In 2008, an artery-imaging study failed to show that Vytorin prevented atherosclerosis better than Zocor alone.
The controversies over the artery-imaging study, called ENHANCE, also began with questions about the companies' use of ClinicalTrials.gov.
Then he urges Weiner's colleague, Norbert Schuff, to include a subset of patients not yet on medication in a brain-imaging study Schuff is doing.
But then came the artery-imaging study in January and a stinging rebuke from an expert panel last Sunday at the American College of Cardiology's (ACC) meeting.
But in January results from an artery-imaging study showed that adding Zetia to Zocor didn't slow heart-attack-causing atherosclerosis in patients with a genetic disorder that causes high cholesterol.
ENHANCE, involving 720 patients, began immediately in June 2002 and was modeled on an imaging study that had worked for Pfizer, called ASAP, conducted by John Kastelein of the University of the Netherlands.
For one thing, the lead investigator of the imaging study says he wanted to have the full results out at least six months, and as much as a year, before they were.
Two days before, a panel at the American College of Cardiology had said that because an artery-imaging study showed no added benefit from Zetia to Zocor, doctors should dramatically scale back their use of Zetia and Vytorin.
"If you had a smoker compared to a nonsmoker and were able to do imaging study of the brain, the smoker would have billions more of the receptors in areas of the brain that have to do with pleasure and reward, " says Richard Hurt, an internist who heads the Mayo Clinic's Nicotine Dependence Center.
But newfangled artery-imaging techniques used in the study, touted as a way to speed drug development, caused problems as well.
Researchers at Northwestern, in a small study using brain imaging, have found preliminary evidence that being in a positive mood aids the creative process in problem solving.
Marta Schulman, chair of the American College of Radiology Pediatric Imaging Commission, said the study adds to the impetus that patients should be scanned only when necessary and with the lowest dose of radiation possible.
Then at about age 73, 700 study participants were given a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scan.
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Combine wireless sensors with the study of genes, or genomics, imaging and a proliferation of health-focused social networks, and you have a convergence capable of bringing about the "creative destruction" of medicine.
In a recent study, researchers at Vanderbilt University used MRI imaging to monitor brain functioning in people engaged in more than one activity at a time.
Dr. Wolinsky said the next study he expects to pursue will use functional MRI imaging to measure changes in the brain in people participating in cognitive-training exercises, he said.
In a 2009 study, scientists there used fMRI (Functional MRI) imaging to measure brain activity in regions of emotional processing in the brain before and after injecting Botox to suppress smiling muscles.
But in an Arena study published online this week in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging, evaluation of over 5, 200 patients in phase 3 trials of 52 weeks of lorcaserin (10 mg, twice daily) or placebo showed only a slight difference in heart valve problems: 2.04% for placebo and 2.37% for lorcaserin.
The study involved scientists from the Medical Research Council (MRC), the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre in Cambridge and a Belgian team at the University of Liege.
To study the neurology of tickling, Dr Blakemore and her team stuck volunteers into a magnetic-resonance-imaging machine (which monitors oxygen flow to the brain, and thus indicates the amount of activity in that organ's various parts).
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