Drug Induced Panic Attack

NY Times

Researchers at the University of Munich repeated the experiment 70 times: a healthy volunteer would receive a chemical injection, then be left alone to ride out an artificially induced panic attack.

From the next room, doctors watched the volunteer's restlessness via video camera, measured the quickening pulse and rise in blood pressure, and used an intercom to question the person about his or her feelings of impending doom. The attacks typically lasted 5 to 10 minutes.

Each volunteer was put through the same test a few days later, but this time most of them first received an experimental anti-anxiety drug. The drug quelled anxiety well enough in those experiments last year that its developer, the Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, gained the confidence to conduct large clinical trials.

The company's approach is part of a trend in the pharmaceutical industry. Drug researchers are conducting small, fast, relatively inexpensive tests on people to get a quick gauge of a drug's promise before committing to full-scale clinical trials that may involve hundreds of patients, millions of dollars and many years of study. Often called experimental medicine, the approach is meant to reduce the huge costs of drug development and speed the most promising treatments into the marketplace.

In the past, many of the tests might have been done only on animals. That might seem to raise ethical concerns, but the people who regulate and monitor drug experiments say that no problems have risen so far. And scientists and industry executives, while acknowledging the potential for ethical issues, say that experiments on people are more reliable, because animal tests often fail to accurately predict whether a drug will work on people.

How can you sit there and watch some one have an attack that you caused? These are people who may be severely affected by these tests later in life. Then, where will the researchers be; on a island watching their Swiss bank account grow. I know that undergoing these tests are voluntary but, I want to know who these subjects are. Were they tempted to do this as a last resort, because they needed the money? If so, I feel that their temporary state puts them in no place to make such judgments that may affect their mental and physical health permanently.