Neurology Center

The herb St John's Wort is as effective as antidepressants while having milder side effects, according to a recent Cochrane review, St John's wort for major depression.Professor Edzard Ernst, a well-known enemy of complementary and alternative medicine, wrote a favorable review of this study in which he comments that given the questions around the safety and effectiveness of antidepressants, it is...

Who's more likely to start digging prematurely: one guy with a metal-detector looking for an old nail, or a field full of people with metal-detectors searching for buried treasure? In any area of science, there will be some things which are more popular than others - maybe a certain gene, a protein, or a part of the brain. It's only natural and proper that some things get of lot of attention if they...

There's been a lot of interest over the idea that an "Artificial brain is 10 years away", which is what Professor Henry Markram told the ultra-hip TED conference in Oxford the other day.That's an amazing idea. But Markram said something else even more astonishing, which, for some reason, has not got nearly as much attention:"There are two billion people on the planet affected by mental disorder," he told the audience.Two billion people. One in three.This was presumably a throw-away remark, something...

The Onion turns its satirical eye on China, with hilarious if not entirely PC results -Here's a screenshot for posterity, because their "special issues" tend to go back to normal pretty quickly.I always think it's a little odd that the Chinese government don't have anyone whose default assumption is that they're in the right. Whenever a Western or a Western-aligned country does something morally......

We read in the BMJ that a German agency refuses to rule on drug’s benefits until Pfizer discloses all trial results. The drug is reboxetine (Edronax), which readers will recall was recently deemed to be the worst new antidepressant by an Oxford team.The agency, the IQWiG, are an independent organization, but they were comissioned by the German federal government to report on the benefits of three...

How do antidepressants work? Some people will tell you that it’s all about neurogenesis. The theory goes that antidepressants increase the rate at which new neurones are created in a region called the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, and that, somehow, this boom in the number of new hippocampal cells alleviates depression.To date, however, all of the research linking antidepressants and neurogenesis...

Over at Comment is Free a week ago, Ed Halliwell proclaimed that "The Drugs Don't Work". The drugs being antidepressants. On this blog I've often written about antidepressants and the evidence that they work, or don't, so I was interested to see what he had to say.Halliwell begins by noting that antidepressant prescriptions are rising. This, he declares, is a bad thing because antidepressants just...

You may well have already heard about neuro images, a new blog from Neurophilosophy's Mo. As the name suggests, it's all about pictures of the brain. All of them are very pretty. Some are also pretty gruesome.But images are, of course, more than decoration. There are dozens of ways of picturing the brain, each illuminating different aspects of neural function. Neuropathologists diagnose diseases by...

I love the BBC, but their online science and health articles have an unfortunate tendency to be, well, rubbish. At least, the headlines do. A while back I wrote about their proclamation that "Homeopathy 'eases cancer therapy'". The problem with that one was that the only treatments which worked turned out to not actually be homeopathic.So when I saw the headline "Self-help 'makes you feel worse'",...