Neurology Center

Icelandic academic and Neuroskeptic reader Steindór J. Erlingsson reports that thanks to his efforts, pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKlein (GSK) has stopped distributing a booklet promoting the monoamine hypothesis of depression to pharmacies and doctors offices in Iceland.His report is here, and it has links to more details on the story, although these are in Icelandic, a language I'm unfortunately...

The BBC promises us a lookInside an actor's brain during a performance Actress Fiona Shaw had an fMRI scan. Parts of her brain were more active while she was reading a poem by T. S. Eliot featuring dialogue than when she was merely counting. So what?The fact that different parts of Shaw's brain were active whilst reading Eliot than when counting out loud is unsurprising. Different parts of the brain...

Do countries with more mental illness have more suicides? At first glance, it seems as though the answer must be "yes". Although not all suicides are related to mental illness, unsurprisingly people with mental illness do have a much higher suicide rate than people without. So, all other things being equal, the rate of mental illness in a country should correlate with the suicide rate. Of course,...

Today I was going to blog this paper, which says that you can predict which kids will grow up and be criminals by measuring their Pavlovian fear conditioning at age 8. In Mauritius. But The Last Psychiatrist already said everything I was going to.Luckily, there's another article in the American Journal of Psychiatry about crime in a tropical country for me to write about - Randomized, Double-Blind,...

It's every man's dream - a pill to make women want more sex. According to Boehringer Pharmaceuticals, that dream could be a reality in a few years, in the form of the strangely-named flibanserin. But is it the latest wonder-drug or just a glorified sleeping pill? Read on.Flibanserin was originally developed as an antidepressant, but in clinical trials against depression it reportedly failed to perform...

We all know about movies that are so bad, they're good. But could the same thing apply to doctors?As I described last week, Desiree Jennings is a young woman from Virginia who developed horrible symptoms, including muscle spasms and convulsions, after getting a flu vaccine. It looked a bit like a form of brain damage called dystonia.Numerous neurologists concluded that her illness was mostly or entirely...

Previously I wrote about a small study finding that smoked marijuana helps with HIV-related pain. In the last month, two more clinical trials of medical marijuana - or rather, marijuana-based drugs - for pain have come out.First, the good news. Johnson et al tested a mouth spray containing the two major psychoactive chemicals in marijuana, THC and CBD. Their patients were all suffering from terminal...

Jamie Talan's Deep Brain Stimulation: A New Treatment Shows Promise In The Most Difficult Cases is the first book to offer a popular look at DBS, one of the more exciting emerging treatments in neurology and psychiatry.Deep Brain Stimulation is not a textbook and the depth of scientific detail is kept pretty low, but the breadth of the material is good. Talan reviews the many kinds of disorders for...

You may already have heard about Desiree Jennings.If not, here's a summary, although for the full story you should consult Steven Novella or Orac, whose expert analyses of the case are second to none. Desiree Jennings is a 25 year old woman from Ashburn, Virginia who developed horrible symptoms following a seasonal flu vaccination in August. As she puts it:In a matter of a few short weeks I lost the...

It's always nice when a local boy makes good in the big wide world. Many British neuroscientists and psychiatrists have been feeling rather proud this week following the enormous amount of attention given to Professor David Nutt, formerly the British government's chief adviser on illegal drugs.Formerly being the key word. Nutt was sacked (...write your own "nutsack" pun if you must) last Friday, prompting...

Coffee contains caffeine, and as everyone knows, caffeine is a stimulant. We all know how a good cup of coffee wakes you up, makes you more alert, and helps you concentrate - thanks to caffeine.Or does it? Are the benefits of coffee really due to the caffeine, or are there placebo effects at work? Numerous experiments have tried to answer this question, but a paper published today goes into more detail...