Study Reveals Benefits of Acupuncture in Pregnancy

February 23th, 2010

The Wall Street Journal

By Shirley S. Wang

Acupuncture designed to treat depression appears to improve symptoms in pregnant women, suggesting it as an alternative to antidepressant medication during pregnancy, a study found.

The study, published Monday in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology, is the largest to date examining the effectiveness of acupuncture to treat depression in pregnant women. It was funded by a grant from the government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. “Acupuncture that we have tested works for pregnant, depressed women,” said Rachel Manber, a study author and professor at Stanford University. However, “no single study is enough to make policy recommendations,” she said.

Depression in pregnancy is a risk factor for postpartum depression. Postpartum depression is associated in some studies with poorer cognitive and emotional development in children. Some have linked depression in pregnancy and low birth weight.

As many as 14% of pregnant women are thought to develop a significant depression at some point during their pregnancy, according to the study authors, comparable to numbers who suffer from postpartum depression. Antidepressants are generally considered safe for use in pregnancy, but research has been limited and concerns continue to grow, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. One study showed that the risk of persistent pulmonary hypertension, a potentially serious lung condition, is significantly greater in newborns whose mother took antidepressants later in pregnancy. The Food and Drug Administration recommends that patients and physicians “carefully consider and discuss together” the benefits and risks taking antidepressants during pregnancy.”Antidepressants are not an attractive option for many women,” said Dr. Manber. “Many women are concerned about using antidepressant medication during pregnancy.”

Acupuncture, based on ancient Chinese medicine, attempts to treat conditions by stimulating points on the body, most often with needles stuck in the skin and moved by hand or electrical stimulation, according to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

In the study, 150 clinically depressed pregnant women who weren’t previously taking antidepressants were randomly assigned to get either acupuncture for depression, acupuncture not specifically designed for depression, or massage for eight weeks. Those who got acupuncture targeting depression had a significantly greater decrease in depressive symptoms, compared with the other women. Some 63% of women in the acupuncture-for-depression group responded to treatment, compared with 44% in the other groups.

There wasn’t a difference between the groups in full recovery from the depression. Though this study didn’t compare acupuncture for depression with another active treatment, the response rates are comparable to those rates from other depression treatments in studies of non-pregnant individuals, Dr. Manber said. And future work needs to examine how acupuncture for depression compares with standard treatment like antidepressants or psychotherapy, as well as who responds to treatment and what the optimal dose of the acupuncture treatment should be.

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Glaxo Taking Focus off of Antidepressants

February5, 2010

The Wall Street Journal

By Jeanne Whalen

GlaxoSmithKline PLC said it will stop research into new antidepressants and focus on diseases for which it believes it can develop more valuable drugs, a major shift for a company that developed some of the biggest-selling antidepressants of the past 20 years.

Profits at the U.K. drug giant, which posted a 66% increase in fourth-quarter earnings Thursday, were long fueled by the antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin, which at their peak generated billions of dollars a year in sales. Similar medicines, such as Eli Lilly & Co.’s Prozac and Pfizer Inc.’s Zoloft, also generated big sales for those companies.

However, low-cost …

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The Kevin Trudeau Show: 1-19-10

Today, Kevin is back LIVE!!! Find out why Kindles might possibly be the scariest things he’s ever seen and why people are starting to get violent over a lack of fast food.

Get the news you won’t hear from the mainstream media!
FDA Warns Drug Companies for Misleading Public
FDA Will Not Regulate BPA
7 Foods You Should Never Eat
This is What Schools Are Serving Your Children
Putin Bans U.S. Imported Chickens
Popular Drugs Recalled For Mold
Side-Effects of Pfizer’s Quit-Smoking Drug
Psychiatrist Wrote 1,000 Prescriptions Per Week

Plus, Dr. Bob Marshall of Quantum Nutrition Center stopped by to explain why vitamins and mineral supplements from health stores are so toxic to your body.

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Anti-Depression Drugs Found Mostly Useless in Study

January 13, 2010

LA Times

By Shari Roan

Antidepressant medications probably provide little or no benefit to people with mild or moderate depression, a new study has found. Rather, the mere act of seeing a doctor, discussing symptoms and learning about depression probably triggers the improvements many patients experience while on medication.

Only people with very severe depression receive additional benefits from drugs, said the senior author of the study, Robert J. DeRubeis, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor. The research was released online Tuesday and will be published today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Hundreds of studies have attested to the benefits of antidepressants over placebos, DeRubeis said. But many studies involve only participants with severe depression. Confusion arises, he said, “because there is a tendency to generalize the findings to mean that all depressed people benefit from medications.”

