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| New Study Casts Further Doubt on Risk of Death from Higher Salt Intake |
Contrary to long-held assumptions, high-salt diets may not increase the risk of death, according to investigators from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. They reached their conclusion after examining dietary intake among a nationally representative sample of adults in the U.S. The Einstein researchers actually observed a significantly increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease (CVD) associated with lower sodium diets. They report their findings in the advance online edition of the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
The researchers analyzed data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III), which was conducted by the federal government among a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. These data were then compared against death records that had been collected by the government through the year 2000. The sample of approximately 8,700 represented American adults who were over 30 years of age at the time of the baseline survey (1988-1994) and were not on a special low-salt diet.
After adjusting for known CVD risk factors, such as smoking, diabetes and blood pressure, the one-fourth of the sample who reported consuming the lowest amount of sodium were found to be 80% more likely to die from CVD compared to the one-fourth of the sample consuming the highest level of sodium. The risk for death from any cause appeared 24% greater for those consuming lower salt, but this latter difference was not quite large enough to dismiss the role of chance.
"Our findings suggest that for the general adult population, higher sodium is very unlikely to be independently associated with higher risk of death from CVD or all other causes of death," says Dr. Hillel W. Cohen, lead author of the study and associate professor of epidemiology and population health at Einstein.
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| Aprotinin Used In Heart Surgery Associated With Increased Risk Of Death |
Aprotinin is associated with a 50 per cent increase in the relative risk of death, according to a major Canadian clinical trial comparing three drugs routinely used to prevent blood loss during heart surgery. The trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows that approximately six per cent of patients who received aprotinin died within 30 days of surgery compared to four per cent of patients who received tranexamic acid or aminocaproic acid.
BART (Blood Conservation using Antifibrinolytics in a Randomized Trial) is one of the largest heart surgery trials ever conducted, involving more than 2,000 high-risk cardiac surgery patients and more than 100 cardiac surgeons, anesthesiologists, pharmacists and coordinators from 19 Canadian centres. This publicly-funded collaborative trial was led by Senior Scientists at the Ottawa Health Research Institute, the research arm of The Ottawa Hospital and an affiliated institute of the University of Ottawa.
"These three drugs have been routinely used in heart surgery for more than a decade, but this is the first trial to rigorously compare them in a meaningful setting with meaningful clinical outcomes," said Dr. Dean A. Fergusson, BART Co-Principal Investigator and Senior Scientist. "The results demonstrate the great value of and the need for independent academic clinical trials."
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Bone Drug Could Help Prevent the Spread of Breast Cancer
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Maintaining bone density could be a key to decreasing the spread of cancer in women with locally advanced breast cancer, according to research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Bones are common sites for the spread, or metastasis, of breast cancer. Scientists here found that women treated for stage II/III breast cancer who also received a bone strengthening drug were less likely to have breast tumor cells growing in their bones after three months. The bone-strengthening drug used was zoledronic acid, a drug that decreases bone turnover and reduces bone fractures in patients with osteoporosis.
The findings will be reported June 3 at 11 a.m. CT at the 2008 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting in Chicago.
"Tumor cells are continually being released from the primary tumor," says lead author Rebecca Aft, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of surgery, faculty member of the Siteman Cancer Center and a Washington University breast surgeon at Barnes Jewish Hospital. "It is thought that the bone marrow harbors these cells and that these cells are likely to evolve into metastatic disease. We think that zoledronic acid changes the bone marrow so that cancer cells are unable to lodge there."
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Pain Free without Numbness - Substance Combination with Chili Peppers
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A dentist's injection typically causes numbness for several hours. This experience could soon be history. Now, Clifford Woolf, professor at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, USA, and his colleagues have developed a combination of two agents which is able to specifically block pain without producing numbness or motor paralysis. The substance is composed of a normally inactive derivative of the local anesthetic lidocaine, called QX314, and capsaicin, the pain-producing substance in chili peppers. Capsaicin works by opening channels present only in pain fibers to allow the QX314 only into these cells, where it blocks their function, Woolf explained in the keynote lecture "Using Pain to Block Pain" at the international conference "Development and function of somatosensation and pain" of the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) Berlin-Buch, Germany. "This is the first example of using the body's own cellular channels as a drug delivery system, targeting treatment only at pain fibers," he pointed out.
Local anaesthetics are pain killers which are used during operations whereby patients remain alert during the procedure and thus, do not require general anaesthesia. "These common analgesics, including lidocaine, affect, however all neurons in the treated area," Woolf said. As a result, not only are pain receptors blocked but also touch receptors, producing numbness. Neurons, controlling muscles, are silenced as well, producing a temporary paralysis.
