Showing posts with label Health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Health. Show all posts
Friday, January 1, 2010
New Years Resolution... "Keep Perspective": *Terrorism Still Less Deadly in US Than Lack of Health Insurance*
.H/t to Firedoglake
"Since we still seem to be having a national freakout over some loser who got on a plane with a bomb in his underwear, which was apparently worthy of a presidential address, it might be a good idea to put the actual danger posed by terrorist attacks in some numerical perspective..."
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Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Designer Drugs For Rat-Racers -You've Heard Of 'Marathon Man? Marathon Mouse! Biotech @ It's Finest... Mouse Speed
Oral pill turns slacker mice into marathonists: study
WASHINGTON (AFP)- US researchers have come up with a pill that promises to give a typical junk-food snacking couch potato the silhouette of an athlete and the endurance of a marathon runner.The drug, which mimics the effects to the body of exercise, works on mice at least, according to scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California.
Created only for research and not available commercially, the drug works on a mouse's genetic switch called PPAR delta.
Scientists understood that in genetically-engineered mice, when the switch was permanently activated, it left the mice with a huge level of endurance, turning them into "indefatigable marathon runners."
"We wanted to know whether a drug specific for PPAR delta would have the same beneficial effects," said research team leader Ronald Evans of the Salk Institute's Gene Expression Laboratory.
The first tests failed, however: the oral drug appeared to activate the gene, but the mice did not do better as exercisers unless they were forced to exercise at high levels. Only then was their endurance heightened.
In Full
IMDB - Marathon Man
Thanks For Stopping By
Saturday, March 29, 2008
Upping the anti (depressant) - Everything you'd want to know about the non-functionality of anti-depressants - Log base 2
Nick Barrowman gave his weblog a somewhat deceptive name:
So he tries to recover:
Friday, March 28, 2008
Upping the anti (depressant)A paper on antidepressants by Kirsch and co-authors published last month in PLoS Medicine has received a lot of attention. The antidepressants studied are the six most widely prescribed approved between 1987 and 1999: Prozac, Paxil, Effexor, Serzone, Zoloft, and Celexa.
The Editors' Summary explains:
The researchers obtained data on all the clinical trials submitted to the FDA ... They then used meta-analytic techniques to investigate whether the initial severity of depression affected the HRSD [Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression] improvement scores for the drug and placebo groups in these trials. They confirmed first that the overall effect of these new generation of antidepressants was below the recommended criteria for clinical significance. Then they showed that there was virtually no difference in the improvement scores for drug and placebo in patients with moderate depression and only a small and clinically insignificant difference among patients with very severe depression. The difference in improvement between the antidepressant and placebo reached clinical significance, however, in patients with initial HRSD scores of more than 28—that is, in the most severely depressed patients. Additional analyses indicated that the apparent clinical effectiveness of the antidepressants among these most severely depressed patients reflected a decreased responsiveness to placebo rather than an increased responsiveness to antidepressants.The press simplified it further. The MSNBC headline was "Antidepressants may not help many patients". The Guardian announced: "Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists".
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