The current analysis attempted to quantify how much of antidepressants’ benefit is attributable to chemical effects on the brain and how much can be explained by other factors, such as visiting a doctor, taking action to feel better or merely the passage of time.

Researchers reviewed six randomized, placebo-controlled studies with a total of 718 patients who took either an antidepressant or placebo. The patients were adults with levels of depression ranging from mild to very severe based on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, a questionnaire widely used in depression research. The studies did not exclude patients who were likely to have a strong response to a placebo. Researchers then compared the patients’ depression scores at the beginning of treatment with those after at least six weeks of treatment.

The study found that the magnitude of the drugs’ benefit increased with the baseline level of depression. The effect of treatment was similar in people with mild, moderate and severe symptoms, regardless of whether they took an antidepressant or placebo. Only the people who rated very severe on the depression scale at the start of the study showed measurable improvements on antidepressants.

“There is no doubt that there are tremendous benefits from antidepressants, as our study showed,” DeRubeis said. “But this study helps us resolve, to some degree, the question of how much benefit people can expect from the medicines themselves when symptoms are not severe.”

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Too Many Drugs in Americans – More Evidence

January 13, 2010

Natural News

By S. L. Baker

As NaturalNews has previously reported, the U.S. is a nation seemingly hooked on mind-altering drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/027054_d…). A study released last fall in the Archives of General Psychiatry documented a dramatic increase in the use of antidepressant drugs like Prozac since l996. In fact, these medications are now the most widely prescribed drugs in the U.S.

Think Americans are maxed out on the number of psychiatric meds that huge numbers of them are taking? Think again. A new report says U.S. adults are increasingly being prescribed combinations of antidepressants, anti-anxiety and antipsychotic medications — and they could be experiencing serious side effects as a result.

The study, published in the January edition of Archives of General Psychiatry, investigated patterns and trends in what is known as psychotropic polypharmacy, meaning the prescribing of two or more psychiatric drugs. Ramin Mojtabai, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Mark Olfson, M.D., M.P.H., of Columbia University Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, examined data gathered from a national sample of office-based psychiatry practices. In all, the researchers looked at the medications prescribed between 1996 and 2006 during more than 13,000 office visits to psychiatrists by adults.

The results showed a significant increase in the number of mind impacting drugs prescribed over these years. The percentage of doctor visits which resulted in two or more medications being prescribed increased from 42.6 percent to 59.8 percent. What’s more, the percentage of visits at which three or more drugs were prescribed soared from 16.9 percent to 33.2 percent. And the median number of medications prescribed at each appointment with a psychiatrist increased on average by of 40.1 percent.

The combinations of drugs being prescribed with increasing frequency include antidepressants with sedative-hypnotics (the most prescribed combination), antidepressants given along with antipsychotics and combinations of several kinds of antidepressants. But at least the doctors prescribing these mixed drugs are only doing so based on solid research showing the combos are safe and effective, right? Wrong.

“Because scant data exist to support the efficacy of some of the most common medication combinations, such as antipsychotic combinations or combinations of antidepressants and antipsychotics, prudence suggests that renewed clinical efforts should be made to limit the use of these combinations to clearly justifiable circumstances,” the authors wrote in their paper. “At the same time, a new generation of research is needed to assess the efficacy, effectiveness and safety of common concomitant medication regimens, especially in patients with multiple disorders or monotherapy-refractory conditions.”

In other words, drugs are being given to patients in all sorts of combinations without sound science showing they even work well together — much less that these drug cocktails are safe to take. In fact, the researchers point out specific dangers of taking multiple psychiatric drugs.

“While the evidence for added benefit of antipsychotic polypharmacy is limited, there is growing evidence regarding the increased adverse effects associated with such combinations,” they concluded. A case in point: some combinations cause increases in body weight and total cholesterol level. Others have been associated with an increase in fasting blood glucose level.

Click here for the full report.

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 1-6-10

 

The Kevin Trudeau Show: 12-15-09

Today, Kevin explains why the government is taking away the spirit of Christmas and how your freedoms are taken away. Also, find out why our standard of living is declining at rapid speeds and the top 3 things you can do to survive it.

Get the headlines you aren’t hearing from the mainstream media:
The Lazy Man’s Way to A Fortune
Text Messaging Causing Blindness
BPA Linked To Serious Health Problems
Big Brother Isn’t a Protect Our Borders
D.C. Hands Out $15M in Bonuses
Fructose Fueling Childhood Obesity
Tamiflu Proven Useless
Swine Flu Less Lethal Than Feared
CT Scans Leads To Cancer in Thousands
Antidepressants Raise Stroke Risk
Herb To Treat Chemotherapy Liver Damage

Plus, the Administrative Director of HempUSA.org, Thomas James, gives you the REAL story behind the power of hemp and why the government wants to keep it from you!

