From the Kentucky Post:

Traumatic brain injury is the leading cause of death and disability for people under the age of 44, according to Dr. Arthur Panioli of the UC Neuroscience Institute.

Until now, there has been no effective medical treatment.

Researchers are looking at progesterone as a possible solution to that problem.

Preliminary data suggests there could be a 5 to 10 percent drop in mortality using the hormone.

National clinical trials are to begin soon, but Dr. Pancioli says there is a caveat to the research.

Normally, he says, researchers ask for permission from the patient. "Unfortunately, these patients are injured and not able to answer for themselves and family may not be available."

"This drug has to start really fast," Pancioli continues. "So, in some situations this drug will have to be started before we can ask for consent from the patient or family."

Because of this, UC is required to let the public know about the trials in advance.

UC's Neuroscience Institute will be conducting the trials in the Tri-State area.

From WLBT.com:

A man is in custody in Warren County for possession of a new drug that has surfaced in the Vicksburg area.

Officers with the Narcotics Division of the Vicksburg Police Department arrested the man for possession of a controlled substance.

It has been identified as dimethyltryptamine or DMT.

This is the first known arrest for DMT in Vicksburg.

From the Athens Banner-Herald:

When a county coroner sends a body to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's Crime Lab, it takes an average of 84 days to determine the cause of death - but if drugs are involved, the time can stretch to six months.

During the three to six months a family is left waiting for the death certificate that allows them to access life insurance and Social Security benefits, bills pile up, homes are lost and loved ones are left in emotional limbo.

Some county coroners get around the wait by issuing pending death certificates to families, but those papers can't be used to claim life insurance or Social Security benefits.

Others, trying to expedite the autopsy process, have resorted to paying private medical examiners and labs to perform necessary autopsies and toxicology tests, but most counties can't afford the services.

Barrow County Coroner David Crosby is dealing with a growing number of cases in which drugs may be a factor in the cause of death, he said.

Crosby records an average of 30 accidental overdoses a year, he said.

These cases are increasing across the state and account for about 20 percent of the 4,000 or so autopsies the crime lab performed in 2009.

Suspected overdose deaths take longer to investigate because of the complexity of figuring out which drug killed the person, said GBI spokesman John Bankhead.

The GBI's crime lab has been cash-strapped since the late 1990s, but the state's recent budget cuts have exacerbated staffing shortages that have led to backlogs in all services - from toxicology tests for DUI cases, to DNA testing for rape investigations, to firearms testing.

From The Times of India:

A new study has revealed that rapamycin, a drug that keeps the immune system from attacking transplanted organs, may help fight Alzheimer's disease.

Researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio found that rapamycin rescued learning and memory deficits in a mouse model of Alzheimer's.

Senior author, Salvatore Oddo, assistant professor in the Department of Physiology of the UT Health Science Center San Antonio, said that the study offers the first evidence that the drug is able to reverse Alzheimer's-like deficits in an animal model.

The researchers also found that the drug also reduced lesions in the brains of the mice. The lesions are similar to those seen in the brains of people who died with Alzheimer's.

"Our findings may have a profound clinical implication. Because rapamycin is a US Food and Drug Administration-approved drug, a clinical trial using it as an anti-Alzheimer's disease therapy could be started fairly quickly," said Oddo.

The study has been published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry .

From The Baltimore Sun:

As scientific evidence mounts against bisphenol-A, a chemical used in plastic baby bottles, soup cans and other containers, many states - including Maryland - are starting to take action to limit the chemical ahead of any federal regulation.

The states are responding to some scientists, consumer groups and now even federal officials who have been sounding alarms about the chemical better known as BPA, which has been linked to developmental disabilities in children and reproductive problems in women.

Minnesota and Connecticut, Chicago and four counties in New York have banned BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups. Maryland is among 20 states that are considering legislation, according to the consumer group Maryland PIRG.

Del. James W. Hubbard, a Democrat from Prince George's County, has pushed BPA legislation in the state for years. On Friday, the House of Delegates passed a bill he sponsored by a vote of 137-0 that would prohibit manufacture, sale or distribution of BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups intended for children younger than 4. The Senate recently held a hearing and might vote as soon as today on the bill, which would take effect in 2012.

