Anti-asthma drugs may increase the risk of older people developing cataracts, claims a Canadian study of 14 years’ worth of research data on more than 100,000 patients. Taking one dose of a corticosteroid inhaler a day increased the cataract risk by a quarter in people over 65, says the McGill University report in the European Respiratory Journal (June).
Child abuse can cause schizophrenia, a Manchester University researcher claimed at a London Institute of Psychiatry conference last week. Paul Hammersley says his review of 40 previous studies involving 33,000 patients shows that two thirds of people diagnosed as schizophrenic have suffered physical or sexual abuse as children, and thus it is “a major, if not the major, cause of the illness”.
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Antidepressants of the Prozac family appear to have saved thousands of lives, says a University of California Los Angeles report. The statistical study, in the Public Library of Science’s PLoS Medicine (June), indicates that from 1988, when selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) drugs were introduced, until 2002, about 33,600 fewer Americans killed themselves than would previously have been expected.
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Even a slightly above-normal rise in blood sugar can increase significantly the risk of death among critically ill patients, say researchers at the Cincinnati Veterans Affairs Medical Centre. The study of 216,000 intensive-care patients found that the higher the sugar level, the worse the outcome, the researchers told the American Diabetes Association last week.
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An experimental Alzheimer’s disease vaccine is showing promising results, claims a study in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (June 12). In laboratory studies, brain deposits that are blamed for the disorder have been cut by between 15.5 per cent and 38.5 per cent by the DNA-based vaccine, claim researchers based at the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute for Neuroscience. If the vaccine passes further tests and regulations, the treatment could be available in about seven years’ time.