Tuesday, November 9, 2010
MPs and campaigners predict class action after failures to mount full-scale research into warnings left millions of patients at risk
Secret documents reveal that government-funded experts were warned nearly 30 years ago that tranquillisers that were later prescribed to millions of people could cause brain damage.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) agreed in 1982 that there should be large-scale studies to examine the long-term impact of benzodiazepines after research by a leading psychiatrist showed brain shrinkage in some patients similar to the effects of long-term alcohol abuse.
However, no such work was ever carried out into the effects of drugs such as Valium, Mogadon and Librium – and doctors went on prescribing them to patients for anxiety, stress, insomnia and muscle spasms...
[Full Article]Labels: brain damage, drugs, medicine
(Reuters) - Novartis AG plans to seek regulatory approval within 18 months for a pioneering tablet containing an embedded microchip, bringing the concept of "smart-pill" technology a step closer.
The initial program will use one of the Swiss firm's established drugs taken by transplant patients to avoid organ rejection. But Trevor Mundel, global head of development, believes the concept can be applied to many other pills.
"We are taking forward this transplant drug with a chip and we hope within the next 18 months to have something that we will be able to submit to the regulators, at least in Europe," Mundel told the Reuters Health Summit in New York.
"I see the promise as going much beyond that," he added.
Novartis agreed in January to spend $24 million to secure access to chip-in-a-pill technology developed by privately owned Proteus Biomedical of Redwood City, California, putting it ahead of rivals.
The biotech start-up's ingestible chips are activated by stomach acid and send information to a small patch worn on the patient's skin, which can transmit data to a smartphone or send it over the Internet to a doctor...
[Full Article]Labels: medications, medicine, privacy, smart pill
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Two studies published recently suggest there could be something wrong with the way ADHD is diagnosed in young children in the US, one found that nearly 1 million kids are potentially misdiagnosed just because they are the youngest in their kindergarten year, with the youngest in class twice as likely to be on stimulant medication, while the other study confirmed that whether children were born just before or just after the kindergarten cutoff date significantly affected their chances of being diagnosed with ADHD.
Papers on both studies by US researchers are in press, to be published in the Journal of Health Economics, the first being a corrected proof that was first available online in June, and the other appeared online on 4 August.
In the first paper, Dr Todd Elder, assistant professor of economics at Michigan State University, looked at a sample of nearly 12,000 children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Cohort, which is funded by the National Center for Education Statistics. He analysed the difference in ADHD diagnosis and medication rates between the youngest and the oldest children in a kindergarten grade.
He found that the youngest children were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and to be prescribed behavior-modifying stimulants such as Ritalin than their older classmates. He told the press that the "smoking gun" was that the diagnoses depended on the children's age relative to classmates and the teacher's perceptions of whether they had symptoms...
[Full Article]
Labels: ADHD, health care, medicine, misdiagnosis
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Imagine a world where a tiny sensor embedded inside a blood pressure pill tells your doctor exactly when you take the medication and what your vital signs are at the time.
High-tech health care gadgets that were the stuff of science fiction just a few years ago are right around the corner, according to many of the people attending the Wireless Health 2010 conference in La Jolla on Wednesday.
Dr. George Savage with Proteus Biomedical delivered an update at the gathering on his Redwood City company’s efforts to develop a so-called ingestible event marker.
The silicon and metal sensor turns on once it comes into contact with liquid in the stomach, transmitting a faint radio signal that says, “I’m here,” Savage said. The electronic message is picked up by a small receiver patch attached to the skin outside of the body, confirming the medication has been taken...
[Full Article]Labels: chip, cine, medicine, pills, sensors
Sunday, August 1, 2010
When Alain Reyes’s hair suddenly fell out in a freakish band circling his head, he was not the only one worried about his health. His co-workers at a shipping company avoided him, and his boss sent him home, fearing he had a contagious disease.
Only later would Mr. Reyes learn what had caused him so much physical and emotional grief: he had received a radiation overdose during a test for a stroke at a hospital in Glendale, Calif.
Other patients getting the procedure, called a CT brain perfusion scan, were being overdosed, too — 37 of them just up the freeway at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, 269 more at the renowned Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and dozens more at a hospital in Huntsville, Ala.
The overdoses, which began to emerge late last summer, set off an investigation by the Food and Drug Administration into why patients tested with this complex yet lightly regulated technology were bombarded with excessive radiation. After 10 months, the agency has yet to provide a final report on what it found.
But an examination by The New York Times has found that radiation overdoses were larger and more widespread than previously known, that patients have reported symptoms considerably more serious than losing their hair, and that experts say they may face long-term risks of cancer and brain damage...
[Full Article]Labels: breast cancer, CT brain perfusion scan, medical technology, medicine, radiation
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Doctors in the United States wrote more than four million prescriptions last year for nitroglycerin tablets, heart drugs placed under the tongue to reduce the chest pain angina or to stop a heart attack.
But the majority of the drugs sold had not been approved for sale, nor had their safety and effectiveness been vetted, by the Food and Drug Administration.
And many doctors, who discovered only last week that pharmacies were giving their patients unproved heart tablets, now say they have no way of knowing whether patients have suffered unnecessarily as a result...
Labels: FDA, Food and Drug Administration, health care, medicine
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]