Older Drivers are Over-Medicated While Driving
February 2, 2010
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
Even though the vast majority of elderly drivers use one or more medications, few of them area aware of the effects that their drugs can have on driving performance, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Alabama-Birmingham and released as a report by the nonprofit AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.
“That’s really scary,” said Peter Kissinger of the AAA Foundation. “The risks are real.”
The researchers interviewed 630 drivers between the ages of 56 and 93, and found that 78 percent of them were taking one or more medications. Yet only 28 percent of the respondents knew of the potential risks from driving while medicated. Only 18 percent of those taking drugs especially known to impair driving ability — including ACE inhibitors, beta blockers and sedatives — had received warnings about the effects from their doctors or pharmacists.
Health care workers yet “are not effectively communicating known risks,” Kissinger said.
The researchers also found that awareness of the risks of driving while medicated decreased with age, while the number of prescription medications used increased.
Studies have conclusively linked certain drugs or combinations of drugs to an increase in the risk of automobile collisions. However, the exact number of crashes caused by medications is still unknown because few safety agencies regularly test for the presence of drugs in drivers’ systems after a crash, except when alcohol use is suspected.
An aging population and the increasing prevalence of multiple prescription use are only likely to worsen the problem of uninformed medicated drivers, Kissinger said. To attempt to reverse the trend, the AAA Foundation plans to release a free web-based resource known as Roadwise Rx in early 2010. Roadwise Rx will include a searchable database of the effects that drugs have, individually or in combination, on driving ability. Users will also be able to input personalized data, such as age, sex and weight. The program will be able to advise users about potential drug interactions, the effects of food, and when driving may be unsafe.
Click here for the full report.
Anti-Depression Drugs Found Mostly Useless in Study
January 06, 2010
Los Angeles Times
By Shari Roan
Antidepressant medications probably provide little or no benefit to people with mild or moderate depression, a new study has found. Rather, the mere act of seeing a doctor, discussing symptoms and learning about depression probably triggers the improvements many patients experience while on medication.
Only people with very severe depression receive additional benefits from drugs, said the senior author of the study, Robert J. DeRubeis, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor. The research was released online Tuesday and will be published today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
Hundreds of studies have attested to the benefits of antidepressants over placebos, DeRubeis said. But many studies involve only participants with severe depression. Confusion arises, he said, “because there is a tendency to generalize the findings to mean that all depressed people benefit from medications.”
The current analysis attempted to quantify how much of antidepressants’ benefit is attributable to chemical effects on the brain and how much can be explained by other factors, such as visiting a doctor, taking action to feel better or merely the passage of time.
Researchers reviewed six randomized, placebo-controlled studies with a total of 718 patients who took either an antidepressant or placebo. The patients were adults with levels of depression ranging from mild to very severe based on the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, a questionnaire widely used in depression research. The studies did not exclude patients who were likely to have a strong response to a placebo. Researchers then compared the patients’ depression scores at the beginning of treatment with those after at least six weeks of treatment.
The study found that the magnitude of the drugs’ benefit increased with the baseline level of depression. The effect of treatment was similar in people with mild, moderate and severe symptoms, regardless of whether they took an antidepressant or placebo. Only the people who rated very severe on the depression scale at the start of the study showed measurable improvements on antidepressants.
Medications Causing Birth Defects by Blocking Folic Acid
November 19, 2009
Natural News
By Paul Louis
(Natural News) An epidemiological study in Israel that included 84,832 babies born at Soroka Medical Center, in Beer-Sheva concluded that medications taken during the first trimester that block folic acid more than double the risk of congenital malformations.
The study team involved Epidemiologists, Pediatricians, Clinical Pharmacologists, Obstetricians and Gynecologists who examined birth and abortion data collected in Israel between 1998 and 2007.
The medications that act as folic acid inhibitors are the antibiotics trimethoprim, sulfasalazine for treating ulcerative colitis, and the chemotherapy drug methotrexate. This group of drugs prevents folic acid from being converted to its active metabolites.
Anti-epileptic drugs and cholesterol lowering drugs are among the group of medications that lower serum and tissue concentrations of folic acid.
All about folic acid
Folic acid (B9) is also known as folate or folacin. It is essential for building new cells, and everyone needs it. But it is especially crucial for a woman’s physiological fetal function during pregnancy. Abundant folic acid during early pregnancy is important for preventing neurological and spinal birth defects.
Doctors are now recommending extra folic acid intake for women during the first trimester of pregnancy. Folic acid is abundant in leafy green vegetables, grains, dried beans, peas, nuts, and fruit. Adding daily supplements of folic acid is usually recommended.
The most common major birth defect from folic acid deficiency is spina bifida, or open spine. It is the result of the fetal spinal cord not closing completely during the first month of pregnancy. Nerve damage can result in the child’s paralysis of the legs, fluid in the brain, learning difficulties, and urinary or bowel problems. There is no cure for this birth defect.
