Precursors to suicidality and violence on antidepressants:systematic review of trials in adult healthy volunteers

OBJECTIVE: To quantify the risk of suicidality and violence when selective serotonin and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors are given to adult healthy volunteers with no signs of a mental disorder. DESIGN: Systematic review and meta-analysis. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Harms related to suicidality, hostility, activation events, psychotic events and mood disturbances. SETTING: Published trials identified by searching PubMed and Embase and clinical study reports obtained from the European and UK drug regulators. PARTICIPANTS: Double-blind, placebo-controlled trials in adult healthy volunteers that reported on suicidality or violence or precursor events to suicidality or violence. RESULTS: A total of 5787 publications were screened and 130 trials fulfilled our inclusion criteria. The trials were generally uninformative; 97 trials did not report the randomisation method, 75 trials did not report any discontinuations and 63 trials did not report any adverse events or lack thereof. Eleven of the 130 published trials and two of 29 clinical study reports we received from the regulatory agencies presented data for our meta-analysis. Treatment of adult healthy volunteers with antidepressants doubled their risk of harms related to suicidality and violence, odds ratio 1.85 (95% confidence interval 1.11 to 3.08, p = 0.02, I(2 )= 18%). The number needed to treat to harm one healthy person was 16 (95% confidence interval 8 to 100; Mantel-Haenszel risk difference 0.06). There can be little doubt that we underestimated the harms of antidepressants, as we only had access to the published articles for 11 of our 13 trials. CONCLUSIONS: Antidepressants double the occurrence of events in adult healthy volunteers that can lead to suicide and violence

Large grain boundary area superconductors

For many applications of polycrystalline high-Tc superconductors the small critical currents of the grain boundaries pose a severe problem. To solve this problem, we derive novel designs for the microstructure of coated conductors

Modifying electronic properties of interfaces in high-Tc superconductors by doping

The town of La Union (SE, Spain) is located within a metal mining area that has been exploited since the Roman period. This historic exploitation has left behind a high concentration of abandoned underground mining galleries. Currently, an industrial area is subsiding due to the collapse of one of these galleries in May 1998. In this paper, an advanced Differential Interferometry SAR (DInSAR) method called the Coherent Pixels Technique (CPT) has been used to study the subsidence phenomena for two time intervals, from January 1998 to December 2000, and from March 2003 to December 2004. DInSAR-derived deformation maps have enabled the detection and monitoring of different deformation processes that affect several locations within the study area. By comparing these results with the underground mining galleries map, a clear relationship between their presence and the subsidence has been proved. Deformation values retrieved with DInSAR between April 2003 and December 2004 have been compared with the topographical leveling network measurements performed in this same period, providing an absolute average difference of 0.7 cm with a standard deviation of 0.5 cm. Results obtained in the city of La Union have shown that the advanced DInSAR technique is able to provide very useful spatial and temporal deformation data for the measurement of small scale subsidence throughout short time periods. This technique has enabled the temporal evolution of the phenomena in the city of La Unión to be studied and understanding of subsidence to be expanded beyond the limits of a deployed topographical control network, in a more cost effective way than classical methods.This work has been partially financed by the Spanish Geological and Mining Institute (IGME) within project 2004051, by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science and EU FEDER within projects TEC2005–06863 and BTE2002–12456- E, and by the Generalitat Valenciana within projects GV04B/556, GV06/179 and GRUPOS03/085