Free Republic

You will never guess what the fifth and sixth best-selling prescription drugs are in the United States, so I’ll just tell you: Abilify and Seroquel, two powerful antipsychotics. In 2011 alone, they and other antipsychotic drugs were prescribed to 3.1 million Americans at a cost of $18.2 billion, a 13 percent increase over the previous year, according to the market research firm IMS Health. Those drugs are used to treat such serious psychiatric disorders as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and severe major depression. But the rates of these disorders have been stable in the adult population for years. So how did...

Drugs that alleviate severe mental disorders can also result in troubling metabolic changes. Many young children and adolescents taking drugs for severe psychiatric problems gain substantial weight and, in some cases, show increased levels of LDL cholesterol and triglycerides in their blood, researchers report in the Oct. 28 Journal of the American Medical Association. Although the data from this study need to be replicated over a longer time frame, the findings nonetheless raise worrisome questions about anti-psychotic drugs that often benefit children who have schizophrenia, autism, tics, severe bipolar disorder or aggressive behavior. “We are between a rock and a...

Ramona Lamascola thought she was losing her 88-year-old mother to dementia. Instead, she was losing her to overmedication. Last fall her mother, Theresa Lamascola, of the Bronx, suffering from anxiety and confusion, was put on the antipsychotic drug Risperdal. When she had trouble walking, her daughter took her to another doctor — the younger Ms. Lamascola’s own physician — who found that she had unrecognized hypothyroidism, a disorder that can contribute to dementia. Theresa Lamascola was moved to a nursing home to get these problems under control. But things only got worse. “My mother was screaming and out of it,...

ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK -- Older anti-psychotic drugs are no safer and might even be worse for the elderly than newer ones that the government warned about earlier this year - both raise the risk of death, a study suggests. The Food and Drug Administration asked drug makers in April to add warnings to the labels of newer anti-psychotics because studies showed the drugs nearly doubled the risk of death for older patients with dementia. These drugs are widely used to treat the aggressive behavior, delusions and hallucinations sometimes experienced by those with dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. Researchers at Harvard's...