Heart Disease Patients On Statins At Lower Risk Of Depression
Patients with heart disease who took cholesterol-lowering statins were significantly less likely to develop depression than those who did not, in a study by Mary Whooley, MD, a physician at the San Francisco VA Medical Center and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The study was published electronically in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Whooley and her research team evaluated 965 heart disease patients for depression, and found that the patients who were on statins were significantly less likely to be clinically depressed than those who were not.
PTSD-Related Nightmares Treated With Blood Pressure Drug Prazosin
Mayo Clinic researchers this week will announce the use of the blood pressure drug prazosin as an effective treatment to curb post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)-related nightmares. In a presentation during the 20th European Congress of Psychiatry in Prague, Mayo Clinic psychiatrists will present a systematic literature review of prazosin in the treatment of nightmares. Researchers investigated 12 prazosin studies, four of which were randomized controlled trials. "The studies showed the drug was well-tolerated and can take effect rapidly, within days to weeks, and some patients reported a return of nightmares when the course of prazosin was stopped, " says Simon Kung, M.
Replacing Defective Venous Valve With Implant
If heart valves don't close properly, they are replaced. Conventional treatment of venous valve failure, however, has up to now always and exclusively been via medication. In future, an implant will assume the function of damaged valves - and a new dispensing tool means these prostheses can be made using an automated process. It's one of the most commonly occurring medical conditions - chronic venous in-sufficiency (CVI). Almost ten million German citizens suffer from weak veins that require treatment, with twice as many women being affected as men.