TUESDAY, Sept. 30 (HealthDay News) -- The mainstream media often fail to report when drug company funding is used for studies of medications, a new review found.

What's more, there's a tendency among both medical and mainstream reporters to use brand names, rather than generic names, when referring to specific medications.

And both of these factors work to skew public and medical opinion toward commercial interests, according to the review, published in the Oct. 1 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

This, despite newspaper editors' assertions to the contrary, the study authors found.

"As a doctor, I am increasingly worried in recent years that company-funded research can't be trusted in the same way that other research can be trusted," said study author Dr. Michael Hochman, a resident physician at Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Mass. "[Also], all of us, doctors, patients, journalists, have gotten into a bad habit of referring to medications by their proprietary brand names. At a philosophical level, I think we need to be referring to them by the generic name. We want to keep commercial interests as much out of the doctor-patient relationship as possible."

"Funding sources should be included in every story where it's relevant," added Andrew Holtz, past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists, former CNN medical correspondent and now an independent journalist. But, he also pointed out, the new study itself may be biased because it only included in its analysis stories of at least 200 words.

"Two hundred words is not a very long story and I didn't see in the study anything about whether there was a correlation between length of article and how thorough the article was in mentioning funding and generic and brand names," Holtz said. Such stories, he added, may be leaving out other important information as well, including, for instance, the side effects of a particular drug.

Peer-reviewed medical journals earlier engaged in a similar debate and most now require that study authors disclose funding sources.

The authors of the new study analyzed 306 news articles about medication research from U.S. newspaper and online sites, and they also asked 100 editors at the most widely circulated newspapers in the country about their reporting practices. The studies that were analyzed had been published in five prominent medical journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine.

Forty-two percent of the news articles did not state when drug research had received funding from the pharmaceutical industry. And when they did, it was often buried in the text.

Sixty-seven percent of 277 articles that reported on medications only used the drug's brand name in at least half of the references to the medication. According to the study authors, up to $9 billion is spent each year in the United States when doctors prescribe brand name drugs although a generic would do just as well.

Yet 88 percent of the responding newspaper editors thought that articles they published often or always mentioned company funding. And 77 percent of the editors thought their stories referred to medications by their generic names.

Three percent of the newspapers had formal, written policies regarding disclosure of company funding, and 2 percent had such policies regarding the use of generic names of drugs.

"News organizations, in my opinion, really should have explicit written policies that they enforce," Hochman said. "We always need to disclose how a medical study is funded. I'm particularly concerned about commercial studies. We have many examples of how company-led research led us astray."

Hochman referred specifically to the Vioxx (rofecoxib) scandal; the arthritis drug was withdrawn from the market in 2004 because of concerns that it increased heart risks.

As for preferring generic drug names -- many of which are unpronounceable, even for experts -- over brand names, Hochman conceded that will be an uphill battle.

"It's a problem but we're not going to change it unless we take the hard step of trying to learn generic names," he said.

More information

Visit the Association of Health Care Journalists   for more on how medicine is reported.

TUESDAY, Sept. 30 (HealthDay News) -- People with complex mental disorders or personality disorders would benefit from long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy that lasts at least a year or longer, according to new research.

Published in the Oct. 1 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, the German study found that compared to the more commonly used short-term therapy, long-term psychotherapy left people better off. In fact, the number of therapy sessions the patients had was directly correlated to improvements in symptoms.

"Long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy was significantly superior to shorter forms of psychotherapy applied in the control groups. This was true with regard to overall effectiveness, target problems, and personality functioning," said the study's lead author, Falk Leichsenring, a professor of psychotherapy research in the department of psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy at the University of Giessen in Germany.

"With regard to overall effectiveness, on average, patients with complex mental disorders were better off after treatment with long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy than 96 percent of the patients in the comparison groups. Thus, this meta-analysis provides evidence that long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy is an effective treatment for complex mental disorders," said Leichsenring.

"This study provides a great value for doctors and for patients, and one would hope could have an influence on policy decisions," added Dr. Charles Goodstein, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine and Langone Medical Center in New York City.

Complex mental disorders include problems such as depression or anxiety that continue for long periods of time. Psychodynamic therapy, according to Leichsenring, is therapy that puts the focus on the therapist-patient relationship and the importance of developing that relationship. Leichsenring said this is a key difference between this type of therapy and some of the shorter-term options, such as cognitive behavioral therapy.

Leichsenring and his colleague, Sven Rabung, from University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, reviewed the medical literature to find studies that compared long-term psychodynamic therapy lasting a year or more to other forms of therapy. They found 23 studies with 1,053 patients. Eleven of the studies were randomized, controlled trials, and 12 were observational studies.

Overall effectiveness, resolution of the target problem, and personality functioning were superior in the long-term psychodynamic therapy groups than in the comparison groups, according to the analysis.

The bottom line: "Long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy is superior to short-term treatments in patients with complex mental disorders," Leichsenring said.

But the problem, according to Goodstein, is that insurance companies often don't want to pay for long-term therapy, perhaps believing medications and short-term therapy are more cost-effective options.

