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(2) PERSONAL
DRUG PROFILES BASED ON GENETIC
MAKE-UP ALREADY
IN USE
(3) THREAT
OF WIDESPREAD JOB LOSSES
SIGNIFICANTLY
INCREASES ILL HEALTH AMONG
EMPLOYEES
(4) ETHNICITY
DOES NOT AFFECT PRESCRIPTION OF
PAINKILLERS
(Association between illegal drugs
and weapon carrying in
young people in Scotland: schools'
survey)
http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/320/7240/982
Substantial numbers of schoolchildren in
Scotland carry
weapons, finds a schools survey published
in this week's
BMJ. Weapon carrying was strongly linked
to the use of
illegal drugs, the survey showed.
To investigate whether there was a link
between illegal drugs
and weapon carrying, McKeganey and Norrie,
of the Centre
for Drug Misuse Research and the Robertson
Centre for
Biostatistics, at the University of Glasgow,
surveyed over
3000 students from 20 schools across Scotland.
The students
were aged from 11 to 16 years old.
Over a third of the boys and one in 12
of the girls surveyed
said that they had carried a weapon; almost
four out of ten 13
to 15 year old boys reported having done
so. Boys who took
illegal drugs were over three times as
likely, and girls over five
times as likely, to carry weapons as their
non-drug taking
peers. The more drugs that were used,
the greater was the
link with weapon carrying. Almost all
the boys who took five
or more different drugs reported carrying
weapons,
compared with around one in two who took
one drug. Types
of weapon carried included flick and Stanley
knives,
machetes, razors, baseball bats, and hammers.
Contact:
Professor Neil McKeganey, Centre for Drug
Misuse
Research, University of Glasgow, Scotland.
Email: gkua27@udcf.gla.ac.uk
(2) PERSONAL DRUG
PROFILES BASED ON GENETIC
MAKE-UP ALREADY IN USE
(Pharmacogenetics)
http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/320/7240/987
In this week's BMJ, Wolf from the ICRF
Pharmacology Unit
at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, and Smith
from the Imperial
College School of Medicine, review the
rapid progress of
pharmacogenetics - the prescription of
drugs according to an
individual's genetically determined response
to them.
The authors discuss how pharmacogenetic
testing will
substantially cut hospital treatment for
adverse drug reactions,
currently thought to account for one in
every 15 admissions.
Although not widespread in the UK, pharmacogenetic
testing
is being used in some teaching hospitals
and academic centres
and has been used in Scandinavia for some
time. At the
moment, it is most widely used to help
tailor drugs and doses
for the treatment of psychiatric illness,
but is also being
developed for cancer treatments.
The ability to predict genetic variability
in drug response has
been facilitated by non-invasive DNA tests
which require
only a small sample of tissue, such as
blood from a finger
prick or cells from a mouth wash, together
with a better
understanding of the way in which drugs
work, say the
authors. Although they caution that we
are some way off from
a DNA chip that General Practitioners
could use to identify a
total drug sensitivity profile for each
patient,
pharmacogenetics should enable the design
of new drugs that
are safer and more effective for particular
groups of people.
"One day it may be considered unethical
not to carry out
such tests routinely to avoid exposing
individuals to doses of
drugs that could be harmful to them,"
they conclude.
Contacts:
Professor Roland Wolf, Imperial Cancer
Research Fund
Molecular Pharmacology Unit, Ninewells
Hospital and
Medical School, Dundee.
Email: rooney@icrf.icnet.uk
or
Professor Robert Smith, Imperial College
School of
Medicine, London c/o Hotel Armada Istanbul.
(3) THREAT OF
WIDESPREAD JOB LOSSES
SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASES ILL HEALTH
AMONG
EMPLOYEES
(Factors underlying the effect of
organisational downsizing on
health of employees: longitudinal
cohort study)
http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/320/7240/971
The threat of widespread job losses as
a result of
"downsizing" significantly increases ill
health among
employees, finds a study in this week's
BMJ. It is not only
job insecurity that adversely affects
an employee's health, but
also the increased demands and lessened
sense of control
that downsizing creates, shows the research
by Kivimäki and
colleagues from the University of Helsinki
and University
College Medical School, London.
The research team investigated links between
downsizing,
changes related to work and other aspects
of life as well as
medically certified sick leave in 764
Finnish municipal
workers. The employees were studied over
a period of five
years up to 1995, before, after, and during
downsizing..
They found that downsizing was associated
with negative
changes in work, impaired emotional support
from a partner,
and increased tendency to smoke. Sick
leave was twice as
likely among workers who had undergone
major, rather than
minor, downsizing. The greatest proportion
of the relationship
between downsizing and sick leave was
explained by
increased physical demands, job insecurity,
and less control
over deployment of skills and decision
making.
Contact:
Dr Mika Kivimäki, Department of Psychology,
University of
Helsinki, Finland.
Email: mika.kivimaki@occuphealth.fi
(4) ETHNICITY
DOES NOT AFFECT PRESCRIPTION OF
PAINKILLERS
(Ethnicity and prescription of analgesia
in an accident and
emergency department: cross sectional
study)
http://bmj.com/cgi/content/full/320/7240/980
Ethnic background has no bearing on the
prescription of pain
relief, finds a study in this week's BMJ.
Previous research
has indicated that white patients may
receive more pain killers
than patients from other ethnic groups.
Yate and colleagues from St Bartholomew's
and The Royal
London Hospital reviewed the prescription
notes for white
and Bangladeshi patients with fractures
of the arms or legs
who had come to the Accident and Emergency
Department
at the hospital. The study took in treatment
patterns for 307
patients over a period of 12 months. Three-quarters
of the
patients were white; 14 per cent were
Bangladeshi. The
authors found that there was no difference
in the amount of
pain relief prescribed, with 81 per cent
of Bangladeshi
patients and just over 78 per cent of
white patients being
given analgesics.
Contact:
Dr Paul Yate, Department of Anaesthetics,
Royal London
Hospital, London.
Email: Pyate@aol.com
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