IN THIS ISSUE:

• Want A Better Memory? Stop And Smell The Roses
   
• Vitamin D Deficiency Widespread During Pregnancy
   
• Vitamin May Help Alcohol-Damaged Babies
   
• Circumcision’s Anti-AIDS Effect Found Greater Than First Thought
   
• Drug May Help Alcoholics Cut Down
   
• Banned Additives In Cildren’s Medicines
   
• Diabetes, Depression Together Increase Risk for Heart Patients

• Believe It Or Not

• News From MedWatch

• Research Update

• Recently Approved Drugs/Indications

• FDA Recalls and Safety Alerts in the Past 60 Days

• Drug Shortages

• Recommend Edmund's Newsletter

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Want A Better Memory? Stop And Smell The Roses

People who want to learn things might do better by simply stopping to smell the roses, researchers reported on Thursday.
German researchers found they could use odours to re-activate new memories in the brains of people while they slept -- and the volunteers remembered better later.
Writing in the journal Science, they said their study showed that memories are indeed consolidated during sleep, and show that smells and perhaps other stimuli can reinforce brain learning pathways.
Jan Born of the University of Lubeck in Germany and colleagues had 74 volunteers learn to play games similar to the game of "Concentration" in which they must find matched pairs of objects or cards by turning only one over at a time.

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Vitamin D Deficiency Widespread During Pregnancy

Even regular use of prenatal multivitamin supplements is not adequate to prevent vitamin D insufficiency, University of Pittsburgh researchers report in the current issue of the Journal of Nutrition, the publication of the American Society for Nutrition. A condition linked to rickets and other musculoskeletal and health complications, vitamin D insufficiency was found to be widespread among women during pregnancy, particularly in the northern latitudes.
"In our study, more than 80 percent of African-American women and nearly half of white women tested at delivery had levels of vitamin D that were too low, even though more than 90 percent of them used prenatal vitamins during pregnancy," said Lisa Bodnar, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.D., assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) and lead author of the study. "The numbers also were striking for their newborns -- 92.4 percent of African-American babies and 66.1 percent of white infants were found to have insufficient vitamin D at birth."
A vitamin closely associated with bone health, vitamin D deficiency early in life is associated with rickets -- a disorder characterized by soft bones and thought to have been eradicated in the United States more than 50 years ago -- as well as increased risk for type 1 diabetes, asthma and schizophrenia.
"A newborn's vitamin D stores are completely reliant on vitamin D from the mother," observed Dr. Bodnar, who also is an assistant investigator at the university-affiliated Magee-Womens Research Institute (MWRI). "Not surprisingly, poor maternal vitamin D status during pregnancy is a major risk factor for infant rickets, which again is becoming a major health problem."

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Vitamin May Help Alcohol-Damaged Babies

Giving a vitamin called choline to babies whose mothers drank too much alcohol while pregnant might help overcome some of their resulting deficits, U.S researchers said on Thursday.
Choline, found in peanut butter, iceberg lettuce and soy, among other foods, affects brain development and may help repair some of the damage done by alcohol, the team at San Diego State University found.
"These findings have important implications for children exposed to alcohol prenatally and suggest that dietary interventions implemented after birth may reduce the severity of some fetal alcohol effects," the researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience.

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Circumcision’s Anti-AIDS Effect Found Greater Than First Thought

Circumcision may provide even more protection against AIDS than was realized when two clinical trials in Africa were stopped two months ago because the results were so clear, according to studies being published today.
The trials, in Kenya and Uganda, were stopped early by the National Institutes of Health, which was paying for them, because it was apparent that circumcision reduced a man’s risk of contracting AIDS from heterosexual sex by about half. It would have been unethical to continue without offering circumcision to all 8,000 men in the trials, federal health officials said.
That decision, announced on Dec. 13, made headlines around the world and led the two largest funds for fighting AIDS to say they would consider paying for circumcisions in high-risk countries. But the final data from the trials, to be published today in the British medical journal The Lancet, suggest that circumcision reduces a man’s risk by as much as 65 percent.
The December announcement described only the follow-up on the men as originally divided into two groups: those who agreed to be circumcised and those who agreed not to. But some in the first group never went to the circumcision clinic, and some in the second had private circumcisions before the study ended.

