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Shildt Financial Services hopes that you find the following news items to be helpful and informative.
IN REVIEW: Health News Back To September, 2008
Health Highlights (Sept. 11, 2009 to Sept. 18, 2009) Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by editors of HealthDay: Antihistamine and Anti-Nausea Drug Promethazine Must Carry Warning About Possible Tissue Damage: FDA The antihistamine and anti-nausea drug promethazine must carry a warning that it can cause tissue injuries, including gangrene, if it's administered incorrectly, says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The agency said Tuesday that the drug's label must carry a warning that it should not be administered into an artery or under the skin. The drug should be injected deep into muscle, the Associated Press reported. A requested label revision would caution doctors who choose to administer promethazine intravenously to limit the concentration and rate of administration of the drug. Manufacturers must submit the safety label changes to the FDA within 30 days or make a case for why they feel changes aren't needed, the AP reported. ----- 35 Percent Of Iraq War Vets Will Seek Treatment for PTSD As many as 35 percent of U.S. military personnel who serve in Iraq will seek treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the Veterans Affairs Department needs to boost its mental health resources to deal with the demand, say Stanford University researchers. They said the tempo of deployment cycles to Iraq is higher than for any war since World War II, United Press International reported. The researchers combined a mathematical operations research model with deployment and PTSD data from the Iraq War and came up with the 35 percent estimate. The study appears in the journal Management Science. There are already long waits for people seeking PTSD treatment in the VA system, which must increase its ability to deal with the expected high demand, the researchers said, UPI reported. ----- Pneumonia Replaces Coronary Artery Disease As Top Cause of Hospitalization in U.S. In 2007 From 1997 and 2007, the number of Americans admitted to hospital for treatment of coronary artery disease decreased by 31 percent, which means it's no longer the No. 1 disease treated in hospitals. Pneumonia was the most common disease treated in U.S. hospitals in 2007. A analysis of national data also showed that hospitalizations for heart attack decreased 15 percent (732,000 to 625,000) from 1997 to 2007, according to the latest News and Numbers from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. That means that heart attacks have moved from No. 4 to No. 10. Among the other findings:
----- Broken Heart Increases Heart Attack Risk A broken heart can be a serious health threat, say Australian researchers who found that people mourning the loss of a loved one have a six times greater risk of suffering a heart attack. The study of 160 people found that those who'd recently experienced the death of a partner or child were at significantly higher risk of heart problems than those who weren't in mourning, Agence France Presse reported. "We found higher blood pressure, increased heart rate and changes to the immune system and clotting that would increase the risk of heart attack," said lead researcher Thomas Buckley. The increased risk, believed to be caused by a sudden increase in stress hormones, was reduced after six months and was gone after two years, AFP reported. ----- Swine Flu Shots May Come Earlier; New Flu Drug Shows Promise Americans worried about the advance of H1N1 swine flu this fall got two doses of welcome news this past weekend: A potentially faster-than-expected roll-out for a vaccine, and good trial results on a new intravenous drug to fight influenza, the Associated Press reported. Speaking on ABC's This Week on Sunday, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the first batches of an H1N1 vaccine could be available by the first week of October -- earlier than the mid-October delivery the federal government announced back in August. "We're on track to have an ample supply rolling out by the middle of October. But we may have some early vaccine as early as the first full week in October," Sebelius said. "We'll get it to states as fast as it comes off the production lines," she added. Supply of the vaccine should get an added boost from studies released last week that suggest that only one dose might be needed to confer protection against H1N1. In related news, a trial in China of peramivir, an antiviral drug delivered intravenously, has found that the drug eased seasonal (regular) flu within less than five days, similar to the efficacy of the oral anti-flu drug Tamiflu, the AP reported. The finding is important because very ill, hospitalized flu patients often cannot take medicines in pill form. "You can get it into the blood, into the lungs, where infection is occurring," Dr. Nancy Cox, chief of influenza at the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention, told the AP. The drug is being developed by BioCryst Pharmaceuticals, Inc., of Birmingham, Ala., along with the Japanese drug company Shinogi & Co. ----- Drug-Resistant Bacteria Found at 5 Washington Beaches Drug-resistant bacteria were detected in sand and water at five public beaches along Washington coast and the state's beaches may not be the only ones with this type of contamination, according to scientists. Previously, the dangerous methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was rarely seen outside of hospitals but is increasingly being found in community locations such as gyms, schools and locker rooms, the Associated Press reported. This new finding suggests that beaches may be another location where people pick up MRSA, which can cause serious skin infections as well as pneumonia and other life-threatening problems. "We don't know about the risk" for a people at the beach, Marilyn Roberts, a microbiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, told the AP. "But the fact that we found these organisms (at the beaches) suggests that the level is much higher than we had thought." For this study, Roberts and colleagues tested 10 coastal beaches in Washington and found staph bacteria at nine of them, including five with MRSA. The findings were presented on the weekend at an American Society for Microbiology conference. ----- Battery Warning Issued on Implanted Defibrillators The batteries in about 6,300 Medtronic implanted defibrillators may fail before their scheduled depletion time, but not without warning users well in advance, the company said on Friday. Medtronic spokesman Chris Garland told Dow Jones that the defect affects "Concerto" cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators, as well as "Virtuoso" defibrillators. Medtronic already guarantees users a 90-day advance warning from such devices, letting patients know that the battery is running down. And although the battery in the devices in question may have a shorter life than was expected, patients will still receive this advance warning, and they should not change their regular check-up/device monitoring schedule. "There's no safety concern at all, there's been no reports of injury," said Garland, who noted that Medtronic had sent doctors notification of the matter earlier this week. ----- Ghostwriting Rampant in Medical Journals Leading medical journals contained a significant number of articles in 2008 that were written by "ghost" reporters paid by pharmaceutical companies, a new study finds. The findings, published Thursday by editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association and reported by The New York Times, cite a ghostwriting rate of 10.9 percent in the New England Journal of Medicine, the highest reported; 7.9 percent in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 7.6 percent in The Lancet, 7.6 percent in PLoS Medicine, 4.9 percent in The Annals of Internal Medicine and 2 percent in Nature Medicine. Responding anonymously to an online questionnaire created for the study, 7.8 percent of authors of 630 articles admitted other people had made contributions to their papers that qualified them to be named as authors but who were not listed. Bias on the part of industry-funded writers has the potential to influence doctors' treatment decisions and patient care, the researchers noted. "These journals are the top of the medical field," Joseph S. Wislar, lead author of the study, told the Times. All contributors should at least be listed in acknowledgments if they are not named as authors, he said. Ginny Barbour, chief editor of PLoS Medicine, the journal of the Public Library of Science, told the Times she was disturbed by the report. "We are a journal that has very tough policies, very explicit policies on ghostwriting and contributorship, and I feel that we've basically been lied to by authors," she said. |
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