Many parents have cried “How many times do I have to tell you?” at their young children when trying to get their attention or emphasize specific behaviors. Now, pharmacists and other medical practitioners are beginning to feel like these parents: “How many times do we have to tell you that Ginkgo biloba is not all it’s cracked up to be?” Yet another study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reports that Gingko biloba is not effective in preventing cognitive decline in older adults, but people continue to take it in astounding numbers. Read more →

Migraine is a recurring headache of moderate to severe intensity that is associated with gastrointestinal, neurologic, and autonomic symptoms. As the most common of the chronic headache disorders, migraine affects 18% of women and 6% of men in the United States. More than one-half of all migraine sufferers report significant disability with the migraine. While the pathophysiology of migraine is not completely understood, there is mounting evidence that migraine sufferers are at an increased risk for cardiovascular disease and other vascular disorders, including angina, myocardial infarction, coronary revascularization, claudication, cardiovascular mortality, and ischemic lesions in the brain. There is also an increased risk of other cardiovascular risk factors, including hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia. Now, the Journal of the American Medical Association reports in a recent study that migraine is associated with pathologic changes in the cerebellum. Read more →

Narcolepsy is a neurological disorder typified by excessive daytime sleepiness. The symptoms of the disorder can be disabling, and for years treatment relied on amphetamines and related stimulants to help patients stay awake. For nearly 2 decades now, modafinil (Provigil) has been available to treat the symptoms of narcolepsy; modafinil has been the preferred wake-promoting drug due to its mechanism of action and safety profile that is distinct from traditional stimulants. It was long believed that modafinil could produce the benefits of the stimulants without the dangerous and unwanted side effects. However, a new study conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association, has shown that it might not be as different from traditional stimulants as once believed. Read more →

Children and adolescents of depressed parents are four to six times more likely to develop depressive symptoms themselves than children of non-depressed parents. This translates to approximately 61% of children of parents with depression developing a psychiatric disorder during their life. Strikingly, more than one-quarter of children in America will experience at least one episode of depression by the time they reach adulthood. Overall, an estimated 1 in 5 Americans will experience depression sometime in their lives, equating to a large number of children with depressed parents. Many studies have focused on the treatment of depression in both adults and children and adolescents, but few focus on its prevention. A new study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) examines the efficacy of preventive interventions in adolescents with depressed parents. Read more →

If you’ve had heart problems, chances are you’ve received some advice from your doctor on how best to care for your condition. Maybe you were advised to take an aspirin daily, exercise regularly, or cut down on the salt in your diet. Maybe you were handed a sheaf of prescriptions bearing foreign-sounding medication names with the assurances that they would help stave off future problems. And if you’re like many patients, you took the doctor at his or her word, assuming he or she was acting based on sound medical evidence. Unfortunately, that assumption may have been false. Read more →

Before you agree with the recent JAMA report that Ginkgo biloba did not prevent dementia, you may want to consider how the study was conducted and whether or not the conclusion researchers made was legitimate.

The study was a large-scale clinical trial on the effectiveness of Ginkgo in reducing the incidence of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. Six medical centers participated with 3069 volunteers 75 years or older. Of the total number of volunteers, 2587 had no cognitive disorders and 482 had mild cognitive impairment. The volunteers were tracked for a median of 6 years and used either a placebo or 120 mg ginkgo extract twice daily. Read more →