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Drug May Help Alcoholics Cut Down

Scientists have devised a treatment which could stop alcoholics drinking too much.
The Scripps Research Institute and the Eli Lilly drug company study also found the chemical could prevent relapses and reduce the effects of hangovers.
The animal study in the Journal of Neuroscience used a synthetic compound to block a chemical response in the brain which triggers relapse.
Alcohol related deaths have doubled in the UK since 1991.

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Banned Additives In Cildren’s Medicines

Young children and babies are routinely being given medicines containing artificial dyes, sweeteners and preservatives that are banned from food and drink for the under 3s.
Research carried out by the Food Commission has found that just one of 41 medications intended for children was free of additives, while many contained a cocktail of colourings, sweeteners and preservatives that can trigger allergic reactions such as rashes, eye irritation, stomach upsets and diarrhoea.
Many brands examined in the study by the commission, which campaigns for food safety, are commonly found in family medicine cupboards.
The researchers said that, while some additives were needed to help children to take unpalatable medicines, the quantity of substances banned for use in food and drink for the under 3s raised concerns. They called for warnings on all medications that could trigger allergic reactions.

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Diabetes, Depression Together Increase Risk for Heart Patients

Having both depression and type 2 diabetes increases the risk of death for heart patients. Each factor had been known to increase the risk of heart disease deaths by itself, but together they're even more deadly.
In an analysis of more than 900 patients with established coronary artery disease, Duke University Medical Center psychologists found that those with both type 2 diabetes and symptoms of depression were more likely to die than heart patients without those conditions.
The study showed that among type 2 diabetes patients, having high depression scores increased the risk of dying by 20 to 30 percent compared to patients with similar depression scores but no type 2 diabetes.
"We found a trend showing that the probability of death increases as the level of depression increases in diabetic patients with coronary artery disease," said Duke researcher Anastasia Georgiades, Ph.D. She presented the results of the Duke analysis on Friday, March 9, 2007, at the annual meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society, in Budapest, Hungary. "Our data appear to show an important interaction between type 2 diabetes and depression, meaning that physicians should closely monitor their heart patients who have both of these disorders.
"There is some sort of synergistic effect between type 2 diabetes and depression that we don't fully understand," Georgiades said. "In our analysis, we controlled for factors that could influence mortality, such as heart disease severity and age. For whatever reasons, these patients were still at higher risk of dying, and future research will aim to investigate the mechanisms for this association."
The research was supported by the National Heart, Lung, Blood Institute.

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Believe It Or Not

Woman awakens after 6 years, slips back

A woman who went into a vegetative state more than six years ago awoke this week for three days and spoke with her family and a local television station before slipping back.
"I'm fine," Christa Lilly told her mother on Sunday — her first words in eight months. She has awakened four other times for briefer periods since suffering a heart attack and stroke in November of 2000.
"I think it's wonderful. It makes me so happy," Lilly told television station KKTV-TV. She also got to see youngest daughter, Chelcey, now 12 years old, and three grandchildren.
Before her relapse on Wednesday, Lilly told the station her biggest frustration was learning how to talk again.
After years of being fed from a tube, eating was no problem. "I've been eating cake," she said.
Her neurologist, Dr. Randall Bjork, said he couldn't explain how or why she awoke.
"I'm just not able to explain this on the basis of what we know about persistent vegetative states," he said.
A vegetative state is much like a coma except Lilly's eyes remain open. Bjork said that he's never seen a similar quality of awakening.
Bjork said that unlike the much publicized case of Terri Schiavo, Lilly is minimally conscious. He said she could awake again.
After Lilly relapsed her mother and caregiver Minnie Smith said: "The good Lord let me know she's alright, he brings her back to visit every so often and I'm thankful for that."

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News From MedWatch

Keep up-to-date on all of the recent MedWatch reports that gives you timely safety information on the drugs and other medical products regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration by CLICK HERE

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Recently Approved Drugs/Indications

Keep up-to-date on all of the recently approved drugs and/or approved new indications on already FDA approved drugs CLICK HERE

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FDA Recalls and Safety Alerts in the Past 60 Days:

To see a list of all FDA Recalls and product safety alerts for the last 60 days CLICK HERE

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Drug Shortages:

As many of you are aware, many drugs in the US are either unavailable or in short supply. To view a list of these drugs CLICK HERE

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Edmund M. Hayes, R.Ph., M.S., Pharm.D.
Departments of Pharmacy and Medicine
Stony Brook University Hospital
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, New York, 11794
631 444-2668

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