ANXIETY MEDICATIONS ATIVAN, XANAX, AND VALIUM MAY INCREASE RISK OF ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE
ANXIETY MEDICATIONS ATIVAN, XANAX, AND VALIUM MAY INCREASE RISK OF ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
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Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
September 15th, 2014 at 5:54PM
My wife’s family has and has had a great of AD, so we read everything we can. As far as I understand it:
1 The studies show an association which might mean (a) that valium (and chemical cousins) by itself, or in combination with other factors, can cause AD at some level of use (b) that many people who are developing AD develop anxiety and so seek out anti anxiety drugs i.e. AD causes valium use or (c) possibly something else.
2. I’ve had difficulty, at a low level of effort, pinning down the dosages involved in the studies. My best read/guess is that those studied were taking 3-5 milligrams of, say, Ativan a day for weeks at a time for constant anxiety, as opposed, for example, to an occasional .5 – .75 milligrams for sleep after a very stressful day or at night before anticipated stress. That is a lot of difference. As we know quantity often makes the safe and desirable into the dangerous. I’d be interested if anyone else knows about the length of treatment and dosages involved.
There is so much balancing of opposing
factors, and wild guess work, involved in deciding how to deal with health. See Woody Allen’s futuristic “Sleeper” in which everything earlier thought not healthy turned out, in the future, not to be so and vice versa. Reading the Times recently I have many times been reminded of this: eg. eggs.
Right now: I’m going to have beer.
September 15th, 2014 at 10:12PM
These pills allow you anxious quakers
To hide that you are inner shakers.
The Xanax will calm you,
Don’t let them alarm you –
See you soon in Alzheimer’s Acres.
September 16th, 2014 at 6:27AM
Greg, according to local lore in my area, some physicians in the 1970s and 1980s prescribed Valium as long-term maintenance meds for factory workers suffering “nerves”. General Motors workers, with extremely lush health insurance at the time, are the ones routinely mentioned. (This story is commonly believed, but I don’t know if there’s truth behind it.)
September 16th, 2014 at 9:18AM
In the Kidz in the Hall film “Brain Candy,” a sleazy pharmaceutical company is making tons of money selling a new drug that cures depression. When it turns out that users eventually become comatose, the company’s response is to open a chain of for-profit “comatoriums.” Problem solved!
September 16th, 2014 at 10:14AM
Dr_Doctorstein: Comatorium! Love it.
September 16th, 2014 at 11:30AM
It has the ring of Obitarium, which was one of Jack Kevorkian’s nuttier ideas.
September 16th, 2014 at 12:03PM
Valium is the “mother’s little helper” that Mick Jagger was singing about way back when. My mom and (I am pretty sure) about half the other moms on our middle-middle-class block took it at one point or another. Its popularity seems to have declined in the mid-1970s.