To foster a dialogue between scientists, doctors, industry and society in order to find Cure for Metabolic and DevelopMental Disorders. Collaboration in the field of Metabolic and Mental disease research is welcomed from centers all over the world. Since established, EMMA has promoted the following activities: • Promoting research, to understand Metabolic causes of Mental diseases (follow red track). • Encouraging research into new, more and more powerful, diagnostic tools (follow violet track). • Establishing novel pharmacological & natural compounds as treatment paradigms (follow green track). • Motivating optimal follow-up care to people suffering from Metabolic and Mental Diseases (blue track). • Offering dissemination of science (to grown people) and scientific background information (to new generations).
In addition, EMMA will participate in the development of novel products for behavior research (an entirely non-profit activity) and will release news on recent discoveries, in all fields relevant to ADHD, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, Tourette Syndrome, in order to keep you up-dated on the appropriate Clinical Knowledge and Care.
SCIENCE AND POLITICS !!! Better knowledge on neural bases of human behavior may help to understand how "human aims" are generated, to contribute evaluating a "moral judgment" of acts and choices, and to formulate fundamental principles of "rights and duties" for social life.
New goals to EMMA - Sept. 13, 2012 Safer drugs for kids Many of the medicines children take have never been proven safe and effective for them. Parents assume that, when a pediatrician prescribes a drug for their child, that drug has been tested and proven safe and effective. If only it were so. Only half of the medicines doctors prescribe to patients 18 and younger have been through the same rigorous trials as those drugs prescribed to adults. The other half are given off-label—that is, in circumstances for which they were never properly vetted, putting children at risk for overdoses, side effects and long-term health problems. For newborns, that fraction rises to 90 percent. In July the U.S. Congress gave the Food and Drug Administration new authority to compel companies to test their products for kids. The law should improve the situation, but it has worrying gaps. As biologists have come to appreciate, drug metabolism is one of the many ways in which kids are not just small adults. When doctors downsize an adult dosage to suit a child's weight or body surface area, a drug can prove ineffective or harmful. Infants have immature livers and kidneys, so even a seemingly small dose of medicine can build up quickly in their bodies. As children mature, their organs can develop faster than their body size, so they need to take disproportionately more of the drug. ... The reason that drug companies neglect their youngest customers is simple. Children make up a small fraction of the world's drug recipients, so developing and testing new medicines for them is rarely worthwhile from a business perspective. Pediatric trials are especially expensive and complex, in part because of the difficulty of finding enough patients to enroll in them.
Campaigns supported by EMMA: Support freedom of research !!! - You might be informed already, having read an article recently published by Nature (Vol 460|2 July 2009), that three Italian scientists are appealing against the Italian government's decision to arbitrarily exclude human embryonic stem cells from an 8-million euro fund for stem-cell biology. As you may know, research on human embryonic stem cells is not prohibited in Italy, provided that hESCs lines are derived abroad and no embryo is destroyed in the country. Therefore excluding hESCs from that fund is not enforceable and openly against Italian Constitution. Please, read more and support this campaign. 28 July 2009 - The lawsuit of 3 Italian researchers against the Italian Minister of Health’s decision to illegally exclude research on human embryonic stem cells from an 8-million fund has been recently rejected by the Regional Administrative Court of Latium (read the full chronology of the action). The motivations of the writ are maybe worse than the Government’s act itself, since they do not recognize the right of individual researchers to sue against Governmental decisions that arbitrarily penalize fully legal researches. According to the writ, only the institutional recipients of the call may sue, though individual researchers themselves undergo unjustified and illegitimate discriminations against their research projects. Nonetheless, the researchers decided to challenge the prohibitions. Please, read more and support this campaign.
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