Friday, February 04, 2005

Women With Borderline Disorder Show Less Anger on Anticonvulsants  Psychiatric News story - "Use of the anticonvulsant topiramate significantly reduced four out of five measures of anger and resulted in a modest loss of weight among women with borderline personality disorder. Women with borderline personality disorder who took the anticonvulsant topiramate displayed less anger compared with those on placebo, said German researchers. They also lost weight, an important consideration for a class of drugs that often provokes weight gain. The research extends evidence of the use of anticonvulsant medications like valproate and carbamazepine in the treatment of pathologic aggression..."  
  

Is End Near for Popular Assessment Tool?  Psychiatric News story - "The Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, a standard for decades, is seriously flawed and should be replaced with a scale built from the ground up, say Canadian researchers. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, and a long-reigning monarch of psychiatric measurement may well see pitchforks and torches approaching the castle walls. The Hamilton Depression Rating Scale became the de facto gold standard for calibrating depression severity in the decades after its development by British psychiatrist Max Hamilton in 1960. Psychiatrists need a reliable tool to measure the effects of treatment in both the research lab and in the clinic, but many have questioned the utility of the Hamilton in recent years."  
  

Suicide Rate Down in the Era of Prozac Los Angeles Times story - "The U.S. suicide rate has fallen steadily since Prozac and related antidepressants came into use in the late 1980s, according to an analysis by researchers worried that evidence linking the drugs to suicide in children could reduce their use. The suicide rate, which reached a peak in 1988 of nearly 13 deaths per 100,000 people, fell steadily to about 10.5 in 2002. Most suicides are the result of untreated depression, not adverse reactions to antidepressants, wrote Dr. Julio Licinio and Dr. Ma-Li Wong, psychiatrists at UCLA, in an opinion piece released Wednesday by the journal Nature Reviews: Drug Discovery."  
  

Cautious response greets antidepressant warning Chicago Tribune story - "Doctors reacted with caution Thursday to a new study suggesting that pregnant women who take common antidepressants might cause their newborn babies to have seizures or other withdrawal symptoms. The study, published in the British journal The Lancet, provides a useful reminder that any drugs taken during pregnancy could harm the unborn child, experts said. But they quickly added that not treating serious cases of depression also carries risks, for both the patient and her baby."