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HealthyPlace.com Newsletter

This Week - April 28, 2003

1. Surviving Depression: A road map to getting well
2. New anxiety pill
3. New trend: Older women with eating disorders
4. Increased risk of bipolar tied to gene discovery
5. Brain scans spot disorders and best treatments
6. FDA rejects ADHD patch
7. I need help with my ADHD child

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Surviving Depression: A road map to getting well

One of the biggest misconceptions is that, "It couldn’t happen to me."

Sometimes depression is mistaken for back pain. Sometimes depression is not diagnosed or recognized at all.

"It’s very insidious," said Dr. Bill Karls, psychiatrist at Southwest Colorado Mental Health Center. "It sneaks up on you. Everything is shut down. Everything you normally enjoy. Your ability to monitor yourself also slows down.

"By the time you’re suicidal, it feels like it’s going to last forever."

So what's the key to getting well? Find out here.

Pfizer Starts Approval Process Abroad for Anxiety Pill

A pain relief drug developed in 1989 could hit European markets within a year and be available in the United States within two years. Pregabalin could be used to treat anxiety, epilepsy and pain disorders.

Pfizer, Inc., the world's largest drug company, decided last May to develop the drug for commercial use and started conducted efficacy and safety studies.

Experts expect pregabalin to have a big effect: According to Pfizer, the drug will change the way patients with neurological and anxiety disorders are treated because the drug has fewer side effects than current treatments.

After securing approval to treat these disorders, Pfizer hopes to get pregabalin approved to treat social anxiety, panic disorders, fibromyalgia -- a disease characterized by intense muscle pain -- and single-drug treatments for epilepsy.

view video on overcoming anxiety

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More Older Women Seeking Treatment for Dieting Obsessions

In her 23 years as a specialist in eating disorders, Margo Maine has received countless telephone calls from women worried that their teen-age daughters might be dieting into a danger zone.

But several years ago, Maine, a psychologist who runs an eating-disorders treatment program with a partner in West Hartford, Conn., noticed a shift in the telephone inquiries.

"Increasingly our calls began to include a significant number of adults seeking help not for their children but for themselves," Maine said. Some of those callers -- women in their late 40s and early 50s -- were relapsing after overcoming eating disorders in their youth, and others were experiencing them for the first time.

Naomi Burton Isaacs, a public relations executive in New York, had been obsessed about her weight most of her life, she said, but it was only at age 45 that her dieting grew extreme and she developed an addiction to laxatives. She swallowed 25 pills a day. Burton Isaacs, who is 5 feet 9 inches, withered to 105 pounds.

"I couldn't control my husband's drinking, and I didn't feel as though I could control anything," said Burton Isaacs, whose husband has since died. After six years of therapy, she now weighs a healthy 135 pounds and has "thrown away" her scale, she said.

Starvation diets and the cycle of binging and purging have long been considered afflictions of affluent white females in their teens and 20s. Although medical literature in recent years has shown eating disorders spreading across class, race and gender lines and striking girls at ever younger ages, the next large group of sufferers, many experts predict, will be middle-aged women. The anxieties of midlife -- divorce, marital strains, parental deaths, empty-nest syndrome and menopause -- are powerful catalysts for older women's eating disorders, the experts say.

At its core, an eating disorder, whatever the age of the sufferer, typically results from feelings that one's life is "out of control," as patients tell clinicians, with compulsive food monitoring offering an illusion of emotional management.

Like adolescence, the years before menopause can prompt fears about progressing to life's next stage. "The 12-year-old anorectic doesn't want to deal with the feeling of becoming a woman, and the 50-year-old doesn't want to deal with the idea of lost youth," said Ellen Schor Haimoff, a psychologist in New York and a former director of the Association of Bulimia and Related Disorders. She, too, has seen an increasing number of middle-aged patients with eating problems.

