BACKGROUND Concerns about the high cost of orphan drugs has led to questions being asked about the generosity of the incentives for development, and associated company profits. METHODS We conducted a retrospective, propensity score matched study of publicly-listed orphan companies. Cases were defined as holders of orphan drug market authorisation in Europe or the USA between 2000-12. Control ...

Introduction Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) is a complex rotational spinal deformity that occurs during the pubertal growth spurt. Recently, through a stepwise association study a new susceptibility locus on chromosome 6q24.1 was reported in Japanese population. The most significantly associated SNP, rs6570507, was in GPR126. This gene is coding for a protein of the adhesion subfamily of...

OBJECTIVE To examine the sexual behaviour and the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases among adolescent girls who attended the Genito-Urinary Medicine Clinic in Birmingham. DESIGN Retrospective case control study. SETTING The Genito-Urinary Medicine Clinic (Ward 19), General Hospital, Birmingham. SUBJECTS 159 adolescent girls aged 13-16 years; 215 female clinic attenders older than...

AIMS The present experiments examined sex differences in ethanol intake and in the influence of a social context on aversive properties of ethanol in adolescent and adult Sprague-Dawley rats. METHODS Experiment 1 examined ethanol intake, with animals receiving daily 2-h access to ethanol and water for 8 days. Experiment 2 assessed the aversive effects of ethanol using a conditioned taste aver...

Rationale: Amphetamine abuse by adolescents predicts long-term drug dependence. Heightened vulnerability to drug abuse could be due to higher sensitivity to drug’s reinforcing effects. Rodents are used to study age-related sensitivities to drugs. Objective: We compared intravenous amphetamine self-administration between adolescent and adult male rats on an operant schedule of reinforcement meas...

BACKGROUND The relatively low budget impact of orphan drugs is often used as an argument in reimbursement decisions. However, overall, the budget impact of orphan drugs can still be substantial. In this study, we assess the uptake and budget impact of orphan drugs in the Netherlands. METHODS We examined the number of orphan drugs, the number of patients and budget impact of orphan drugs in th...

To encourage the development of orphan drugs, the European Union has implemented specific policies in 2000. However, the political, social, scientific and economic context has changed since the implementation of these policies. For that reason, the aim of this article is to evaluate orphan drug policies in Europe. Firstly, key issues on the orphan drug policy were identified based on desk resea...