Adriane Fugh-Berman examines documents unsealed in recent litigation to investigate how pharmaceutical companies promoted hormone therapy drugs, including the use of medical writing companies to produce ghostwritten manuscripts and place them into medical journals.

PURPOSE Desmopressin is a standard treatment for monosymptomatic nocturnal enuresis. Different formulations are promoted as bioequivalent, although these claims are not supported by comparative pharmacodynamic data in children. Food interaction is known to influence the bioavailability of desmopressin. We compared the pharmacodynamics of the 2 most frequently used desmopressin formulations, tab...

Methods: First, we constructed a questionnaire based on the descriptors collected from various sources in order to elicit university teachers’ views on the importance of these descriptors. A revised version was produced based on the feedback from the initial questionnaire survey. In order to further investigate what level or levels these remaining descriptors would fall into, 35 university teac...

Objective—To investigate whether micrographia in patients with Parkinson’s disease is lessened either by giving visual targets or by continually reminding them that they should write with a normal amplitude. Methods—Eleven patients with Parkinson’s disease (mean age 65.4 years) were compared with 14 control subjects (mean age 67.1 years). The subjects wrote with a stylus on a graphics tablet. T...

OBJECTIVES Previous research suggested that people with Parkinson's disease are able to increase handwriting stroke size up to 1.5 cm without an increase of stroke duration; whereas age matched individuals in normal health are able to modulate stroke size without changes in stroke duration for sizes up to 2 cm. This study was designed to test this finding by examining whether sizes larger than ...