Edmund's Newsletter December 30, 2008 Issue: #52 Volume 8 Happy New Years Join Our List In This Issue Common Treatment for Chronic Prostatitis Fails to Reduce Symptoms Reducing the Damage of a Heart Attack -- Mechanism Behind Cardiac Scarring Discovered Vitamin D Deficiency Associated With Greater Rates Of Cesarean Sections Older Adults At High Risk For Drug Interactions Estrogen Pills Can Benefit Women With Metastatic Breast Cancer Einstein Researchers Find Convincing Evidence That Probiotics are Effective Chocolate, Wine and Tea Improve Brain Performance Believe It Or Not News From MedWatch Recently Approved Drugs/Indications FDA Recalls and Safety Alerts in the Past 60 Days Drug Shortages Quick Links Edmund's Blog Edmund's Newsletter Edmund's Web Page Past Issues SPECIAL THANKS TO Michael R. Cohen President The Institute for Safe Medication Practices and Dr. Stephen Barrett Quackwatch Some links in Edmund's Newsletter will point to a page that requires registration.  In all cases the most you will have to do is fill out a simple form to enroll as a member.  In no case will I point you to a site that requires payment to view the page. PRAY FOR PEACE © 2001,2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 Join Our List Common Treatment for Chronic Prostatitis Fails to Reduce Symptoms Alfuzosin, a drug commonly prescribed for men with chronic prostatitis, a painful disorder of the prostate and surrounding pelvic area, failed to significantly reduce symptoms in recently diagnosed men who had not been previously treated with this drug, according to a clinical trial sponsored by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The study is to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine. "Although these results are disappointing, it is just as important to find out what doesn't work as it is to know what does," said NIDDK Director Griffin P. Rodgers, M.D. "We have conclusively shown that a drug commonly prescribed for men with chronic prostatitis did not significantly reduce symptoms compared to a placebo." Chronic prostatitis, which has no known cause and no uniformly effective therapy, is the most common type of prostatitis seen by physicians. Men with this condition experience pain in the genital and urinary tract areas, lower urinary tract symptoms such as pain in the bladder area and during urination, and sexual problems that can severely affect their quality of life. Population-based surveys estimate that 6 percent to 12 percent of men have prostatitis-like symptoms. Read more..... Reducing the Damage of a Heart Attack -- Mechanism Behind Cardiac Scarring Discovere In the aftermath of a heart attack, the body's own defenses may contribute to future heart failure. Authors of a new study believe they have identified a protein that plays an important role in a process that replaces dead heart muscle with stiffening scar tissue. The researchers are hopeful that the findings will lead to the development of new therapies to prevent this damage. "The body tries to fix the injury to the heart muscle by depositing the fibers, but this causes a greater problem," says Dr. Thomas Sato, co-senior author of the study and the Joseph C. Hinsey Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. "This process, called fibrosis, causes the heart to become like steel, unable to contract and pump blood throughout the body. The result can be fatal." Myocardial infarction causes 13 percent of deaths worldwide and is the leading cause of death in industrialized countries. The researchers' promising findings were published online, Dec. 14, in Nature Cell Biology and will be featured in the upcoming January issue. Due to the findings' significance, the journal has selected the study as an issue highlight. Read more..... Vitamin D Deficiency Associated With Greater Rates Of Cesarean Sections Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Boston Medical Center (BMC) found that pregnant women who are vitamin D deficient are also at an increased risk for delivering a baby by caesarean section as compared to pregnant women who are not vitamin D deficient. These findings currently appear on-line in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. At the turn of the 20th century, women commonly died in childbirth due to "rachitic pelvis" rickets of the pelvis. While rickets virtually disappeared with the discovery of vitamin D, recent reports suggest that vitamin D deficiency is widespread in industrialized nations. Over a two-year period, the researchers analyzed the relationship between maternal serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH)D] and the prevalence of primary caesarean section. In total, 253 women were enrolled in this study, of whom 43 (17 percent) had a caesarean section. The researchers found that 28 percent of women with serum 25(OH)D less than 37.5 nmol/L had a caesarean section, compared to only 14 percent of women with 25(OH)D greater than 37.5 nmol/L. "In our analysis, pregnant women who were vitamin D deficient at the time of delivery had almost four times the odds of caesarean birth than women who were not deficient," said senior author Michael Holick, MD, PhD, director of the General Clinical Research Center and professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics at BUSM and Anne Merewood assistant professor of pediatrics at BUSM and lead author of the study. Read more..... Older Adults At High Risk For Drug Interactions At least one in 25 older adults, about 2.2 million people in the United States, take multiple drugs in combinations that can produce a harmful drug-drug interaction, and half of these interactions involve a non-prescription medication, researchers from the University of Chicago Medical Center report in the Dec. 24/31, 2008, issue of JAMA. Although the number of people taking medications has remained stable for the last decade, the number of drugs taken by older people has significantly increased. This may be because of more intense therapy for chronic illness, improved access to medications due to Medicare Part D, and the growth of the generic drug market. More than half of older adults now take five or more medications or supplements. "Older adults are the largest consumer of prescription drugs," said study author Stacy Tessler Lindau, MD, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology and of medicine at the University of Chicago Medical Center. "We find that they commonly combine these prescription medications with over-the-counter medications and dietary supplements, which can increase their vulnerability to medication side-effects and drug-drug interactions." Read more..... Estrogen Pills Can Benefit Women With Metastatic Breast Cancer For breast cancer survivors, the idea of taking estrogen pills is almost a taboo. In fact, their doctors give them drugs to get rid of the hormone because it can fuel the growth of breast cancer. So these women would probably be surprised by the approach taken by breast cancer physician Matthew Ellis, M.B., Ph.D., associate professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis - he has demonstrated that estrogen therapy can help control metastatic breast cancer.   