The drugs, known as anticonvulsants, were initially designed for the treatment of epilepsy but are now widely prescribed “off-label” for conditions such as bipolar disorder, migraine headaches and pain.

“We all know the range of uses of these medications is very, very wide,” researcher Elisabetta Patorno said.

The researchers examined the prescription and medical records of more than 300,000 people above the age of 14 who had been prescribed an anticonvulsant for the first time between July 2001 and December 2006.

All of the drugs, they found, significantly increased a patient’s risk of attempted or successful suicide, as well as violent death by other causes. During the course of the study, there were 801 attempted suicides, 26 successful suicides and 41 violent deaths.

“We found increased risk for suicidal acts beginning within the first 14 days after treatment initiation, opening the possibility that anticonvulsant medications could induce behavioral effects prior to the achievement of their full therapeutic effectiveness,” the researchers wrote.

Based on prior studies, the FDA ruled in 2008 that all anticonvulsants must carry labels warning that they double the risk of suicidal thoughts and actions. These older studies had not been able to determine if any drugs posed higher risks than others, however.

In the current study, researchers compared the rates of suicides and violent deaths among users of topiramate (sold generically and also marketed as Topamax), gabapentin (marketed as Neurontin), lamotrigine (marketed as Lamictal), oxcarbazepine (marketed as Trileptal), tiagabine (marketed as Gabitril) and valproate (marketed as Depakine and Epilim). They found that the risk was lowest in topiramate, and roughly equal in the five other drugs.

Sources for this story include: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS….

Both FDA and GSK scientists have found that Avandia is dangerous and significantly increases the risk of heart attacks, but the drug remains on the market to this day. FDA officials have rejected sound scientific evidence demonstrating the dangers of the drug, including evidence from the FDA’s own scientists. (Read all about the Avandia scandal in my previous article on the subject.)

Meanwhile, GSK is moving forward with a global clinical trial that it says will compare the safety of Avandia with other diabetes drugs in its class. In other words, according to press reports, GSK knows Avandia is dangerous, but it’s choosing to go ahead with a trial anyway… a trial that could put the lives of thousands of people at risk.

Real scientists say Avandia drug trial is unethical and dangerous

Dr. David Juurlink, chief of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto, and Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of health research for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, have petitioned the FDA to stop the GSK drug trial. Citing concerns that the trial is “unethical” and “dangerous”, the two are doing what the FDA itself should be doing – assessing the evidence and coming to a rational conclusion about risk versus benefit.

After all, it was Dr. Juurlink’s 2009 study which already found that Avandia increases the risk of heart failure and death by 30 percent more than another diabetes drug in the same class. Not only has Avandia been proven to be dangerous, it’s been proven to be even more dangerous than the competition.

And numerous studies years before found that Avandia increases the risk of heart problems and death, prompting the FDA to issue two black-box warnings for the drug back in 2007.

But at this point, it doesn’t seem to matter how many people suffer and die from Avandia because the FDA somehow doesn’t believe there is “conclusive evidence” that Avandia is dangerous, so pharmacies everywhere continue to sell it. And even though GSK knows that Avandia is statistically responsible for an increase in deaths, it continues to push this drug on the masses.

GSK guilty of negligent deaths?

If you really think about it, what GSK is doing amounts to negligent homicide. The company is knowingly and willfully selling a dangerous drug that’s killing people, and now it wants to subject even more people to unnecessary risk of death through a medically unnecessary clinical trial that’s global in scope.

I say “medically unnecessary” because there have already been a number of studies verifying that Avandia is dangerous. Why create another trial with 16,000 participants to reveal what we already know? How many more people need to suffer or die before the FDA pulls the drug from the market?

The sheer lunacy of what’s taking place here in the name of “medicine” and “science” is shocking — even to those of us who follow the crimes and corruption of Big Pharma on a regular basis. Real scientists and doctors know this behavior by GSK is appalling, and apparently so does much of the public who, according to new reports, are refusing to even participate in the trial.

GSK can’t even get Americans to participate in the trial, so it’s moving to third-world countries

Typically when drug companies conduct clinical trials, they pay people a sum of money to act as guinea pigs for a new drug. (Sadly, many people are willing to ingest experimental substances for a couple hundred bucks). However according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, GSK can’t even get Americans to sign up!

You see, the average joe has more common sense than the FDA, and a lot of people know that Avandia is dangerous. The Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina, for example, which is one of GSK’s study sites, has “not succeed[ed] in recruiting anybody” in over a year. And this is during a time when a lot of Americans are out of jobs and desperately need the cash.

