Sleep deprivation has been linked to motor vehicle accidents, industrial accidents and medical errors. It has also been linked to obesity, diabetes, hypertension, depression, anxiety, reduced problem-solving capacity, memory lapses, an increased risk for the common cold and even premature death.

Recent data published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, while not cutting new ground in this area, has helped to quantify the extent of the problem among Americans, as well as its impact on car crashes. The news is not good.

According to the CDC report, between 50 and 70 million US adults suffer from chronic sleep deprivation and related disorders. Those estimates came from a study which found that 35% the nearly 75,000 adult participants in a 12-state sleep study reported getting less than 7 hours of sleep per night. Nearly 40% of these people claimed to doze off inadvertently at least once a day.

Furthermore, people who averaged less than 7 hours were more likely to nod-off while driving a car. Overall, nearly 5% of respondents said they had fallen asleep while driving during the last year. According to the CDC, this phenomenon causes 1,550 highway deaths and 40,000 injuries per year.

The numbers are probably higher than this, according to Allan Pack, who directs the Center for Sleep at University of Pennsylvania. “Most of us believe that there are a lot more fall asleep crashes than reported,” he said in an interview. “It’s probably not reported accurately because a number of states don’t even having a ‘falling asleep while driving’ tick in the box when reporting a car crash.” (more…)

The FDA has been tough on diet drugs of late. Three years ago, it scuttled an attempt to get the European diet drug rimonabant approved for use in the US. More recently it rejected, at least temporarily, applications for Qnexa and Lorcaserin.

But that trend may have been reversed last week, when an advisory committee set the stage for possible FDA approval of Orexigen’s investigational diet drug, Contrave. By a 13-7 vote, the committee said in essence that the somewhat modest beneficial effects of the drug outweighed its tendency to increase blood pressure.

The FDA will make final decision on the matter by the end of January. It is not required to follow the advice of its advisory committees, but as was the case for the 3 diet drugs mentioned above,  it usually does.

Orexigen has petitioned the FDA to approve Contrave for the treatment of obesity and weight management in people who have a body mass index of at least 30, or at least 27 if they have at least one cardiovascular disease risk factor like diabetes, high cholesterol or high blood pressure.

Contrave is a combination of 2 drugs that were approved long-ago by the FDA and are widely used today. Naltrexone, the first of these, is used to treat opioid addiction and alcohol dependence. The second, bupropion, is used to treat depression and as a quit-smoking aide.

Before reaching its verdict, the FDA’s Endocrine and Metabolic Drugs Advisory Committee reviewed the results of 4 randomized trials that were sponsored by Orexigen. Together, the studies enrolled more than 4,500 overweight and obese subjects. The Committee noted that in pooled results from the 4 trials, the weight-loss difference between those receiving Contrave and those receiving a placebo was about 4.2%, which it deemed to be “of nominal statistical significance.” However, more than a third of subjects in the Contrave group did lose least 5% of their body weight during a 1-year follow-up period.

“As far as efficacy goes, I think they made it by the hair of their chinny chin chin,” Melanie Coffin, a patient representative on the Committee told ABC News.

The Committee did raise concerns about several side effects of Contrave, including seizures and suicidal ideation, although it was clearly most concerned about the drug’s tendency to increase blood pressure, a phenomenon that seemed to be most apparent in the first few weeks after the drug was started. Ultimately though, the Committee decided there wasn’t enough data to draw clear conclusions about the cardiovascular risks of Contrave. It did recommend that Orexigen should submit post-market data on the matter, if and when it receives full FDA approval.

Currently, the only anti-obesity drug on the market is Orlistat (also known as Xenical and Alli). Recently, Abbott pulled another one, sibutramine (Meridia) after mounting evidence suggested it was associated with strokes and heart attacks.

A study of children between the ages of 11 and 17 has revealed that suicide risk increases with the number of changes in residence.

To reach this conclusion, Ping Qin and colleagues from the University of Aarhus used data from Danish population registries to identify 120,000 children born in Denmark between 1978 and 1995.

Using other sources, they subsequently determined  that 4,160 of these people attempted suicide during adolescence. Seventy-nine completed the act.

The scientists then used logistic regression to demonstrate the increased risk of attempted and completed suicide associated with changes in home address. The more frequently the kids moved, the higher was the suicide risk.

Subjects that moved more than 3 times had twice the risk of suicidal behavior as those that stayed put throughout their early years. Those who moved more than 10 times experienced a four-fold bump in such risk.

The finding was not affected by year of birth, birth order, birthplace, age when the move took place, gender, presence of 2 parents, or parental age at birth.

“It’s understandable that a lot of moves increase people’s risk for suicide,” Nadine Kaslow, the chief psychologist at Emory University told ABC news. “Moving is all about losing things.”

But Kaslow cautioned that moving might be a marker for problems rather than the proximate cause of suicidal behavior. “There could be all sorts of other family stressors that are associated with moves,” she reasoned.

The write-up appears in Archives of General Psychiatry.

“It is always good to involve children in the process, motivating their participation in all decisions, plans and practical work,” wrote the authors.

Kaslow recommended having the children visit their new home and, after the move, their old one. But she added the vast majority of children do adjust. “Some kids are at increased risk, but many…do just fine,” she told ABC News.