With an aging population, rates of dementia will only climb, yet doctors have few effective strategies for addressing the worst symptoms.       Mild cognitive impairment, in which older adults show lapses in memory and other mental functions that aren’t serious enough to impair their daily activities, affects about 10% to 20% of ...

The omissions included drugs with the most serious, black box warnings of potential adverse effects.   Doctors often first learn of new drugs during sales meetings with pharmaceutical sales representatives, during which the representatives educate physicians about their latest offerings, provide free samples, and, according to the law, inform doctors of potential ...

Parents who talk to their kids about their own, past drug may not be helping their kids to avoid drugs. “Talk to your kids about drugs,” has been a refrain sung to parents by anti-drug activists and in public service message for decades.  But if these conversations include information about your ...

And the risk is especially great for women, according to new research. Researchers explored the relationship between addictions and risky sexual behavior in a report published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. They followed virtually all of the 1037 children born between 1972 and 1973 in Dunedin, New Zealand, and ...

Fighting the problem of fake drugs will require putting medications through a chain of custody like U.S. courts require for evidence in a trial, the Institute of Medicine reported Wednesday. The call for a national drug tracking system comes a week after the Food and Drug Administration warned doctors, for the ...

For the first time in 70 years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released two major requirements for improving food safety. On Friday, the FDA released two draft rule proposals for food safety that will allow the FDA to shift its focus on preventing, rather than simply reacting, to food borne ...

Two cases could trigger dramatic changes in the way medications and therapies are regulated. The legal arguments now wending their way through the courts could either seriously undermine— or dramatically boost—the ability of regulators to protect the public from dangerous medications and therapies. On their face, the cases seem to share little ...

Prescription painkillers are creating a massive public-health crisis. Since 1990, deaths in the U.S. from unintentional drug overdoses have increased by over 500%. Most of this rise can be attributed to prescription painkillers, which now kill more people than heroin and cocaine combined. Where are all these pills coming from? ...

Chasing down tips in meningitis outbreak STORY HIGHLIGHTS Pharmaceutical compounding is a common practice, experts say Only 1% to 3% of all prescriptions dispensed in the United States are compounded Prescriptions are customized to change dosage, add flavor, remove allergens (CNN) -- News of a recent meningitis outbreak has sent many Americans into panic mode. As ...

British psychiatrist and Big Pharma gadfly David Healy is so controversial amongst his colleagues that some have tried to have his medical license revoked — but there he was on Thursday, speaking at the American Psychiatric Association’s second largest annual meeting at a well-attended session on conflicts of interest. “It’s a ...