Pasireotide, sold under the brand name Signifor, is an orphan drug approved in the United States and the European Union for the treatment of Cushings disease in patients who fail or are ineligible for surgical therapy. It was developed by Novartis. Pasireotide is a somatostatin analog with a 40-fold increased affinity to somatostatin receptor 5 compared to other somatostatin analogs. The most common side effects include hyperglycaemia (high blood sugar levels), diabetes, diarrhoea, abdominal pain (stomach ache), nausea (feeling sick), cholelithiasis (gallstones), injection site reactions, and tiredness.Pasireotide was approved for Cushings disease by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in April 2012  and by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in December 2012.Pasireotide LAR (the long-acting-release formulation) was approved by the FDA for treatment of acromegaly in December 2014, and had been approved for this indication by the EMA in September 2014. References
External links
"Pasireotide". Drug Information Portal. U.S. National Library of Medicine.
It originates in the substitution of one Nordic capital (Stockholm, Sweden) for another (Helsinki, Finland). It entered popular culture when used in the Bruce Willis film Die Hard, by a doctor appearing on a television show and describing the phenomenon. The bumbling host says this refers to "Helsinki, Sweden", and the doctor corrects him, saying "Finland". History
Stockholm bank robbery
In 1973, Jan-Erik Olsson, a convict on parole, took four employees (three women and one man) of Kreditbanken, one of the largest banks in Stockholm, Sweden, hostage during a failed bank robbery. He negotiated the release from prison of his friend Clark Olofsson to assist him. They held the hostages captive for six days (23–28 August) in one of the banks vaults. When the hostages were released, none of them would testify against either captor in court; instead, they began raising money for their defense.Nils Bejerot, a Swedish criminologist and psychiatrist coined the term after the Stockholm police asked him for assistance with analyzing the victims reactions to the 1973 bank robbery and their status as hostages. As the idea of brainwashing was not a new concept, Bejerot, speaking on "a news cast after the captives release" described the hostages reactions as a result of being brainwashed by their captors. He called it Norrmalmstorgssyndromet (after Norrmalmstorg Square where the attempted robbery took place), meaning "the Norrmalmstorg syndrome"; it later became known outside Sweden as Stockholm syndrome.