So what does GSK do in response? It opens dozens of new sites in third-world countries where it can prey on innocent poor people who are less informed about the dangers of Avandia.

In fact, this is part of the reason why Dr. Juurlink and Dr. Wolfe are urging the FDA to stop the trial. They recognize how evil it is for GSK to exploit ill-informed people from other countries when things aren’t going so well for Avandia back at home. In targeting low-income third-world study subjects, GSK is demonstrating itself to be a ruthless, money-hungry organization that has no qualms about exploiting human lives to achieve its profit goals.

The inhumanity of the medical-industrial complex

The whole Avandia fiasco is truly indicative of the way the medical-industrial complex operates. You would think that after all the studies and trials proving its dangers, the countless lawsuits and the official government report, that GSK would at least back down from this drug. Not only has GSK continued to deny the obvious truth about Avandia’s risks, but now it is shamelessly pressing forward to expand the market for Avandia around the world. (Remind you of anything? How about Big Tobacco?)

It seems obvious that Avandia should be pulled from the market and GSK investigated for its role in pushing a knowingly harmful drug. At the very least, there should be a moratorium on the sale of the drug until GSK can prove the safety of Avandia. But in the real world, this dangerous drug is being treated as safe and its producer is allowed to continue using it on human guinea pigs around the world.

If GSK was a person, that person might be classified as a serial killer (and the FDA would be considered its accomplice). Both GSK and the FDA, if they were people, would be pursued for their crimes against society. But because they are two of the key organizational players in the global medical-industrial complex, they continue to perpetrate their crimes without consequence.

This may be changing, though, as people wake up to the truth. The fact that GSK can’t get U.S. participants to sign up for its Avandia clinical trials says to me that people are really starting to recognize “the emperor has no clothes.” Big Pharma’s lies can only continue for so long before the truth is exposed.

Source: http://www.naturalnews.com/029552_GSK_Avandia.html

Donald Light, sociologist, professor of comparative health policy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and author of the new study, explains that the drug industry as a whole produces all sorts of “lemon” drugs that do not work, whose efficacy has not been proven and whose manufacturers are protected from responsibility by industry protection laws.

“Sometimes drug companies hide or downplay information about serious side effects of new drugs and overstate the drugs’ benefits,” he said in a press release. “Then, they spend two or three times more on marketing than on research to persuade doctors to prescribe these new drugs. Doctors may get misleading information and then misinform patients about the risks of a new drug.”

According to an independent review, only about 15 percent of new drugs even work as stated, and most new drugs — whether they offer a benefit or not — come with serious side effects that are now a significant cause of death in the U.S.

The report explains that drug companies deliberately expose large amounts of people to ineffective, harmful drugs in trials, but skew them to make it look as if the drugs are effective. They then submit hosts of incomplete, inaccurate data to the FDA for approval, followed by large marketing campaigns designed to convince doctors to prescribe the newly approved drugs for both approved and unapproved uses.

According to the report, an analysis of 111 final drug applications revealed that 42 percent were missing adequate randomized trials, 40 percent had inaccurate dosage testing, 39 percent failed to show drug efficacy, and roughly half revealed the drugs to have serious adverse side effects.

Light also emphasized that, because drug companies control both the scientific testing process and the selection of which tests get submitted to the FDA or get published, the entire process is biased and flawed.

Sources for this story include:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_relea…

For the study, scientists administered either 1,600 milligrams (mg) of SAMe or a placebo on top of participants’ existing medication regimens for six weeks. Following this period, the team found that those participants taking SAMe experienced better relief from depression that did those simply taking conventional antidepressants.

And since SAMe is naturally produced in the body, there are no negative side effects from taking it like there are from taking chemical antidepressant drugs.

According to Dr. George Papakostas, author of the study and psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the results are “exciting because [SAMe] works differently than what we have now — it doesn’t seem to be associated with the kind of side effects that FDA-approved treatments for this niche have.”

And this is good news for many who have experienced devastating side effects from taking antidepressants. SAMe is not only a viable alternative to these pharmaceutical drugs, but it exerts many other positive changes within the body as well.

“SAMe is a naturally occurring molecule present in all living cells, and is made in the body by a reaction between methionine and another compound called adenosyntriphosphate (ATP). It has many incredible benefits, including a positive effect on depression and arthritis pain…it helps the liver to replenish important substances, notably the all-important glutathione,” explains Johny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S., in his book The Most Effective Natural Cures on Earth: The Surprising, Unbiased Truth about What Treatments Work and Why.

Sources for this story include:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS…

http://www.naturalpedia.com/Methion…