price.
  • Smallpox was eradicated by 1980, and the only known remaining virus is in government laboratories in the United States and Russia
  • Experts say the virus could also be re-engineered into existence in a sophisticated genetics lab.
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  • the government is paying more than $200 for each course of treatment.
  • But when stockpiling a smallpox drug was first proposed in 2001 after the Sept. 11 and anthrax attacks, it was expected to cost only $5 to $10 per course, said Dr. Donald A. Henderson, who led a government advisory panel on biodefense in the wake of those attacks. Dr. Henderson was a leader in the eradication of smallpox in the 1960s and is now at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
  • Smallpox has such a long incubation period that the vaccine can prevent disease even if it is given as late as three days after infection. Arestvyr may also prevent infection if given early enough, but that has not been proven.
  • the price being charged for a patented drug was a bargain compared with AIDS antiretrovirals that cost $20,000 a year and cancer drugs that cost more than $100,000 a year.
  • “There are 80 million courses of Tamiflu in the strategic national stockpile,” he said. “Smallpox is just as contagious and has 30 times the mortality. By measures like that, I’d say 2 million is on the low end.”
  • Emily Horwitz on 14 Mar 13
     
    After reading this article, I thought about how much fear and the perceived threat of terrorism can be used quite effectively as manipulative tools. The article seemed to suggest that, because the US is so afraid/wary of a bioterrorism attack involving smallpox, we were willing to pay an excessive amount of money for emergency-use vaccines.
grayton downing

F.D.A. Seeks Tighter Control on Prescriptions for Class of Painkillers - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-for-class-of-painkillers.html

tighter control prescriptions science medicine

shared by grayton downing on 24 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday recommended tighter controls on how doctors prescribe the most commonly used narcotic painkillers.
  • The drugs at issue contain a combination of hydrocodone and an over-the-counter painkiller like acetaminophen or aspirin and are sold either as generics or under brand names like Vicodin or Lortab. Doctors use the medications to treat pain from injuries, arthritis, dental extractions and other problems.
  • Medical Association and pharmacy organizations, have continued to fight the measure, citing the impact on patients.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “These are very difficult tradeoffs that our society has to make,” said Dr. Woodcock. “The reason we approve these drugs is for people in pain. But we can’t ignore the epidemic on the other side.”
  • In 2011, about 131 million prescriptions for hydrocodone-containing medications were written for some 47 million patients, according to government estimates. That volume of prescriptions amounts to about five billion pills.
  • Schedule II drugs are those drugs with the highest potential for abuse that can be legally prescribed.
  • Along with changing how doctors prescribe these drugs, the classification change will also impose added storage and recordkeeping requirements on druggists. In some states, nurse practitioners and other health care professionals who can currently prescribe hydrocodone-containing drugs may no longer be able to do so.
ilanaprincilus06

The FDA Has Approved An Obesity Drug That Helped Some People Drop Weight By 15% : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-some-people-drop-weight-by-15

diabetes FDA obesity

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Regulators on Friday said a new version of a popular diabetes medicine could be sold as a weight-loss drug in the U.S.
  • In company-funded studies, participants taking Wegovy had average weight loss of 15%, about 34 pounds (15.3 kilograms). Participants lost weight steadily for 16 months before plateauing.
  • "With existing drugs, you're going to get maybe 5% to 10% weight reduction, sometimes not even that,"
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • In the U.S., more than 100 million adults — about 1 in 3 — are obese.
  • Dropping even 5% of one's weight can bring health benefits, such as improved energy, blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels, but that amount often doesn't satisfy patients who are focused on weight loss
  • The drug carries a potential risk for a type of thyroid tumor, so it shouldn't be taken by people with a personal or family history of certain thyroid and endocrine tumors. Wegovy also has a risk of depression and pancreas inflammation.
  • Like other weight-loss drugs, it's to be used along with exercise, a healthy diet and other steps like keeping a food diary.
  • Wegovy builds on a trend in which makers of relatively new diabetes drugs test them to treat other conditions common in diabetics.
markfrankel18

Malcolm Gladwell: Do Genetic Advantages Make Sports Unfair? : The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130909crat_atlarge_gladwell

gladwell ethics sports

shared by markfrankel18 on 03 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 03 Sep 13
     
