No wonder a Canadian physician castigated the FDA's Jing Zhang for approving drugs for "competitive reasons" not patient health in a symposium about comparative drug effectiveness. "In a recent transcript on your web site, Dr. Laughren [FDA director of psychiatry products] clutches at studies to try to approve a new drug on behalf of industry," he charged. "FDA's non-inferiority studies in which a drug can be less effective that an existing one and only beat placebo, present the 'patient risk' of a drug not working," he said.
But elsewhere drugs were given a better spin.
Ann Childress, MD, gave a veritable commercial for the ADHD drug Vyvanse, manufactured by Shire on whose Speaker's Bureau she serves. And the Wyeth funded C. Neill Epperson, MD, appearing with Wyeth Speakers Bureau member Claudio Soares, MD, actually told a clinician not to trust a pharmacist for a hormone preparation but to use pharma's drugs in a symposium called "Mood, Memory and Myths: What Really Happens at Menopause." Biodentical hormones, compounded by pharmacists, have been a revenue threat for Wyeth's menopause drugs. (The seminar devolved when breast cancer patients in the audience discussed their health status.)
If there were a take home message at the APA meeting about the blizzard of ADHD, bipolar and personality disorders threatening adults and children, it was don't wait. These dangerous conditions, likened to cancer and diabetes, won't go away.
Thanks to genetic advancements, psychiatric disease risks can now be detected and treated before symptoms surface, said presenters, fostering early treatment paradigms that are pretty Brave New World: People being told they have a disease they can't feel that needs immediate and lifelong treatment at hundreds of dollars a month or their health will suffer. Run that past me again? The National Institute on Drug Abuse is even working on vaccines to treat the specific genetic risks in opioid addicts. Good luck with that.
Not everyone agreed about early treatment. The very fact that bipolar disorder is a lifelong disease is reason to wait until you are sure said Mark Zimmerman, MD director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital whose research, published in the June Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, finds a link between unconfirmed, overdiagnosed cases of bipolar disorder and" the receipt of disability payments.
Not everyone agreed about multidrug combinations commonly called polypharmacy either. In between industry "research" in poster sessions extolling Seroquel, Vyvanse, Saphris, Geodon, Risperdal and Zyprexa was a study at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn "Evaluating Antipsychotic Polypharmacy Regimens for Patients with Chronic Mental Illness."
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