The FDA said the chemical, used for more than four decades in hard plastic food containers and the lining of metal food and soda cans, may be passed into food and beverages, and the agency expressed "concern" about its safety.

It was a reversal of a position taken in 2008, when the FDA said toxicology research showed BPA was safe.

In response, the Interagency Task Force on Children's Environmental Health was created to coordinate more research. The National Institutes of Health was given $30 million to foster research, and results are expected in 18 months to two years.

From wbztv.com (Portland, Maine):

Maine drug police say that some of the illegal drug cocaine that is reaching the state has been contaminated with a drug used to treat parasites in farm animals.

Christopher Montagna of the Maine Health & Environmental testing lab says the drug levamisole first started showing up in Maine in 2008, but now it shows up in 30 percent to 50 percent of tested samples.

Sgt. Kevin Cashman of the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency tells the Portland Press Herald it's "very, very dangerous."

The drug is used to increase the volume of cocaine.

Some scientific studies believe it might give cocaine users a more intense high. Experts say it has killed at least three people in the U.S. and Canada and sickened more than 100 others.

From Psychiatric News:

Days before a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee reviewed the safety concerns about antipsychotic drug use in pediatric patients, two additional antipsychotics, quetiapine and olanzapine, were approved by the agency for treating youth with schizophrenia and those with bipolar I disorder.

With these additions, four second-generation antipsychotics (SGAs) have been approved by the FDA for use in patients under age 18: risperidone, aripiprazole, quetiapine, and olanzapine. Indications are for the acute treatment of schizophrenia and bipolar I manic or mixed episodes based on three- to six-week clinical trials in pediatric and adolescent patients. Risperidone and aripiprazole have also been approved by the FDA to treat irritability associated with autistic disorders.

Other SGAs, including ziprasidone and paliperidone, and recently approved iloperidone and asenapine, are not approved for pediatric use but are sometimes prescribed off-label for children and adolescents.

In the past decade, mounting research evidence has linked SGAs to significant weight gain, increased blood glucose and cholesterol levels, and endocrine abnormalities in adult and underage patients.
At a public meeting held last December 8, representatives from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Antipsychotics Safety Therapeutic Working Group told the FDA's Pediatric Advisory Committee that the lack of knowledge about these drugs in the pediatric population is worrisome. A number of published epidemiological studies suggest that children may experience more dramatic weight gain and worse metabolic effects on SGAs compared with adults, the working group reported. Most recently, a study in the October 28, 2009, Journal of the American Medical Association showed that first-time SGA use was associated with a large increase in cardiometabolic risks in patients aged 4 to 19. The study found that average weight gain in youth taking SGAs ranged from 4.4 kg (aripiprazole) to 8.5 kg (olanzapine) after a median of 10.8 weeks.

The working group urged the FDA and National Institutes of Health to fund and conduct postmarketing studies, both retrospective and prospective, to clarify the long-term effectiveness and safety of SGAs in children and adolescents.

From msnbc.com:

About 250 case files languish in a bin at the Maine State Police computer crimes unit in Vassalboro. The files document the worst child pornography cases, complete with instructional videos detailing how to sexually assault children without getting caught.

The Maine crime lab can’t get to the cases because it’s overworked. With more cases coming in every week, the bin will likely never be empty.

The Maine crime lab, like many across the country, is stumbling under what specialists call the CSI Effect. Americans see television lab techs unravel the knottiest cases with evidence culled from the smallest clues, thanks to the most advanced equipment ever devised, and they presume that’s how it works in the real world.

It doesn’t. There are serious questions about the credibility of nearly every kind of crime lab analysis, the conclusions of which often rest on unproven science filtered through the subjective judgment of technicians whose training and certification vary wildly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

And with crime labs struggling under backlogs that already reach back years in many cities and states, budget cuts driven by the recession are threatening to make credible crime scene analysis a lost art, law enforcement officials and forensic specialists say.

“Overall, most laboratories lack adequate, dedicated and stable funding to fully accomplish their work,” the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors warned in the wake of a highly critical National Academy of Sciences report on crime labs, the impact of which continues to shake lawmakers and criminal justice experts a year after it was released.

Crime lab analysis has never been the empirical, nearly foolproof discipline depicted in top-rated TV shows like “CSI” and “Law & Order.”

Except for nuclear DNA analysis, “no forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source,” the National Academies report said.

