Stop Memory Loss Caused by Big Pharma

Though memory loss is often part of the aging process, in some cases it's caused by prescription medications. The symptoms are reversible - if they are caught early enough.

When Jane Simpson’s mother, then 91, started showing signs of memory loss in December 2007, Ms. Simpson thought age had finally caught up with her. “As this had been a gradual process, and considering her age, we were not unduly alarmed — just saddened that it seemed we were losing my mother mentally,” she wrote in an e-mail to this blog.

But on a visit six months later, Ms. Simpson, a 61-year-old advertising copywriter in North Carolina, was struck by how much worse her mother’s memory loss had become and by her confusion about everything happening around her.

Just typical 91-year-old behavior? Just the first signs of the inevitable slide toward dementia we all may face if we live long enough? Not at all.

Since the ’70s, geriatric specialists have been aware of many unusual causes of memory loss, confusion and disorientation in older people. These include not just medical conditions ranging from urinary tract infection to hydrocephalus to the flu, but also side effects from many commonly used medications. Read more

Drug Studies Suppressed - But Only the Negative Ones

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has urged antidepressant manufacturers not to disclose to physicians and the public that some clinical trials of the medications in children found the drugs were no better than sugar pills. Regulators suppressed the negative information on the grounds that it might scare families and physicians away from the drugs.

For at least three medications, the FDA blocked the companies' plans to reveal the negative studies on drug labels, and in one case the agency reversed a manufacturer's decision to amend its drug label to say that the drug was associated in studies with increased hostility and suicidal thinking among children.

Now the The New England Journal of Medicine reports that a majority of studies that get published about antidepressants are positive because negative studies remain unpublished. Read more