A new study at the School of Medicine has shown that estrogen therapy can shrink tumors in some women with metastatic breast cancer. Estrogen works against metastatic tumors that have become resistant to estrogen-lowering drugs, which are widely used for treating advanced breast cancer. In a study presented at the 31st annual San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium, he showed that for about a third of the 66 participants - women with metastatic breast cancer that had developed resistance to standard estrogen-lowering therapy - a daily dose of estrogen could stop the growth of their tumors or even cause them to shrink. The study was funded by the Avon Foundation through the National Cancer Institute and included six cancer centers in the United States. Ellis believes that estrogen therapy offers an appealing alternative to chemotherapy for metastatic breast cancer that has become resistant to estrogen-lowering agents called aromatase inhibitors, such as exemestane, anastrazole and letrozole. These drugs deplete the body of estrogen and are standard treatments for hormone-receptor positive breast cancers, which account for about 75 percent of breast cancer cases. Read more..... Einstein Researchers Find Convincing Evidence That Probiotics are Effective Up to one in five people on antibiotics stop taking their full course of antibiotic therapy due to diarrhea. Physicians could help patients avoid this problem by prescribing probiotics, according to a study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University published in American Family Physician. Antibiotics target "bad" bacteria but may also kill the "good" bacteria in the large intestine, leading to diarrhea. Diarrhea can also result from bacterial and viral infections. Probiotics-cultures of "good" microorganisms similar to those normally found in the gut - have been promoted as restoring the microbial balance disrupted by antibiotics and infections. Probiotic bacterial strains are added to certain yogurts and brands of miso and other fermented foods, and are also available as powders and pills sold in health food stores. The Einstein scientists reviewed the medical literature and found seven, high-quality studies in which probiotics were administered to people. The researchers concluded that the studies support the use of probiotics for avoiding diarrhea resulting from antibiotic use or from gastrointestinal viral or bacterial infections. In addition, the probiotics used in these studies were found to rarely cause adverse effects, even in children. "With the level of evidence that probiotics work and the large safety margins for them, we see no good reason not to prescribe probiotics when prescribing antibiotics," says Dr. Benjamin Kligler, a co-author of the study and associate professor of clinical family and social medicine at Einstein. "The only drawback is that probiotics are not covered by health insurance." On average, a one-month supply of probiotics costs between $8 and $22. Read more..... Chocolate, Wine and Tea Improve Brain Performance Wine, chocolate and tea can enhance cognitive performance, Oxford researchers foundAll that chocolate might actually help finish the bumper Christmas crossword over the seasonal period. According to Oxford researchers working with colleagues in Norway, chocolate, wine and tea enhance cognitive performance. The team from Oxford's Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics and Norway examined the relation between cognitive performance and the intake of three common foodstuffs that contain flavonoids (chocolate, wine, and tea) in 2,031 older people (aged between 70 and 74). Participants filled in information about their habitual food intake and underwent a battery of cognitive tests.Those who consumed chocolate, wine, or tea had significantly better mean test scores and lower prevalence of poor cognitive performance than those who did not. The team reported their findings in the Journal of Nutrition. Read more..... Believe it or not Mexican beauty queen dethroned after drug arrest A Mexican beauty queen arrested in the company of heavily armed, suspected drug traffickers has been stripped of her Hispanic American beauty title, pageant organizers in Bolivia told local media on Saturday. Laura Zuniga, 23, and seven men were detained at a military checkpoint in central Mexico on Monday. Police found assault rifles and $55,000 in cash in the luxury vehicles they had been driving. Zuniga was ordered jailed on Friday for a further 40 days while investigators probe possible ties to violent smuggling gangs. Police say they suspect the dark-haired model, who won the Miss Sinaloa and Queen of Hispanic America pageants earlier this year, was the girlfriend of one of the men arrested. Investigators say he is linked to the Juarez cartel, which operates lucrative smuggling routes into the United States. "Promociones Gloria, the company that created and is responsible for (the pageant) has dismissed Laura Zuniga as the official Hispanic America Queen 2008," the organisation said in a statement, according to La Paz daily La Razon. She was to compete in the Miss International pageant next year. Mexican President Felipe Calderon is battling powerful cartels in his country with soldiers and federal police. 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