Four years ago, Lilly and several other drugmakers proposed the creation of The Florida Behavioral Health Collaborative. And they provided $10 million to the state to get it up and running. Soon, an expert panel was convened and recommended state standards, and national scholars with financial ties to drugmakers that sell atypicals were invited to [...]

The so-called atypicals - including Abilify, Risperdal, Zyprexa, Seroquel and Geodon - have been hailed as more effective and easier to tolerate than the older and cheaper kind such as Haldol, which cause tremors and rigid muscles. But the new generation are no better at treating a first episode of schizophrenia, according to a study [...]

Otsuka American Pharmaceutical, the US unit of the Japanese drugmaker, agreed to pay more than $4 million to resolve allegations that it marketed the Abilify antipsychotic for off-label uses, according to the US Department of Justice.
The settlement resolves allegations that, from 2002 through 2005, Otsuka knowingly promoted the sale and use of Abilify for pediatric [...]

Antipsychotic Promotional Spending In ‘06

Drug
Spending

Abilify
$329 million

Zyprexa
$184 million

Risperdal
$182 million

Seroquel
$179 million

Geodon
$119 million

Sometimes, money really can’t buy everything. Despite outspending its rivals by huge sums, Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Abilify failed to make much of an impression on a group of psychiatrists and primary care docs surveyed recently.
As the first table illustrates, Bristol spent $329 million to promote Abilify [...]

Connecticut’s nursing homes dole out antipsychotic drugs to residents who do not have psychotic disorders at one of the highest rates in the country, raising questions about whether the medications are being used to subdue agitated patients because of a lack of staffing and attention to alternate treatments, The Hartford Courant reports.
Federal data from the [...]

That’s right. The antipsychotic, as you know, can cause weight gain and diabetes. And a survey conducted last month finds that 86 percent of psychiatrists are now writing fewer scrips for Zyprexa. They cited the side effects as the reason, according to Sandra Chow, an analyst at Decision Resources, the market-research firm that queried 151 [...]

That’s what the rate of scrips for antipsychotics written for kids is being called in the wake of a study this week in the Archives of General Psychiatry. The research showed that there’s been a 40-fold increase over nine years in the number of kids diagnosed with bipolar disorder, fueling an explosion in sales of [...]

The number of American children diagnosed with bipolar disorder jumped 40-fold from 1994 to 2003, according to a study in the Archives of General Psychiatry (here’s the abstract).
By 2003, the diagnosis was applied to 1 in 100 kids, researchers found. Of the 800,000 people ages 19 and younger with the diagnosis, 91 percent were [...]

So here’s a move that’s likely to cause controversy. Citing unmet medical needs, the FDA has agreed to grant priority review to an application from Bristol-Myers Squibb, which wants to sell its antipsychotic for teenagers.
This could become the first atypical antipsychotic drug to be approved for adolescents, although the whole class of meds is widely [...]

The latest in a widening stream of stories about the pernicious influence of money on the practice of medicine focuses on the recent rush to prescribe atypical antipsychotics to youngsters. In a report this morning, The New York Times notes that these meds are being prescribed to more than half a million children in the [...]