Numerous mistakes have come to light in recent months, potentially sabotaging untold numbers of criminal cases.

Elected officials know it’s political suicide to take police officers off the street, so if jobs have to go, the cuts typically come in back-office services like crime lab analysis:

• Georgia is planning to close three of its seven regional crime labs on April 1. The state loses an average of four lab technicians a year to better-paying jobs elsewhere — especially in federal operations like the highly regarded FBI Laboratory — or in private industry. There’s no money to hire enough new scientists to keep the labs open, said officials of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which operates the facilities.
• A shortage of ballistics examiners at the Washington State Patrol crime labs has created backlogs of up to a year, but Gov. Christine Gregoire is proposing to cut, not add, jobs. The lab’s acting director, Larry Hebert, insisted that all the fat had been trimmed from his budget and said any further cuts could mean even deeper reductions in service.
• Requests for DNA analysis rose by 25 percent last year in Kansas, at the same time that the number of scientists at the state crime lab in Wichita dropped by 20 percent. The backlog is now about 800 cases and is expected to rise, because open jobs at the lab won’t be filled during the budget crisis.
• The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation is seeking legislation this year to allow it to charge police departments and other law enforcement agencies for using its forensics lab. Budget cuts mean the charges — $2,000 a year for small agencies and $6,000 a year for larger agencies — are the only way the TBI can avoid layoffs, Director Mark Gwyn said.

The money has been drying up even as the National Academies has urged many expensive changes to improve the reliability of crime lab reports. Boiled down from 254 densely scientific pages, it questions two fundamental underpinnings of forensic analysis itself: Is the science reliable, and are analysts qualified to interpret it?

Funding for forensic scientists varies widely from place to place, the report notes. Substandard facilities can lead to contamination of the evidence that is analyzed and stored in them. Analysts, many of whom are inadequately trained, are badly overworked. (Plus, they’re human beings, whose judgments are subject to bias.)

And once a report is concluded, it is not subject to assessment by scientific peers; instead, it is put in the hands of defense lawyers whose job it is to destroy it.

It adds up to a system that the public believes is infallible but that experts know is anything but. As the report’s authors concluded: “Substantive information and testimony based on faulty forensic science analyses may have contributed to wrongful convictions of innocent people.”

From the NY Daily News:

They're the anti-Red Bulls.

After nearly a decade of exploding energy drink sales, a new batch of relaxation tonics is creeping onto store shelves in the city - one drowsy shot at a time.

The nonalcoholic drinks with slumbering names like iChill, RelaxZen and Dream Water are marketed to teens trying to wind down or adults who have trouble falling asleep.

The relaxation drinks rack up about $20 million in sales a year, compared with $5 billion for energy drinks. Their popularity is growing in New York, but so are concerns about putting sleep-inducing melatonin in the drinks.

Last month the FDA ordered the makers of Drank, a melatonin-based drink that launched in 2008, to prove that using the hormone in the drink is safe. Drank has 2 milligrams of melatonin - 20 times the body's natural amount.

"Melatonin is a hormone," warned Dr. Charles Czeisler, a sleep expert with Harvard medical school. "[Hormones] should not be put in beverages, since the amount people drink often depends on thirst and taste rather than being taken only when needed like any other drug."

Experts say there haven't been reliable studies to determine the impact of melatonin on adults or children.

From the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel:

The Assembly voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to ban the sale and manufacture of BPA in baby bottles and cups for children age 3 and younger, clearing the way for the matter to become law.

The measure, passed 95-2, also requires that these items made without BPA be labeled to let consumers know that they don't contain the chemical.

Last month, the state Senate unanimously passed an identical bill.

The measure moves to Gov. Jim Doyle for his signature to become law. He is expected to sign it.

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And from KVAL.com (Eugene, Oregon):

A bill to ban a chemical used in rigid plastic baby bottles and "sippy cups" has failed on a tie vote in the Oregon Senate.

Advocates of the bill say bisphenol A is a hormone disrupter that poses multiple health hazards for fetuses and young children, and the federal government has failed to regulate it.

Opponents say federal regulators haven't concluded the chemical is a hazard, and the measure could lead to a ban on the chemical in the plastic liners of baby formula cans.

Oregon canneries opposed a provision in the bill that would apply to cans, so it had been taken out.