Two popular anti-smoking drugs will now carry warnings about the risk of severe mental health problems, the Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday.
The FDA said Chantix and Zyban will carry the warnings to alert consumers to the risks of depression and suicidal thoughts when using the drugs.
The drugs also have been reported to cause changes in behavior, hostility and agitation in users, whether users had a history of psychiatric illness or not. In many cases, side effects started shortly after use began and ended when the medication was stopped. The FDA does not know what is causing the changes and said people taking these products should be monitored by their doctor.
A 30-year-old male student enrolled in the United States has been confirmed as China’s second H1N1, or swine flu, case, and its first on the mainland, according to the information office of the Chinese Health Ministry.
“Bao” began his journey at St. Louis, Missouri, took a connecting flight at St. Paul, Minnesota, for Tokyo, Japan on May 7th, according to Xinhua state-run news agency.
Mexican authorities sought to reassure citizens Saturday over a deadly new multi-strain swine flu, as the World Health Organization warned that the virus had “pandemic potential.”
The outbreak of the new virus transmitted from human to human that has killed up to 60 people and infected hundreds in Mexico and infected eight in the United States is a “serious situation” with a “pandemic potential”, the head of the World Health Organization said Saturday.
A drug that boosts the body’s production of stem cells appears to “jump-start” the bone-healing process to a point that older adults’ bones heal as fast as young people’s, suggest preliminary results released Tuesday by U.S. researchers.
Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York gave teriparatide (Forteo) to 145 people who had bone fractures that had not healed, many for six months or more. They found that 93 percent of them showed significant healing and pain control after eight to 12 weeks.
The second-largest pistachio processor in the nation yesterday significantly expanded its recall of nuts after federal investigators found salmonella bacteria in “critical areas” of its California facility.
Setton Pistachio of Terra Bella, Calif., said it was recalling all lots of roasted in-shell pistachios, roasted shelled pistachios and raw shelled pistachios that were produced from nuts harvested in 2008.
Last week, the company recalled a small portion of that harvest — about 2 million pounds — on the theory that it may have been contaminated by a sanitation mistake that affected just one or two production lines.
The northeastern corner of Ontario — a vast area extending from just northeast of Wawa to Hudson Bay — has 51 hospitals and one permanent radiologist.
That’s why Northern Radiology (NORrad) was created seven years ago to allow nine of those hospitals to share digital diagnostic images such as X-rays and ultrasounds. Before NORrad, emergency-room physicians in remote communities with only limited diagnostic capabilities often had to ship patients out to larger centres.
Taiwan recorded 73,293 new cancer cases in 2006, with the largest number being colorectal cases, according to the latest cancer incidence report released yesterday by the Department of Health=.
The figures mean that on average, a new cancer patient was being diagnosed in the country every 7 minutes, 10 seconds in 2006, up slightly from the average of 7 minutes, 38 seconds in 2005, when 68,907 new cases were recorded, according to Chao Kun-yu, deputy chief of the DOH’s Bureau of Health Promotion.
The report showed that for the first time, colorectal cancer replaced liver cancer as the most common type among new cases recorded in a single year.
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Whether you drive, take the bus, or bicycle, being in heavy traffic triples your risk of heart attack within one hour.
Air pollution from car fumes is the likely culprit, suggest Annette Peters, PhD, and colleagues at the Institute of Epidemiology, Helmholtz Center, Munich, Germany.
In a previous study, Peters and colleagues found that a sizeable proportion of heart attacks — about 8% — could be attributed to being in traffic.
To follow up, the researchers interviewed 1,454 people who survived heart attacks. In the hour before their heart attack, many of the survivors had been in heavy traffic.
A late-stage clinical study of Pfizer Inc’s (PFE) Sutent was halted early after the drug showed significant benefit in patients with a rare form of cancer, the drugmaker said on Thursday, sending its shares up 3.5%.
An independent committee monitoring the study recommended halting it after concluding that patients on Sutent stayed free of disease progression for longer than those on placebo plus best supportive care.
The patients in the study had advanced pancreatic islet cell tumors, a rare cancer with limited treatment options, according to Pfizer.
Nanotechnology has been used for the first time to destroy cancer cells with a highly targeted package of “tumour busting” genes.
The technique, which leaves healthy cells unaffected, could potentially offer hope to people with hard-to-treat cancers where surgery is not possible.
Although it has only been tested in mice so far, the researchers hope for human trials in two years.
The UK study is published online by the journal Cancer Research.