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Antidepressants May Raise Women’s Stroke Risk

December 15, 2009

WebMD Health News

By Salynn Boyles

Dec. 14, 2009 — Older women who take antidepressants may have a slightly higher risk for stroke and death.

In a new finding from the large study known as the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), postmenopausal women who took tricyclic or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants had a small increased risk of dying from all causes, compared to women who did not take antidepressants.

SSRI users also had a greater risk for strokes, especially strokes caused by bleeding, but their overall risk was still quite small.

It was not clear if the increase was caused by the medications or by the depression itself.

“Depression is an often serious and debilitating illness, with its own heart risks including heart disease and death,” study researcher Jordan W. Smoller, MD, of Massachusetts General Hospital tells WebMD. “It is difficult to confidently tease apart the contribution of depression and the drugs used to treat it.”

The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), which began in 1991, followed more than 160,000 postmenopausal women in the U.S. for up to 15 years. The newly published analysis included more than 136,000 WHI participants who were not taking antidepressants at enrollment.

Antidepressants and Stroke

At their first follow-up visit, either one or three years after enrolling in the study, 5,500 women reported taking either tricyclic or SSRI antidepressants.

Compared to women who did not take antidepressants, women who did had no greater risk for heart disease around six years later. But SSRI use was associated with a 32% greater risk of dying from all causes in one analysis and a 45% increased risk for stroke.

Smoller points out that the overall increase in stroke risk among SSRI users was small — less than 2% per year.

“The vast majority of women taking antidepressants did not have one of these bad outcomes,” he says.

He adds that more research is needed to fully understand the impact, if any, of different classes of antidepressants on cardiovascular risk.

It is also not clear if a similar association would be seen in men and younger women.

The researchers note that tricyclic antidepressants have potential to be toxic to the heart. Studies examining SSRIs and the heart have been mixed, with some finding the drugs to be protective against clot-related strokes and others finding them to increase the risk for bleeding.

SSRIs include the drugs Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, Lexapro, and Celexa.

Some widely prescribed newer antidepressants, including the serotonin norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs) Cymbalta, Pristiq, and Effexor and the unique antidepressant Wellbutrin, entered the market after the study was completed.

Huntsville, Ala., neurologist and American Heart Association spokesman Jeff Harris, MD, says even if antidepressant use is associated with a slight increase in stroke risk, the risks associated with untreated depression are much greater.

“No one should stop taking a needed antidepressant based on the results of this study,” he tells WebMD. “We know that depression is a risk factor for stroke and heart attack, just like high blood pressure and diabetes. And just like these risk factors, it is treatable.”

Harris warns that certain combinations of antidepressants, such as SSRIs and SNRIs, should never be taken together.

“It is important that patients tell all their doctors about the medications they are taking for depression to avoid interactions,” he says. “But I wouldn’t worry about the risk associated with an individual SSRI or tricyclic antidepressant.”

WebMD contacted manufacturers of antidepressants for comment but did not receive replies in time for publication.

Click here for the full report

Antidepressants Alter Your Personality

December 9, 2009

Los  Angeles Times

By Melissa Healy

Peter D. Kramer, the psychiatrist and author of the path-breaking 1993 book “Listening to Prozac,” said in an interview today that he felt “vindicated” by a newly published study (“Personality Change During Depression Treatment,” by Tony Z. Tang et al) finding that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants cause dramatic personality changes in depressed patients who take them.

“It’s hard not to feel justified” in the view–offered long before it became fashionable–that antidepressants now taken by 7% of American adults do more than lift depression: They nudge underlying personalities–even those of healthy people–into brighter, more appealing territory, and in so doing, raise ethical concerns about “cosmetic psychiatry.”

The study offers evidence that people who are unassertive, pessimistic, prone to worry and prefer to be by themselves or in small groups are more likely to develop depression, and that, when they take SSRIs, those underlying personality traits change more than most peoples’ change in an adult lifetime–in the span of 16 weeks. That change in basic outlook not only seems to be the thing that lifts them out of depression; it may even reduce the likelihood that they’ll relapse. (You can read our detailed account of the study and its findings here.)

While a group of subjects undergoing cognitive therapy had some of the same effects, they weren’t nearly as powerful as those that came from a pill–which in this case was paroxetine, marketed as Paxil.

