Saturday, January 31, 2015

Vaccine Critics Turn Defensive Over Measles - NYTimes.com

Their children have been sent home from school. Their families are barred from birthday parties and neighborhood play dates. Online, people call them negligent and criminal. And as officials in 14 states grapple to contain a spreading measles outbreak that began near here at Disneyland, the parents at the heart of America's anti-vaccine movement are being blamed for incubating an otherwise preventable public-health crisis.

Measles anxiety rippled thousands of miles beyond its center on Friday as officials scrambled to try to contain a wider spread of the highly contagious disease — which America declared vanquished 15 years ago, before a statistically significant number of parents started refusing to vaccinate their children.

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Wednesday, January 28, 2015

An ‘expensive’ placebo is more effective than a ‘cheap’ one, study shows - The Washington Post

Parkinson's Disease patients secretly treated with a placebo instead of their regular medication performed better when told they were receiving a more expensive version of the "drug," researchers reported Wednesday in an unprecedented study that involved real patients.

The research shows that the well-documented "placebo effect" -- actual symptom relief brought about by a sham treatment or medication -- can be enhanced by adding information about cost, according to the lead author of the study. It is the first time that concept has been demonstrated using people with a real illness, in this case Parkinson's, a progressive neurological disease that has no cure, according to an expert not involved in the study.

"The potentially large benefit of placebo, with or without price manipulations, is waiting to be untapped for patients with [Parkinson's Disease], as well as those with other neurologic and medical diseases," the authors wrote in a study published online Wednesday in the journal Neurology.

But deceiving actual patients in a research study raised ethical questions about violating the trust involved in a doctor-patient relationship. Most studies in which researchers conceal their true aims or other information from subjects are conducted with healthy volunteers. This one was subjected to a lengthy review  before it was allowed to proceed, and, in an editorial that accompanied the article, two other physicians wrote that "the authors do not mention whether there was any possible effect (reduction) on trust in doctors or on willingness to engage in future clinical research."

Nor would such a ruse be allowed in clinical practice, said Ted J. Kaptchuk, director of the Program in Placebo Studies and Therapeutic Encounter at Harvard Medical School.  "I don't think it has a direct practical application," Kaptchuk said. "Telling people something is expensive, that's deception. That's not allowed in clinical practice."

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Sunday, January 25, 2015

The Mind Research Network (MRN)

Headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, MRN is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization consisting of an interdisciplinary association of scientists located at universities, national laboratories and research centers around the world and is focused on imaging technology and its emergence as an integral element of neuroscience investigation.

With an extended community of academicians, researchers, graduate students and technicians, the MRN is uniquely positioned with its national infrastructure to link the brightest minds in neuroscience with some of the most cutting-edge neuroimaging capabilities in the world today.

Founded in 1998, the MRN's initial plan called for the building of state-of-the-art magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and magnetoencephalogram (MEG) neuroimaging systems to be applied to studies of mental illness. This important task was carried out by Mind's initial collaborators: Massachusetts General Hospital's Martinos Biomedical Imaging Center (Harvard and MIT), the University of Minnesota, the University of New Mexico, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Since both the Network and the mission have expanded beyond building neuroimaging tools, a comprehensive understanding of mental illness and more fundamental and systematic understanding of the brain is possible.