For someone who's just started having symptoms -- considered an acute problem -- short-term therapy may be helpful, according to Goodstein. But, for those who've had mental health symptoms chronically, short-term therapy may boost them to a "barely livable level" but not to a good quality of life.

So, what's the ideal number of visits? It really depends on the individual and their specific problem, but Leichsenring said, "there is evidence that most patients with acute distress benefit sufficiently from 25 sessions. For patients with chronic distress, about 50 sessions are required to achieve a response rate of 70 percent. For patients with personality disorders, there is evidence that about 200 sessions, or 2 years of treatment, are required to achieve recovery in 75 percent of the patients."

More information

To learn more about psychotherapy, including psychodynamic psychotherapy, visit the America Psychiatric Association's Healthy Minds Web site  .

THURSDAY, Sept. 25 (HealthDay News) -- The fear of losing is why people tend to overpay for items bought in an auction, a new study says.

Neuroscientists and economists at New York University reached this conclusion by combining brain imaging techniques with behavioral economic research. Their findings were published in the Sept. 26 issue of Science.

The researchers, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), examined brain activity in people playing an auction game with a partner, or a lottery game. While participants could win or lose money in either game, winning at the auction depended on outbidding a partner. Activity in the striatum, part of the brain's reward circuitry, appeared exaggerated during losses in the auction game. The magnitude of this change matched the tendency to overbid, suggesting that the possibility of losing in a social competition, such as an auction, may lead people to bid "too high."

A follow-up behavioral economic study, in which groups played an auction game against a partner under different circumstances, found similar results.

"Such a result would not have been predicted by existing economic theory. While there have been investigations of overbidding which have attributed the phenomenon to either risk aversion or the 'joy of winning,' it was the use of imaging data which allowed us to distinguish between these conflicting explanations and actually arrive at a new and different one, the 'fear of losing.' Our results provide evidence of how an understanding of the neural systems of economic behavior might inform economic theory," researcher Andrew Schotter, a professor in NYU's Department of Economics, said in a university news release.

Neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps, an NYU professor involved in the research, added: "These results highlight a role for the contemplation of social loss in understanding the tendency to bid 'too high' in auctions and emphasize the importance of considering social factors in economic decisions. By combining neuroeconomic and behavioral economic techniques, we were able to provide novel insight into a classic economic problem."

More information

The U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has more about how the brain works.

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 10 (HealthDay News) -- Minute particles of food soil on surfaces can help bacteria survive industrial cleaning procedures in food processing factories, which may lead to possible contamination of food with pathogenic bacteria, say researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom.

"Tiny amounts of soil are enough to provide nutrients and a reservoir for contaminating bacteria to survive the cleaning process, leading to food spoilage later. The soil should be identified to make sure effective cleaning regimes are used on food preparation surfaces," researcher Dr. Kathryn Whitehead said in a Society for General Microbiology news release.

She and her colleagues compared different methods for detection of food residues, including chemical and physiochemical techniques, microscopy and rapid industrial methods such as ultraviolet (UV) light. They found that standard ultraviolet (UV) light and detection techniques may not detect the tiny quantities of food soil, which can even adhere to stainless steel surfaces.

The researchers concluded that more complex analytical methods are the most effective in identifying food soil and developing appropriate cleaning procedures.

"Some methods are not as sensitive as others at detecting food residue and microorganisms in the food industries. A rapid industrial technique using UV light may be optimized to detect soil. Our results also showed that different techniques may be better suited to different disciplines," Whitehead said.

Knowing the type of food soil build-up on food surfaces can help in determining the best approach to removing the soil.

"By using more precise methods to detect food residue and microorganisms on surfaces, it may be possible that different cleaners could be used to target key fouling components," Whitehead said. "We hope our work will lead to a greater level of hygiene in the food industry."

The research was expected to be presented Wednesday at the Society for General Microbiology Autumn meeting, in Dublin.

Another Manchester Metropolitan University study expected to be presented at the same meeting concluded that titanium work surfaces in food factories could reduce the number of food poisoning cases every year, because some pathogenic bacteria have more difficulty attaching to titanium than to stainless steel.

Abrasion, constant cleaning and impact damage can cause work surfaces to become scratched.

"It is important that surfaces in a hygienic environment are kept clean. Scratches may entrap microorganisms such as Escherichia coli and protect them from being removing during cleaning," researcher Adele Packer said in a society meeting news release.

"We measured scratches found on different surfaces and reproduced them in our lab. We coated the surfaces with titanium so that they all had the same chemistry, and the only difference was the surface roughness," Packer said.

After they cleaned the surfaces, the researchers examined them for bacteria retention and found that the shape of bacteria was a factor. Rod-shaped Listeria remained in tiny scratches less than 0.5 micrometers across, and round Staphylococcus bacteria remained in scratches that were 1 micrometer across.

"The results show that surface scratches retain bacteria well if they are of comparable size. The more tightly the bacteria fit in the scratches, the more difficult they are to remove during cleaning," Packer said. "Our findings indicate that titanium coating may have a role to play in reducing the attachment of E. coli to food contact surfaces; E. coli cells attached to stainless steel much better than titanium."

More information

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has more about food safety.