Health & WellnessS


Pills

Long, hard road to marketplace for Vanda drug

Mike Musgrove
WashingtonPost
Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:09 UTC
Early next year, if all goes according to plan, doctors will be able to prescribe a new antipsychotic drug for patients with schizophrenia. When that happens, investors in a local pharmaceutical firm will surely breathe a sigh of relief.

While it's almost certain that the compound known as Fanapt will reach pharmacy shelves, the drug's future was anything but clear for most of its 13-year existence. Rockville-based Vanda Pharmaceuticals toiled for years on its development, even after larger drugmakers lost interest and the Food and Drug Administration gave the product a thumbs-down.

"Last year at this time, nobody believed in the company, and nobody believed in the compound," said Mihael H. Polymeropoulos, Vanda's president and chief executive. Today, the company has a deal for Fanapt worth nearly half a billion dollars.

Shareholders fled the company in droves last year after a negative ruling from the FDA, and Polymeropoulos says he doesn't blame them. He founded Vanda after earlier careers, mostly in Washington, in the health-care industry. He'd never heard of a case in which the FDA reversed a decision on a drug, but that's what happened after Vanda told the agency that it had misinterpreted some data.
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Magnify

High Protein Diets may Lead to Brain Shrinkage

Frank Mangano
NaturalNews
Sun, 01 Nov 2009 18:00 UTC
For muscle heads, diets high in protein may be just what the doctor ordered, but a growing bicep may come with a cost: a shrinking brain.

According to a recent study published in the journal Molecular Neurodegeneration, when compared to three other diets, high protein diets were the ones that caused the most significant drop-off in brain weight.

Alzheimer's disease researchers are well aware of the wealth of studies linking diet to brain health. The Mediterranean diet, for example, is touted as one of the best diets to follow not only for great physical health, but for great mental health as well, according to findings published in a December 2006 issue of the Archives of Neurology.

With this in mind, researchers put four specific diets to the test to see how, or if, they contributed to the formation of amyloid proteins in the brain. Amyloid protein formation is one of the precursors to Alzheimer's disease.
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Magnify

Sleep Deprivation Can Negatively Affect Information Processing


ScienceDaily
Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:00 UTC
A new study in the journal Sleep shows that sleep deprivation causes some people to shift from a more automatic, implicit process of information categorization (information-integration) to a more controlled, explicit process (rule-based). This use of rule-based strategies in a task in which information-integration strategies are optimal can lead to potentially devastating errors when quick and accurate categorization is fundamental to survival.

Results show that sleep deprivation led to an overall performance deficit on an information-integration category learning task that was held over the course of two days. Performance improved in the control group by 4.3 percent from the end of day one to the beginning of day two (accuracy increased from 74 percent to 78.3 percent); performance in the sleep-deprived group declined by 2.4 percent (accuracy decreased from 73.1 percent to 70.7 percent) from the end of day one to the beginning of day two.

According to co-principal investigators W. Todd Maddox, PhD, professor of psychology, and David M. Schnyer, PhD, associate professor of psychology at the Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Texas in Austin, fast and accurate categorization is critical in situations that could become a matter of life or death. However, categorization may become compromised in people who often experience sleep deprivation in fast-paced, high pressure roles such as doctors, firefighters, soldiers and even parents. Many tasks performed on a daily basis require information-integration processing rather than rule-based categorization. Examples include driving, making a medical diagnosis and performing air-traffic control.
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Family

The Epidemic Of 'Medical Child Abuse' And What Can Be Done

Dana Ullman
Huffington Post
Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:40 UTC
The primary purpose of this article is to encourage a stronger commitment from doctors and parents to consider using safer medical care for infants and children FIRST before resorting to more dangerous treatments. One would hope and assume that doctors and parents would have a natural inclination to make the safety of these young human souls a significant and sincere priority, but sadly, the power and propaganda of Big Pharma has inappropriately turned this equation around and made it seem that doctors and parents are putting their children at risk if they don't prescribe powerful drugs first. I personally disagree with this assumption and sincerely hope that people consider this health issue to be of primary importance today.

I certainly realize that the evidence that I present below on the epidemic proportions of "medical child abuse" is somewhat inflammatory, but due to the fact that this issue is presently being ignored by so many doctors and parents, a little "inflammation" may be a necessary symptom that will lead to great attention to this problem and perhaps to some concrete solutions to it.
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Health

Women With Chronic Kidney Disease More Likely Than Men To Go Undiagnosed


Science Daily
Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:41 UTC
Woman are at particular risk of their primary care physicians delaying diagnosis of chronic kidney disease (CKD), according to a paper being presented at the American Society of Nephrology's 42nd Annual Meeting and Scientific Exposition in San Diego, California. The findings suggest that educating practitioners about CKD could increase the timely diagnosis of CKD, thereby leading to improvements in care to patients and savings in Medicare dollars.