    "Eyesight can be improved-in some cases dramatically-through laser surgery or implantable lenses. Should a promising young baseball player cursed with normal vision be allowed to get that kind of corrective surgery? In this instance, Major League Baseball says yes. Major League Baseball also permits pitchers to replace the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow of their throwing arm with a tendon taken from a cadaver or elsewhere in the athlete's body. Tendon-replacement surgery is similar to laser surgery: it turns the athlete into an improved version of his natural self. But when it comes to drugs Major League Baseball-like most sports-draws the line. An athlete cannot use a drug to become an improved version of his natural self, even if the drug is used in doses that are not harmful, and is something that-like testosterone-is no more than a copy of a naturally occurring hormone, available by prescription to anyone, virtually anywhere in the world."
Javier E

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...2

medical research bias error science knowledge

shared by Javier E on 04 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.
  • even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you
  • studies report average results that typically represent a vast range of individual outcomes.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • studies usually detect only modest effects that merely tend to whittle your chances of succumbing to a particular disease from small to somewhat smaller
  • The odds that anything useful will survive from any of these studies are poor,” says Ioannidis—dismissing in a breath a good chunk of the research into which we sink about $100 billion a year in the United States alone.
  • nutritional studies aren’t the worst. Drug studies have the added corruptive force of financial conflict of interest.
  • Even when the evidence shows that a particular research idea is wrong, if you have thousands of scientists who have invested their careers in it, they’ll continue to publish papers on it,” he says. “It’s like an epidemic, in the sense that they’re infected with these wrong ideas, and they’re spreading it to other researchers through journals.
  • Nature, the grande dame of science journals, stated in a 2006 editorial, “Scientists understand that peer review per se provides only a minimal assurance of quality, and that the public conception of peer review as a stamp of authentication is far from the truth.
  • The ultimate protection against research error and bias is supposed to come from the way scientists constantly retest each other’s results—except they don’t. Only the most prominent findings are likely to be put to the test, because there’s likely to be publication payoff in firming up the proof, or contradicting it.
  • even for medicine’s most influential studies, the evidence sometimes remains surprisingly narrow. Of those 45 super-cited studies that Ioannidis focused on, 11 had never been retested
  • even when a research error is outed, it typically persists for years or even decades.
  • much, perhaps even most, of what doctors do has never been formally put to the test in credible studies, given that the need to do so became obvious to the field only in the 1990s
  • Other meta-research experts have confirmed that similar issues distort research in all fields of science, from physics to economics (where the highly regarded economists J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang once showed how a remarkably consistent paucity of strong evidence in published economics studies made it unlikely that any of them were right
  • His PLoS Medicine paper is the most downloaded in the journal’s history, and it’s not even Ioannidis’s most-cited work
  • while his fellow researchers seem to be getting the message, he hasn’t necessarily forced anyone to do a better job. He fears he won’t in the end have done much to improve anyone’s health. “There may not be fierce objections to what I’m saying,” he explains. “But it’s difficult to change the way that everyday doctors, patients, and healthy people think and behave.”
  • “Usually what happens is that the doctor will ask for a suite of biochemical tests—liver fat, pancreas function, and so on,” she tells me. “The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, the doctors have all been trained to order these tests, she notes, and doing so is a lot quicker than a long bedside chat. They’re also trained to ply the patient with whatever drugs might help whack any errant test numbers back into line.
  • What they’re not trained to do is to go back and look at the research papers that helped make these drugs the standard of care. “When you look the papers up, you often find the drugs didn’t even work better than a placebo. And no one tested how they worked in combination with the other drugs,” she says. “Just taking the patient off everything can improve their health right away.” But not only is checking out the research another time-consuming task, patients often don’t even like it when they’re taken off their drugs, she explains; they find their prescriptions reassuring.
  • Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do—not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding.
  • We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough
  • Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”
ilanaprincilus06

A Medication-Assisted Treatment For Meth Addiction Shows Promise : Shots - Health News ... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-proves-effective-in-new-trial

drugs addiction medical community

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • For the first time, a medication regime has been found effective for some patients with meth addiction in a large, placebo-controlled trial.
  • Unlike opioid addiction, for which medication-assisted treatment is the standard of care, no medication has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use with meth.
  • patients in clinics around the U.S. suffering from methamphetamine use disorder were treated for 12 weeks with a combination of medications — naltrexone and bupropion — or placebo.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The treatment helped 13.4% of patients with their addiction, compared with 2.5% of the placebo group.
  • This medication therapy provides another tool for doctors to try with patients.
  • "As we understand the complexity of the human brain, it becomes very much of a magical thinking that one pill will solve the problem of addiction,"
  • The treatment regimen in the trial combined two medications that have been studied separately for treating methamphetamine addiction with limited success.
  • This clinical trial was successful enough that the National Institute on Drug Addiction's Volkow says she expects to move forward toward securing FDA approval.
  • lack of medical treatments for those addicted to meth has complicated efforts to curb demand for the drug.
  • The human cost has been catastrophic. Researchers say overdose deaths linked to meth increased fourfold over the last decade.
  • Even users who don't overdose often experience damage to the heart and other tissues, and can see their lives spiral out of control.
  • "For heroin users, there's methadone, there's suboxone. I just wonder why we haven't researched [treatments for] this drug yet,"
  • "It's about evidence-based care, it's about empathy and it's about survivability,"
Javier E