It is not just anxiety about aging, but a fear of aging in a culture that is 20 years into a fitness obsession that is in some part responsible for setting off midlife eating disorders, many clinicians say -- or more commonly, reviving disorders dormant for many years.

Read the Defeating Your Eating Disorder transcript from our chat conference with Ira Sacker, author of "Dying to Be Thin."

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Take the first step toward living a life that is not controlled by fear and food. Call us now at 1-800-445-1900. We'll be happy to answer your questions. or visit our site.

Gene Variation Raises Risk Of Bipolar Disorder And Schizophrenia

Increased risk for bipolar disorder has been linked to two overlapping genes on the long arm of chromosome 13. University of Chicago researchers say earlier work showed the same gene complex increases risk for schizophrenia. Bipolar disorder or manic-depressive illness is a brain disorder that causes profound shifts in a person's mood. It is caused by multiple genes, researchers say, each contributing a small part. The newly implicated genes, G30 and G72, were discovered through positional cloning, an approach that relies on small differences among family members who have a disease and those who do not to track down the genes that increase risk. The authors say these two genes are rather odd, expressed only in primates and have no known function. They are located in a sort of "gene desert" near the end of the chromosome.

Brain Scans Spot Disorders

Also pinpoint correct treatment

It can take months to years for some people with depression or obsessive compulsive disorder to find the right medication. Now brain scans may finally eliminate the guess work.

Marc Pincus is obsessive compulsive. "I was checking things, always arranging things and making them perfectly lined up."

His doctor prescribed the anti-anxiety medication Paxil to treat the disorder. But Marc was skeptical because other drugs he tried hadn't worked. "I really debated about it for a while and I wasn't sure if I wanted to try another medication," says Marc.

What convinced him were brain scans. Marc had them done as part of a new study on brain function and response to different medications.

Psychiatrist Sanjaya Saxena heads the research at UCLA. He says the brain scans show distinct patterns of hyperactivity in patients with OCD or depression. In those who respond to treatment, the hyperactivity is diminished.

Saxena tells us "Before treatment... after treatment. We wanted to use brain imaging to see if we could identify patterns of brain activity that would predict response to different treatments."

In other words, the goal of the study is to enable doctors, through the use of PET scans, to pick the best treatment for individual patients... Sooner rather than later.

"Patients may have to go through multiple trials of different medications before they hit upon one that actually works for their symptoms and that can take a very long time," Saxena says.

Marc says he's glad he was in the study. Now with the right treatment his OCD symptoms have subsided. "I have a lot more free free time to do things."

The doctor is also studying brain activity to compare the effectiveness of drug therapy to behavioral therapy for individual OCD patients.

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FDA Rejects ADHD Patch

Noven Pharmaceuticals Inc. said on Monday U.S. regulators rejected its application to market its experimental treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the first transdermal patch to treat ADHD.

Shire, Britain's third-biggest drugmaker which had obtained the right's to market Noven's patch, said it was surprised and disappointed by the FDA's decision. It had hoped to launch the Methypatch in the second half of this year. Shire sells the Adderall line of attention deficit products.

The experimental patch uses the chemical methylphenidate, the active ingredient in many widely used oral drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder such as Ritalin.

Noven says its representatives plan to meet with the FDA to see what went wrong.

Bulletin Board:
ADHD Child. I Need Help!

AngieB writes:

"My son is 6 years old. He was on a stimulant medication but the side effects were worse than the benefits. We are having trouble at school with behavior and lack of concentration. The teachers seem to be getting frustrated with him. I am about to go crazy over this. His school work is suffering. Any advice would be greatly appreciated."

Can you help AngieB? Respond here .

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In closing, here's something to consider:

There are two lasting bequests we can give our children:
One is roots.
The other is wings.

Hodding Carter, Jr.

From all of us here at HealthyPlace.com, we hope you have a good week.

Previous Newsletters

• April 14, 2003
• March 31, 2003
• March 24, 2003
• March 12, 2003

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