Maya Rao, MD, of Columbia University, reviewed records from nearly 900 patients at 18 rural, community-based primary care clinics in Oregon, to investigate whether primary care physicians accurately diagnosed CKD in patients with known kidney dysfunction. Chronic kidney disease is estimated to affect up to 19 million adults in the U.S. and is usually diagnosed and treated in the primary care setting. The analysis showed that 52.4 percent of patients found to have CKD did not have a diagnosis in their charts. Females were more likely to be undiagnosed than males, except at the most advanced stages of CKD.
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Pills

Rise in Youth Hyperactivity Prescriptions


The Independent
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:41 UTC
The number of prescriptions for drugs to treat hyperactivity in children is on the rise, figures suggested today.

Data obtained by the Conservatives found more than 420,000 prescriptions were written for under-16s in 2007 - up 33 per cent on 2005 figures.

More than 40,000 prescriptions were also written for 16 to 18 year-olds, up 51 per cent since 2005.
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Health

Every minute, one woman dies in labour


Press TV
Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:39 UTC
Image
© Unknown
The number of women dying during pregnancy and childbirth is increasing in some nations, the health ministers from around the world say at the UN Population Fund meeting.

According to the findings of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) meeting held this week in Addis Ababa, every minute, a woman dies in childbirth.

In the high-level meeting of over 150 health ministers, childbirth was reported to be responsible for a greater number of female deaths when compared to events such as war.

Lack of properly trained midwives and the long distance between certain rural areas and health centers are among the main reasons contributing to serious complications and even death in pregnant women.
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Magic Wand

Swine flu vaccine shots eliminate wrinkles, bad breath and varicose veins, too

Mike Adams
NaturalNews
Fri, 30 Oct 2009 10:49 UTC
The propaganda push for flu vaccines has reached a level of absurdity that's just begging to be made fun of. Today, a flu vaccine story appearing in Reuters claimed that injecting pregnant women with flu shots would increase the birth weight of their babies by half a pound. That same story claimed flu shots are so healthy for pregnant women that they also prevent premature births.

It even quotes a team of experts who claim that injecting an expectant mother with a flu shot would reduce the hospitalization of her infants, explaining: "Flu vaccine given to women during pregnancy is 85 percent effective in preventing hospitalization in their infants under 6 months of age."
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Pumpkin

Study: Pumpkin Skin May Repel Germs


United Press International
Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:20 UTC
Pumpkin
© UPI/Terry SchmittGrowers thump a competing gourd at the World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay.
Kwangju, South Korea - South Korean scientists say they've determined a substance in pumpkin skin can repel germs that cause millions of cases of yeast infections annually.

Chosun University researchers say some disease-causing microbes are becoming resistant to existing antibiotics, causing scientists to search for new bacterial treatments.

In the study, Kyung-Soo Hahm, Yoonkyung Park and colleagues noted pumpkins have long been used as folk medicine in some countries. So the scientists said they extracted proteins from pumpkin rinds to see if the proteins inhibit the growth of microbes, including Candida albicans, a fungus that causes vaginal yeast infections, diaper rash in infants and other health problems.
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Bizarro Earth

Beware: Genetically Modified Omega 3 Oils to Appear in Foods

James Williams
Atlanta Wellness Examiner
Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:00 UTC
Image
Evidence: journals, pharmaceutical companies, GM-food and processed food producers work together
Monsanto, the company which spent an astounding eight million dollars last year on lobbying, is planning to flood the food market with poor quality omega 3 oils from its genetically modified (GM) soy beans.

Monsanto, which is trying to control the world's farming market and infect nature with its genetically modified seeds, plans to sell its omega 3 frankenfood to processed food companies. The food companies will then claim that their frozen dinners and microwave meals are healthy because they contain omega 3 oils.

Yet you can bet your bottom dollar that the packaging on these TV dinners won't reveal that the omega 3 oils are from GM soy. If you've missed the headlines, you can learn why GM-food has a suspicious history and why these food ingredients are considered unhealthy.

More astoundingly, is the timing of this press release from Monsanto. Just last week, a poorly designed study doubting the benefits of omega 3 oils from fish somehow passed the peer review process and was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. What's the connection?
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