Obesity/Metabolic Syndrome

Teaching psychiatrists the appropriate prescribing guidelines for patients with schizophrenia did not reduce the incidence of inappropriate prescribing.

My mother was once a bright, creative, beautiful young woman, a promising artist and a poet, who was captivated by the hippie movement. She was a creative bohemian artist, defying the conventions of our middle-class Jewish Midwestern family, which had carried a tradition of holding emotions inside and acting stoic. One day, soon after my grandparents’ divorce, she left. She hitched a ride to California, and from that point on, was never the same. The police picked her up on a park bench in Arizona, and she was committed for the first time at age 18. She rotated in and out of mental hospitals, the streets, and jail until her death.

An Austrian study of the baseline prevalence of metabolic abnormalities and changes following treatment with five commonly-used antipsychotic drugs (haloperidol, amisulpride, olanzapine, quetiapine or...

According to new research by Joanna Moncrieff and Sebastião Viola, mental health problems have become the leading cause of disability claims in the UK. While the overall number of claims for other conditions has decreased by 35%, claims related to “mental disorders” have increased 103% since 1995.

In this piece for The New York Times, Emily Palmer describes the life journey thus far of Charles Louis, from being prescribed two psychiatric medications in...

Following a lawsuit brought by Andrew Thibault of Parents Against Pharmaceutical Abuse (PAPA), the FDA has produced adverse event and severe adverse event reports...

A 33-year controlled, prospective study conducted as a collaboration by researchers in New York, Mexico, and Verona, Italy found that men diagnosed with ADHD...

From EndocrinologyAdvisor: A recent meta-analysis suggests that antidepressant drug use may increase patients' risk of diabetes. According to the lead investigator, over 1 million diabetes...

“Do they make people less aggressive? Yes, sometimes they do. Will they sedate people? Absolutely. Will they make kids easier to manage? They will,” Robert Whitaker tells Liz Spikol for Philadelphia Magazine. “But I know of no study that shows that medicating these kids long-term will help them grow up and thrive. The developing brain is a very delicate thing. The narrative is that these side effects are mild, and that’s just not true, and that the benefits are well-established, and so often they’re not.”

Johnson & Johnson is exposed to personal injury and product liability lawsuits over the failure to warn about Risperdal gynecomastia side effects in boys.

Research from India indicates that "schizophrenia in the absence of antipsychotic drug treatment is not a factor contributing to high prevalence of metabolic abnormalities." Abstract...

As we have reported at MIA, new research indicates that Parkinson's disease patients who are given antipsychotics to treat dementia and psychosis may be...

In a series of experiments in mice, researchers found that the drug risperidone alters gut microbes, which in turn profoundly influence metabolism, weight, and overall health.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports on legislation being passed in California to go after physicians who overprescribe psychiatric drugs to foster youth. The proposed legislation also targets government agencies that fail to offer nondrug alternative therapies to help foster youth recover from traumatic childhoods.

Two patients have now died while taking the drug beloranib in an obesity drug trial. Both patients were in the active arm of the study and had received the drug rather than a placebo. Zafgen did not say whether it believed the drug had caused the blood clotting in the lungs that led to the patient’s death.

Drug makers have faced large fines for unethical and harmful practices but have simply treated these as a cost of doing business. Ed Silverman reports...