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Comparative Effectiveness Necessary To Weigh New Drugs Against Old Ones, Opinion Piece Says
Patients and physicians "need to know not just whether a new drug outperforms a placebo, but whether it"s a real advance on what"s already on the market," Richard Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College, writes in a New York Times opinion piece. According to Friedman, "Doctors and patients alike are inundated by drug company marketing." Friedman states he has seen "scores of patients" who are "eager to get the latest antidepressant or mood stabilizer that promised them tranquility on their TV screens." He continues that these new treatments are not necessarily better than older, proven treatments. Comparative effectiveness research would allow "head-to-head trials comparing new and standard treatments," which is why the practice has "provoked strong resistance from the makers of drugs and devices who fear that their fancy new products may not be any better than current ones," according to Friedman. He concludes, "I"d opt for an old drug with a known track record of efficacy and safety over an expensive newcomer with no added benefit -- any day of the week" (Friedman, New York Times, 5/19).
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Lobbyists Face Potential Conflicts Of Interest
"With a health reform at the top of the Congressional and White House agenda, it"s prime time for industry lobbyists," Roll Call reports. But, because details of the anticipated reform package have not yet emerged, industry winners and losers remain largely unknown. Lobbyists are forced to accept clients despite their incomplete knowledge of client needs, and are struggling to anticipate conflicts of interest before they arise, according to the article. "There are so many different players at the table, and right now not knowing whose ox is likely to get gored and at whose expense... the best we can do is try and anticipate conflicts and be clear with our clients in advance," one health care lobbyist told the paper. "We certainly would not lobby on both sides of an issue. It"s also entirely possible conflict may emerge in the next two to six months, and we hope we don"t have to make hard choices" (Ackley, 6/3). Purchase zoloft to treat depression.
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MS Society Pleased With Government Recognition Of Crisis In Social Care
The government"s Green Paper "Shaping the Future of Care Together" has been welcomed by the MS Society as the radical step necessary to address the crisis in social care.
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Brain Detects Happiness More Quickly Than Sadness

Our brains get a first impression of people"s overriding social signals after seeing their faces for only 100 milliseconds (0.1 seconds). Whether this impression is correct, however, is another question. Now an international group of experts has carried out an in-depth study into how we process emotional expressions, looking at the pattern of cerebral asymmetry in the perception of positive and negative facial signals. The researchers worked with 80 psychology students (65 women and 15 men) to analyze the differences between their cerebral hemispheres using the "divided visual field" technique, which is based on the anatomical properties of the visual system. "What is new about this study is that working in this way ensures that the information is focused on one cerebral hemisphere or the other", J. Antonio Aznar-Casanova, one of the authors of the study and a researcher at the University of Barcelona (UB), tells SINC. The results, published in the latest issue of the journal Laterality, show that the right hemisphere performs better in processing emotions. "However, this advantage appears to be more evident when it comes to processing happy and surprised faces than sad or frightened ones", the researcher points out. "Positive expressions, or expressions of approach, are perceived more quickly and more precisely than negative, or withdrawal, ones. So happiness and surprise are processed faster than sadness and fear", explains Aznar-Casanova. The two faces of the brain This research study adds to previous ones, which had revealed asymmetries in the way the brain processes emotions, and enriches the international debate in cognitive-emotional neuroscience in terms of how to define the exact way in which human beings process these facial expressions. People make deductions from the expressions on people"s faces. "These inferences can strongly influence election results or the sentences given in trials, and have been studied before in fields such as criminology and the pseudoscience of physiognomy", the neuroscientist tells SINC. Two theories are currently "competing" to explain the pattern of cerebral asymmetry in processing emotions. The older one postulates the dominance of the right hemisphere in the processing of emotions, while the second is based on the approach-withdrawal hypothesis, which holds that the pattern of cerebral asymmetry depends upon the emotion in question, in other words that each hemisphere is better at processing particular emotions (the right, withdrawal, and the left, approach). "Today there is scientific evidence in favour of both these theories, but there is a certain consensus in favour of the lateralisation of emotional processing predicted by the approach-withdrawal hypothesis", concludes Aznar-Casanova. Plataforma SINC


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