Opinion | For the F.D.A., Cold Medicine That Doesn't Work Is Just the Tip of the Iceber... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cold-medicine-fda.html

cold medicine research science

shared by Javier E on 29 Sep 23 - No Cached
  • Congress needs to develop a way of better funding the F.D.A. review process. Perhaps a small excise tax could be levied on over-the-counter sales or fees assessed to makers of over-the-counter drugs to fund the F.D.A. review process or to fund studies into drugs that went on the market before 1962. Leaders need to suggest more options. There should also be a way to prioritize which drugs to look at first. The agency should review old drugs for which there are already many complaints about lack of effectiveness in the manner it did recently for phenylephrine.
  • Right now, Americans spend billions on drugs that contain ingredients that will not help them. That’s not just a waste of money — it could mean they are delaying appropriate treatment, which can lead to more severe illnesses. This is risky not only for health but also for trust. The American public deserves medicines that do what they are advertised to do.
grayton downing

The Epigenetics of Drug Abuse | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views

www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/38258/title/The-Epigenetics-of-Drug-Abuse/

abuse science research brain science

shared by grayton downing on 11 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Medicine at Mount Sinai and her colleagues found significant changes in gene networks related to glutamate pathways in the striatum, an area commonly linked to drug use
  • “In heroin users, there are clear disturbances of epigenetic mechanisms that directly correlate with their years of drug use,”
  • the researchers found evidence of alterations to DNA’s structure, including its chromatin, to produce repeatable, predictable changes in gene expression. “It’s well established that cocaine addiction has lasting effects on the brain,” Nestler said in a press release. “But studies in our lab begin to reveal just how extensive these changes are and how they might change brain function. This level of understanding could lead to better treatments for addiction.”
Ellie McGinnis

The Drugs of Work-Performance Enhancement - Steven Petrow - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281055

drugs enhancement science knowledge brain science

shared by Ellie McGinnis on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Adderall makes everything easier to understand; it makes you more alert and focused. Some college students scarf them like M&Ms and think they’re more effective at cognitive enhancement than energy drinks and safer than a smoke or a beer.
  • 4.4 percent of the adult U.S. population has ADHD, which if left untreated is associated with significant morbidity, divorce, employment, and substance abuse.
  • When she asked me why I needed it, I replied just as the college kids had on 60 Minutes: “For focus.”  
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “[Adderall] makes me so happy I can be at a family function or out socializing and not get too distracted by other events/conversations around me. I can hear them, but am not taken in by them.”
  • “Since being on Adderall, I have been insanely productive… I have paid all my outstanding bills and parking tickets (and even renewed my car's registration before it was due). I'm not late for things anymore… I have not spent a single day lying around my house doing nothing in the past few months. I have a budget, and a scheduler that I actually use.”
  • Nonetheless, for untold healthy adults (those whom researchers refer to as “mentally competent”) the cognitive-enhancing drug has led to positive changes in their lives.
  • Did it make me smarter? No. Did it make me a faster writer? Yes. Previously, when I’d sit down at my desk, I felt adrift at sea. It was as though my MacBook and research materials, piled high, swayed from left to right and then back again. It was dizzying; I just couldn’t get a grip.
  • My metaphoric double vision snapped to mono and I could see and think as clearly as if I’d stepped out of a fog. I’d never had such concentration and it showed in the number of well-written pages I produced daily
  • But with Adderall, I had knowledge aplenty and knew that once I stopped it, my depression would quickly lift. I also know that not everyone has that kind of previous experience or perspective, which is when folks get into deep trouble.
  • “Under medical supervision, stimulant medications are considered safe.” I’d add, as the Nature authors did, especially for “mentally competent adults.”
anonymous

