Neurology Center

Six months ago, I asked What's The Best Antidepressant?, and I discussed a paper by Andrea Cipriani et al. The paper claimed that of the modern antidepressants, escitalopram (Lexapro) and sertraline (Zoloft) offer the best combination of effectiveness and mild side effects, and that sertraline has the advantage of being much cheaper.The Cipriani paper was a meta-analysis of trials comparing one drug...

Deep-brain stimulation (DBS) is probably the most exciting emerging treatment in psychiatry. DBS is the use of high-frequency electrical current to alter the function of specific areas of the brain. Originally developed for Parkinson's disease, over the past five years DBS has been used experimentally in severe clinical depression, OCD, Tourette's syndrome, alcoholism, and more.Reports of the effects...

Antidepressant sales are rising in most Western countries, and they have been for at least a decade. Recently, we learned that the proportion of Americans taking antidepressants in any given year nearly doubled from 1996 to 2005.The situation has been thought to be similar in the UK. But a hot-off-the-press paper in the British Medical Journal reveals some surprising facts about the issue: Explaining...

Last month Wired, announced that Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.The article's a good read, and the basic story is true, at least in the case of psychiatric drugs. In clinical trials, people taking placebos do seem to get better more often now than in the past (paper). This is a big problem for Big Pharma, because it means that experimental new drugs often...

The placebo is the most talked-about treatment in medicine.Everyone's heard of the "placebo effect", by which pills containing no drugs at all, just chalk and sugar, often seem to make people feel better. But if the mere expectation of improvement can produce improvement, then the expectation of unpleasant consequences, such as side effects, should make people feel worse. This is sometimes called...

"Statistically, airplane travel is safer than driving..." "Statistically, you're more likely to be struck by lightning than to..." "Statistically, the benefits outweigh the risks..."What does statistically mean in sentences like this? Strictly speaking, nothing at all. If airplane travel is safer than driving, then that's just a fact. (It is true on an hour-by-hour basis). There's no statistically...

A study claims that it's possible to immunize against cocaine: Cocaine Vaccine for the Treatment of Cocaine Dependence in Methadone-Maintained Patients. But does it work? And will it be useful?The idea of an anti-drug vaccine is not new; as DrugMonkey explains in his post on this paper, monkeys were being given experimental anti-morphine vaccines as long ago as the 1970s. This one has been under development...

Freudian psychoanalysis is the key to treating depression, especially the post-natal kind (depression after childbirth). That's according to a Guardian article by popular British psychologist and author Oliver James. He says that recent research has proven Freud right about the mind, and that psychoanalysis works better than other treatments, like cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT).Neuroskeptic readers...