A whistleblower lawsuit filed against Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) didn’t get much attention in the media because the unproven accusations within it — paying kickbacks to nursing home pharmacy Omnicare (OCR) — sounded familiar. But the details in the complaint are worth exploring because they go further than the usual allegations of paying for no-work contracts to boost pharmacy distribution of their drugs.
A long-awaited, 14 year magnetic imaging (MRI) follow-up study by Dr. Nancy Andreasen, involving 211 patients, documents progressive shrinkage of brain
tissue volume in patients prescribed antipsychotics when they first experienced an episode of psychosis.
“The big finding is that people with schizophrenia are losing brain tissue at a more rapid rate than healthy people of comparable age. Some are losing as much as 1 percent per year. That’s an awful lot over an 18-year period…Another thing we’ve discovered is that the more drugs you’ve been given, the more brain tissue you lose.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has notified health care providers that the Pregnancy section of drug labels for the entire class of antipsychotic drugs has been updated. The new drug labels include additional and consistent information regarding the potential risk for abnormal muscle movements (extrapyramidal signs [EPS]) and withdrawal symptoms among newborns whose mothers received the drugs in the third trimester of pregnancy.
They survived live fire, explosive devices, terror attacks and grueling desert conditions. But upon returning home to seek treatment for the mental anguish that too often accompanies war, U.S. soldiers are now being killed by the pharmaceutical industry in record numbers.
A recent example is found with the late Senior Airman Anthony Mena, who returned home from Baghdad only to be killed by a toxic cocktail of prescription medications in his apartment in the USA. As the New York Times reports, a toxicologist found eight prescription medications in his blood
A new study finds that one the fastest-growing classes ofprescription drugs in the United States is linked to shrinkage in the brains of those who take it, raising some new questions about the widening use of antipsychotic medications.
What they found was that those whose treatment with antipsychotic medication was most “intensive”—those who took the largest doses over the longest time–had the greatest losses in brain volume. The intensity of a subject’s antipsychotic medication therapy was a far stronger predictor of brain-volume loss than was the severity of his or her psychiatric symptoms or of the extent of his or her illicit drug or alcohol abuse, the researchers found.