I have a new favorite advocacy site in the Public Library of Science Medicine. It's a peer review open-access journal where researchers publish original research or <gasp> educated criticisms of current research exposing biases or flaws in research design, and they share it for FREE- no screw you unless you have $50 to view the entire article for a day. For a librarian, it's a breath of fresh air.

In looking up some specific info on the supposed role of cholinesterase inhibitors in PD, I ran across this alarming bit of info in the current push to market AD anti-dementia drugs for use in PD; this is a copy/paste from the article which can be found in its entirety right here:

From: "Cholinesterase Inhibitors; Drugs Looking for a Disease"
Maggini, M. et al. 2006.


If the results of these trials are not carefully evaluated, together with evaluating the methodological quality of the studies, this could lead to inappropriate prescribing of cholinesterase inhibitors. Drug companies have invested heavily in developing treatments for Alzheimer disease, and then were actively involved in expanding the market to other forms of dementia. In the last decade, donepezil, galantamine, and rivastigmine have been tested not only in patients with Alzheimer disease but also in patients with vascular dementia, dementia with Lewy bodies, dementia associated with Parkinson disease, and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Even when the evidence on the efficacy of these drugs is lacking, or inconclusive, the results are often presented in such a way as to create a false perception of efficacy. For example, about 23 different scales or instruments (on average six per trial) were used, in the trials considered here, as primary or secondary outcome measures. Most of them were not validated for the disease for which the drugs were tested and are not currently used in clinical practice, undermining the translation of these research findings into clinical practice. Moreover, the treatment effect in the trials is usually expressed through the average change from baseline in test scores, without discussing the clinical importance of the usually small effect size observed.

-Laura