This Is Your Brain on Junk Food: In 'Hooked,' Michael Moss Explores Addiction - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hooked-junk-food.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This Is Your Brain on Junk Food
  • Yet after writing the book, Mr. Moss was not convinced that processed foods could be addictive.
  • In a legal proceeding two decades ago, Michael Szymanczyk, the chief executive of the tobacco giant Philip Morris, was asked to define addiction.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • “My definition of addiction is a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit,”
  • Mr. Szymanczyk was speaking in the context of smoking. But a fascinating new book by Michael Moss, an investigative journalist and best-selling author, argues that the tobacco executive’s definition of addiction could apply to our relationship with another group of products that Philip Morris sold and manufactured for decades: highly processed foods.
  • In his new book, “Hooked,” Mr. Moss explores the science behind addiction and builds a case that food companies have painstakingly engineered processed foods to hijack the reward circuitry in our brains, causing us to overeat and helping to fuel a global epidemic of obesity and chronic disease.
  • Mr. Moss suggests that processed foods like cheeseburgers, potato chips and ice cream are not only addictive, but that they can be even more addictive than alcohol, tobacco and drugs.
  • In another cynical move, Mr. Moss writes, food companies beginning in the late 1970s started buying a slew of popular diet companies, allowing them to profit off our attempts to lose the weight we gained from eating their products.
  • Heinz, the processed food giant, bought Weight Watchers in 1978 for $72 million. Unilever, which sells Klondike bars and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, paid $2.3 billion for SlimFast in 2000. Nestle, which makes chocolate bars and Hot Pockets, purchased Jenny Craig in 2006 for $600 million. And in 2010 the private equity firm that owns Cinnabon and Carvel ice cream purchased Atkins Nutritionals, the company that sells low-carb bars, shakes and snacks. Most of these diet brands were later sold to other parent companies.
  • “The food industry blocked us in the courts from filing lawsuits claiming addiction; they started controlling the science in problematic ways, and they took control of the diet industry,”
  • “I’ve been crawling through the underbelly of the processed food industry for 10 years and I continue to be stunned by the depths of the deviousness of their strategy to not just tap into our basic instincts, but to exploit our attempts to gain control of our habits.”
  • The book explained how companies formulate junk foods to achieve a “bliss point” that makes them irresistible and market those products using tactics borrowed from the tobacco industry.
  • In the 1980s, Philip Morris acquired Kraft and General Foods, making it the largest manufacturer of processed foods in the country, with products like Kool-Aid, Cocoa Pebbles, Capri Sun and Oreo cookies.
  • “I had tried to avoid the word addiction when I was writing ‘Salt Sugar Fat,’” he said. “I thought it was totally ludicrous. How anyone could compare Twinkies to crack cocaine was beyond me.”
  • Witness
  • But as he dug into the science that shows how processed foods affect the brain, he was swayed
  • In “Hooked,” Michael Moss explores how no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods.
  • The faster it hits our reward circuitry, the stronger its impact.
  • That is why smoking crack cocaine is more powerful than ingesting cocaine through the nose, and smoking cigarettes produces greater feelings of reward than wearing a nicotine patch
  • : Smoking reduces the time it takes for drugs to hit the brain.
  • But no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods, Mr. Moss writes. “The smoke from cigarettes takes 10 seconds to stir the brain, but a touch of sugar on the tongue will do so in a little more than a half second, or six hundred milliseconds, to be precise,
  • This puts the term “fast food” in a new light. “Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain,” he added.
  • Mr. Moss explains that even people in the tobacco industry took note of the powerful lure of processed foods.
  • One crucial element that influences the addictive nature of a substance and whether or not we consume it compulsively is how quickly it excites the brain.
  • As litigation against tobacco companies gained ground in the 1990s, one of the industry’s defenses was that cigarettes were no more addictive than Twinkies.
  • It may have been on to something.
  • “Smoking was given an 8.5, nearly on par with heroin,” Mr. Moss writes. “But overeating, at 7.3, was not far behind, scoring higher than beer, tranquilizers and sleeping pills.
  • But processed foods are not tobacco, and many people, including some experts, dismiss the notion that they are addictive. Mr. Moss suggests that this reluctance is in part a result of misconceptions about what addiction entails.
  • For one, a substance does not have to hook everyone for it to be addictive.
  • Studies show that most people who drink or use cocaine do not become dependent
  • Nor does everyone who smokes or uses painkillers become addicted.
  • Mr. Moss said that people who struggle with processed food can try simple strategies to conquer routine cravings, like going for a walk, calling a friend or snacking on healthy alternatives like a handful of nuts. But for some people, more extreme measures may be necessary.
  • “It depends where you are on the spectrum,” he said. “I know people who can’t touch a grain of sugar without losing control. They would drive to the supermarket and by the time they got home their car would be littered with empty wrappers. For them, complete abstention is the solution.”
  • anonymous on 26 Mar 21
     
    Really interesting!! How food affects your brain:
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