A recently published study conducted at the Maudsley Hospital has reported that people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have a life expectancy of 10-15 years lower than the UK average. Researchers looked at the electronic medical records of more than 30,000 patients suffering from severe mental health problems. They found that many patients were dying [read the full story…]
School prevention programs aimed at reducing alcohol misuse are good enough to consider widespread use, according to a new systematic review from the Cochrane Library. The review found 53 studies that explored a range of interventions. Some studies concluded that the prevention program had no effect, but others showed more positive results. The authors could [read the full story…]
A Department of Health press release published today highlights two new reports on addiction to prescription and over-the-counter drugs. People can become dependent on tranquilisers, sleeping pills and opiate based painkillers, such as codeine, particularly if taken at high doses for prolonged periods. Long-term dependence on substances such as benzodiazepines has been identified as a particular [read the full story…]
The age old debate over antidepressant use rolls on this week with the publication of a new provisional review by Davis et al in the Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine journal. They are responding to the Ioannidis paper from 2008: Effectiveness of antidepressants; an evidence based myth constructed from a thousand controlled trials, which [read the full story…]
Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia have published a new systematic review that explores three different home and community care models for the elderly. The evidence in this field is patchy. Studies are heterogeneous (i.e. too different from one another to be pooled in a meta-analysis) and results are inconsistent. [read the full story…]
NICE guidance has sometimes suffered from poor accessibility and usability, and as a result, it has not always been implemented at the coalface as well as it could have been. NICE have responded to this criticism by creating a set of interactive online pathways that bring together all of their content around a specific topic. [read the full story…]
Aripiprazole is a second-generation antipsychotic that is widely used as a maintenance treatment for bipolar disorder in the US. It was approved by the FDA as a drug for this purpose in 2005. A new systematic review, published in the online journal PLOS medicine, sought to critically review the evidence supporting the use of aripiprazole [read the full story…]
A new Californian meta-analysis shows that childhood ADHD increases the risk of smoking in adolescence and alcohol use in young adulthood. The review examined the association of childhood ADHD with substance use (nicotine, alcohol, marijuana) and abuse/dependence outcomes (nicotine, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine) by conducting a meta-analysis of longitudinal studies that prospectively followed children with and without [read the full story…]
The review and re-appraisal of donepezil, galantamine, rivastigmine and memantine for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease has resulted in a change in the guidance. Specifically: donepezil, galantamine and rivastigmine are now recommended as options for managing mild as well as moderate Alzheimer’s disease, and memantine is now recommended as an option for managing moderate Alzheimer’s [read the full story…]
A birth cohort study carried out by researchers in Finland has discovered a predictive association between being a bully in childhood and becoming a mother in adolescence. The Finnish 1981 birth cohort study included 2,867 Finnish girls at baseline in 1989. Information, both on the main exposure and outcome, was available for 2,507 girls. Both bullies and victims [read the full story…]
