New drugs
revere | February 12, 2010We've written quite a bit about statins because there is evidence that these plentiful and cheap drugs may be useful in treating or preventing the innate immune system's catastrophic dysregulation sometimes called "cytokine storm" (see here, here, here, here, here for a few examples). A new study now suggests that daily statin use by people under 75 may also lead to a significant (40%) reduction in cataracts. This from a study in Epidemiology of 180,000 patients seen between 1998 and 2007 in Israel:
Dr. [Gabriel] Chodick and his colleague Dr. Varda Shalev found that men aged 45 to 54 who took…
revere | January 8, 2010Let me start with an apology. This post is again fairly long (for a blog post). Blog readers don't like long posts (at least I don't). But once I started writing about this I was unable to stop at some intermediary point, although I might have made it more concise and less conversational. I haven't done either. Even worse, I didn't quite finish with the single point I wanted to make, so it will be continued in the next post. Hence the apology. Now to recap a bit and then get down to business.
My "challenge" from 10 days ago has drawn quite a response: over 40 quite substantive comments on the…
revere | March 24, 2009When the Wall Street Journal called attention to a claim that the Journal of the American Medical Association called a whistle-blower a "nobody" and a "nothing," a claim JAMA denied, I didn't know what to think. I was inclined to give JAMA the benefit of the doubt. Whatever dealings I've had (and they are few) with JAMA's editor in chief, Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, she's been pleasant and has a reputation for being a tough and intelligent editor. It sounded as if someone had gotten a little irritated and maybe said things in a way that wasn't quite appropriate, but these things happen. But…
revere | March 20, 2009If the 1960s film, The Graduate, were to be made today (Graduate, II: The Stimulus), the iconic scene at the party where a friend of the family takes Dustin Hoffman aside and whispers in his ear, "I have only one word for you, Plastics") would be transmogrified into, "I have only three words for you, Health Information Technology." HIT, and its love child with the recently passed stimulus package, the Electronic Medical Record, have all the characteristics of a good idea destined to go bad. One of my vivid memories from my early career was being shown a new kind of quiet printer, called an…
revere | March 5, 2009The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that if the FDA approves a drug, it doesn't mean you don't have to keep the labeling up to date if you should warn people. So that settles one question about FDA approval. The FDA put its stamp of approval on the drug Vioxx, too, but approved or not, Vioxx was not OK. Some unfortunate people traded their arthritis pain for a heart attack. Not a good trade. So the maker of Vioxx got sued. When the regulatory agencies don't do their job, that's about the only remedy left. More important, it is the only way to change the behavior of companies whose negligence…
revere | March 4, 2009When I was in medical school it was common to get gifts from drug companies. Since many of us had very little money, the gifts were welcome. One company gave me a Littman stethoscope, at the time, the most advanced stethoscope around. The same model costs about $100 now. I was glad to get it, although I can't tell you the name of the company. I forgot the names as quickly as I pocketed their gifts. We all got lots of free samples, too, and they were often things like tranquilizers sent through the mail and left in the magazine bin in my apartment house common mailbox area. Yes, these folks…
revere | July 12, 2008We've had occasion to discuss the boondoggle, Project Bioshield a number of times (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here). Maybe I should have said, quite a number of times. REally, though, it's hardly worth mentioning. Via the Clinician's Biosecurity Briefing, this:
The Project BioShield Act, passed in 2004, gives HHS "authorities to expedite research, development, acquisition, and availability of priority medical countermeasures for public health emergencies caused by terrorist attacks." This Congressionally mandated report covers progress on the uses of those authorities for the…
revere | June 1, 2008Republicans are supposed to be the tight fisted fiscal conservatives and Democrats the ones who think that problems can be solved by throwing federal money at it. In reality it is just the opposite, a triumph for Republican image makers but a disaster for the rest of us who have lived through a decade of Republican Congressional and then Bush administration profligacy, with nothing to show for it but a widening gap between the favored plutocrats and everyone else. One sees it everywhere, most spectacularly in the Iraq debacle, which has enriched Bush - Cheny cronies while wreaking violence on…
revere | April 20, 2008The National Post recently had an interesting article on "disease mongering," an article I largely agreed with. The major point was that fostering a fear of "germs," promoting the idea that following medical advice, especially advice involving "taking your pills," and the very definition of who is diseased and who is not has a suspiciously commercial aspect.
Consider the marketing of hand sanitizers, a subject of interest to the flu obsessed:
The slogan of Purell -- a hand sanitizer manufactured by Pfizer -- is "Imagine a Touchable World." It's hard to miss the implication that the world in…
revere | March 17, 2008Sometimes when I surf the net looking for things to write about I run across things I don't ordinarily write about but attract my attention because they are especially pertinent to my own health. Here's an example. I recently herniated a disk, for which I took fairly hefty doses of anti-inflammatories. Mostly it was extra strength aspirin but often it was horse doses of ibuprofen. I am also of the age that it makes sense to take low dose aspirin for its anti-platelet effects. There is good data to suggest this is a preventative for heart attack and stroke. Now it turns out I may have been…
revere | December 24, 2007We've discussed the scandal over the use of Avastin and Lucentis for wet macular degeneration several times (here, here, here). If you've missed it, here's the gist. Avastin is a drug approved to treat colon cancer. It works by choking off blood vessels to the tumor. It turns out, however, that a tiny dose of the same drug, when injected into the eye can also stop the uncontrolled growth of blood vessels behind the retina that produces a leading cause of blindness in the elderly, macular degeneration. The good news is a compounding pharmacy can take the large dose in the Avastin package and…
revere | October 25, 2007Gold salts have been used for a long time to treat arthritis, although how it worked or more pertinently, if it worked, was unclear. Injecting gold salts for inflamed and swollen rheumatic joints took weeks to work and often had nasty side effects: rashes, mouth ulcers, impaired kidney function and sometimes bone marrow depression. My pharmacology professor in medical school taught us the only thing gold was good for as a drug was "itchy palm disease." Now the chief of rheumatology at Duke, DAvid Pisetsky, is telling us we shouldn't be so dismissive:
&"We scientists have really never…
revere | October 20, 2007The Erectile Dysfunction (ED) drugs already carry the required warnings we know from our misspent youth: Warning: you can go blind doing this. Okay, it says you may experience sudden loss of vision. Same thing. Now a new warning is being added: Warning: it might make you hard -- of hearing:
The impotence drugs Viagra, Cialis and Levitra will get prominent warnings on the risk of sudden hearing loss, U.S. regulators said.
[snip]
The FDA found 29 reports of sudden hearing loss in people who took the erectile dysfunction drugs since 1996. More than 40 million people worldwide have used the…
revere | November 14, 2006The title in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS, or "penis" in the trade) doesn't sound like much: Human Opiorphin, a natural antinociceptive modulator of opioid-dependent pathways (abstract). The first couple of sentences in the abstract are even less enticing:
Mammalian zinc ectopeptidases play important roles in turning off neural and hormonal peptide signals at the cell surface, notably those processing sensory information. We report here the discovery of a previously uncharacterized physiological inhibitor of enkephalin-inactivating zinc ectopeptidases in humans, which…