Kramer found one possible inference from the study particularly striking: that it might turn on its head the view that many clinicians have of the value of drugs and/or cognitive therapy for their patients. “It looks like medicine is good for chronic personality traits and cognitive therapy is good for acute illness,” he said. Translation: Maybe any of us who are given to sad or worried rumination should be on SSRIs, and then, if we fall into depression anyway, we can get some time-consuming and expensive cognitive therapy. (That DOES sound like a treatment algorithm that would appeal to insurance companies.)

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Pharmaceuticals in NYC Drinking Water

November 23, 2009

Environmental Working Group

By Olga V. Naidenko, Ph.D.

Mr. Chairman and distinguished Members of the Committee: My name is Olga Naidenko, and I am a Senior Scientist at Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit research and advocacy organization based in Washington, DC; Ames, Iowa; and Oakland, California. We focus much of our research on potential health risks from chemical contamination of food, water, consumer products and the environment.

With this testimony, we express our strong support for the proposed law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York that would require testing by the Department of Environmental Protection for the presence of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in the New York City drinking water supply and the effluent from wastewater treatment plants. We commend the Council for considering this important measure that will serve as an essential step toward protecting public health from potential adverse effects of life-long, cumulative exposure to mixtures of multiple pharmaceuticals and endocrine disrupting chemicals in drinking water.

The presence of hundreds of unregulated pharmaceuticals and other synthetic chemicals in the nation’s surface, ground, waste and drinking water has been documented in studies done by the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) and water utilities. Research demonstrates that although individual pharmaceuticals occur at relatively low levels, conventional wastewater treatment does not effectively remove them. This is cause for concern and a call for timely action.

Below, we highlight three key areas of concern around pharmaceuticals in drinking water:

The full spectrum of pharmaceuticals and related contaminants in the New York City drinking water supply is currently unknown; this gap must be urgently addressed by systematic, long-term water quality monitoring;
The results of the testing must be fully disclosed in order to maintain the public’s confidence in the health and safety of their drinking water;
The development of appropriate, economically feasible plans for the protection of drinking water and for ensuring the healthy survival of aquatic life requires a robust dataset on the occurrence of pharmaceutical contaminants in water sources.
Below we address these points in detail.

1. The full spectrum of pharmaceuticals and related contaminants in the New York City drinking water supply is currently unknown; this gap must be urgently addressed by annual water quality monitoring.

The Associated Press investigation (“AP Probe Finds Drugs in Drinking Water,” March 9, 2008) brought to the attention of the public what the scientific literature has been documenting for a decade – our waters are polluted with a mixture of synthetic chemicals that have been designed to have powerful effects at very low concentrations. Of especial concern are human and veterinary medicines such as steroids, antibiotics, anti-depressants and hormones, which find their way into wastewater due to pharmaceuticals excreted by the body; disposal of unused drugs; farm fields treated with biosolids (sewage sludge); manure from animals fed antibiotics that is used as fertilizer; and industrial discharge from pharmaceutical manufacturing (AP (Associated Press) 2008).

There are no federal or state standards or monitoring requirements for the vast majority of these contaminants in drinking water or wastewater. While the health effects of these pharmaceuticals at therapeutic doses are relatively well-known, their ecological and public health impacts, especially their side effects and potential for synergism with other pollutants, remain to be addressed and cannot be dismissed (Jones 2003; Pringle 2008).

Some studies have suggested that for individual pharmaceuticals, a person would have to drink hundreds of gallons of water to get anywhere near a medical dose (Caldwell 2009; Snyder 2008). However, no study has so far addressed the cumulative human health risk posed by the mixtures of pharmaceuticals that we may ingest on a daily basis (Benotti M.J. 2009; Focazio 2008; Kingsbury 2008; Kolpin 2002). Meanwhile, according to the U.S. EPA, many drug classes of concern are found in the nation’s water sources, including (U.S. EPA 2009b):

Antibiotics and antimicrobials that may lead to the development of drug-resistant bacteria;
Estrogenic steroids that may affect the reproductive system in wildlife and people;
Antidepressants and calcium-channel blockers, which have been associated with effects on spawning in shellfish and “dramatic inhibition of sperm activity in certain aquatic organisms” (U.S. EPA 2009b);
Antiepileptic drugs such as phenytoin, valproate, carbamazepine that may act as human neuroteratogens and trigger cell death in the developing brain, which leads to neurodegeneration.
Genotoxic drugs that are primarily used at hospitals and have a high acute toxicity.

Scientists do not yet understand what impact all of these water pollutants will have on human and environmental health.

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