In order to specifically block pain receptors and leave touch sensors and motor function unharmed, the scientists used a normally inactive positively charged form of the local anaesthetic lidocaine called QX314. This particular type of lidocaine is special in that it is not able to pass through the cell membrane of neurons because it is charged. Since local anesthetics only operate inside neurons, an injection of QX314 alone is ineffective, unlike lidocaine which passes easily through the membrane of all cells and therefore blocks all neurons.
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Joslin Researchers Discover New Effect for Insulin - Plays Previously Unknown Role in Aging and Lifespan
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Researchers at the Joslin Diabetes Center have shown that insulin has a previously unknown effect that plays a role in aging and lifespan, a finding that could ultimately provide a mechanism for gene manipulations that could help people live longer and healthier lives.
The paper, published in the March 21st issue of Cell, reports that insulin inhibits a master gene regulator protein known as SKN-1, and that increased SKN-1 activity increases lifespan. SKN-1 controls what is called the Phase 2 detoxification pathway, a network of genes that defends cells and tissue against oxidative stress - damage caused by elevated levels of free radicals (byproducts of metabolism) - and various environmental toxins. The new finding was demonstrated in experiments on the digestive system of C. elegans, a microscopic worm often used as a model organism.
"We've found something new that insulin does and it has to be considered when we think about how insulin is affecting our cells and bodies," said Dr. T. Keith Blackwell, senior investigator at Joslin and author of the paper. "This has implications for basic biology since under some circumstances insulin may reduce defense against the damaging effects of oxidative stress more than we realize."
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| Some Early Stage Colon Cancer Patients Should Not Receive Chemotherapy |
Mayo Clinic researchers and collaborators say they have conclusively demonstrated that a substantial subset of colon cancer patients should not receive chemotherapy because it provides no clinical benefit, and actually may reduce survival time.
Research findings indicate that oncologists should use an existing test to check tumor subtype in certain patients before offering treatment. Patients who would benefit most from this test include those with locally advanced disease that has not spread to their lymph nodes, known as stage II disease.
The study, released May 15 as part of the 44th annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, found that the 15 percent of patients with tumors defined as "deficient DNA mismatch repair" (dMMR) do not respond to 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) chemotherapy, which is widely used to treat colon cancer.
The researchers and collaborators published a study in 2003 in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12867608) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12867608) that suggested patients with dMMR tumors should not be treated with chemotherapy. Because the finding was so novel, confirmation of the results was required before they could be incorporated into clinical practice. This new work offers that confirmation.
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Drug Therapy for PKU Reverses Heart Damage
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A pricy drug used to treat a rare but well-known genetic disorder may hold wider promise as a treatment for millions of Americans with potentially lethal enlarged hearts, due mainly to high blood pressure, a study from Johns Hopkins shows.
The common denominator in both phenylketonuria (PKU) and cardiac hypertrophy is the chemical tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4). In PKU, this enzyme coworker helps break down the molecule phenylalanine whose buildup is toxic to the brain. In the heart, BH4 helps build the chemical nitric oxide, which is needed for normal heart function and neutralizing toxic chemicals, called oxygen free radicals.
Doctors have traditionally used diets excluding phenylalanine to treat PKU, a so-called inborn error of metabolism that can lead to irreversible brain damage, but more recently, they have also begun to treat the disease with BH4. It affects an estimated 15,000 newborns in the United States each year.
Building on what has been known about BH4's activities, the Hopkins team, working with mice, found that treatment with BH4 stabilizes the pumping function of failing, enlarged hearts and dramatically shrinks the muscle size in a relatively short timeframe of just over a month. The team's findings appear in the May 20 edition of the journal Circulation.
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Believe it or not
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Australian fined for buckling in beer, not child
An Australian man has been fined after buckling in a case of beer with a seat belt but leaving a 5-year-old child to sit on the car's floor, police said Tuesday.
Constable Wayne Burnett said he was "shocked and appalled" when he pulled over the unregistered car Friday in the central Australian town of Alice Springs.
The 30-can beer case was strapped in between two adults sitting in the back seat of the car. The child was also in back, but on the car's floor.
"The child was sitting in the lump in the center, unrestrained," Burnett told reporters Tuesday.
"I haven't ever seen something like this before," he said. "This is the first time that the beer has taken priority over a child."
The driver was fined 750 Australian dollars - about $710 - for driving an unregistered and uninsured vehicle and for failing to ensure a child was wearing a safety belt.
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News From MedWatch |
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