Click here for the full report
Phthalates in Plastics ‘Feminizing’ Boys in Womb
November 17, 2009
Natural News
By Mike Adams
(NaturalNews) In a bombshell finding that has far-reaching implications for society and culture, scientists at the University of Rochester have found that phthalates — the chemical found in many vinyl and plastic products — tends to “feminize” boys, altering their brains to express more feminine characteristics. The study has been published in the Journal of Andrology.
Phthalates are found in vinyl products (including vinyl flooring), PVC shower curtains, plastic furniture and even in the plastic coating of the insides of dishwashing machines.
The feminization process happens during pregnancy when phthalate exposure causes hormone disruptions in the unborn baby. This chemical feminizes males by disrupting the action of the hormone testosterone.
In this recent study, researchers found a strong correlation between the types of toys that male children play with and the level of phthalates found in their mothers when they were pregnant. Researchers discovered that boys exposed to high levels of phthalates in the womb tend to avoid playing with cars, trains or toy guns. They also avoided rough play, instead preferring more feminine toys and activities. (Barbie?)
Phthalates used in pharmaceutical coatings
What very few people know about phthalates is that they are used in the coatings of pharmaceuticals to create “enteric” coatings. This means that many people taking certain pharmaceuticals are unknowingly eating phthalates. If expectant mothers take such pharmaceuticals during pregnancy, they may then feminize their unborn male babies.
How do we know phthalates are used in pharmaceuticals? This Google Books link (http://books.google.com/books?id=e7) shows a page from the Handbook of Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Formulations: Over-the-counter products. In it, a recipe is given for manufacturing a clear enteric coating. The ingredients are:
Acetone
Purified water
Hydroxypropyl Methyl Cellulose Phthalate
Vanillin
Acetylated Monoglycerides
Alcohol
This combination of highly toxic chemicals is cooked, stirred and then used to coat pharmaceutical pills that people actually swallow!
Click here for the full report
A Nation on Mind Altering Drugs: Antidepressants Most Commonly Prescribed Drugs in US
September 18, 2009
Natural News
by S.L. Baker
As NaturalNews has reported in detail, antidepressants like Prozac (fluoxetine) and the growing list of similar selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor drugs (SSRIs) not only can have numerous side effects from nausea to headaches — but they’ve also been linked to horrendous problems including suicide in teens, sudden death in women (http://www.naturalnews.com/025811.html) and even murders. But has that stopped US doctors from prescribing the drugs or slowed down the antidepressant pill popping by Americans? Apparently not. New research shows that antidepressants are now the most widely prescribed drugs in the country.
According to a report in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, a journal of the American Medical Association, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of antidepressants since l996. It’s not only stressed out middle-aged folks being treated for problems caused by supposed depression, either. Perhaps the most disturbing part of the new study is that it shows a broad expansion in the patient population being put on these drugs — starting with children as young as six.
“Several factors may have contributed to this trend, including a broadening in concepts of need for mental health treatment, campaigns to promote mental health care and growing public acceptance of mental health treatments,” the researchers stated in their article.
To come up with the new antidepressant statistics, Mark Olfson, M.D., M.P.H., of Columbia University Medical Center and New York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, and Steven C. Marcus, Ph.D., of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, studied data from the 1996 and 2005 Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to estimate US health care usage and costs. In all, 18,993 people from age six and older were included in the 1996 survey and 28,445 in the 2005 survey which covered information regarding medical visits,prescriptions, conditions for which they were treated and other healthcare details.
In all, the researchers found that the rate of antidepressant treatment increased from 5.84 percent to 10.12 percent between 1996 and 2005. That translates into a remarkable increase from an estimated 13.3 million taking antidepressants to 27 million people now on the mind and body-altering drugs.
Curiously, the only people who aren’t apparently being prescribed these medications in droves are those in racial and ethnic minorities, possibly because they may be less likely to afford the expensive drugs or insurance copays. “Significant increases in antidepressant use were evident across all sociodemographic groups examined, except African Americans, who had comparatively low rates of use in both years (1996, 3.61 percent; 2005, 4.51 percent),” the authors wrote. “Although antidepressant treatment increased for Hispanics, it remained comparatively low (1996, 3.72 percent; 2005, 5.21 percent).”
And it isn’t only antidepressant usage that is soaring. The report found that among the millions of Americans taking those drugs, huge numbers of them are also now being prescribed antipsychotic medications. The percentage who were also prescribed antipsychotic medications increased between 1996 and 2005 from 5.46 percent to 8.86 percent.
Wouldn’t common sense dictate that people who are so mentally ill that they need to be put on strong antipsychotic medications should be getting psychotherapy help, too? The new study shows that isn’t the the case. In fact, there’s been an enormous drop in the number of people undergoing psychotherapy — a decrease from 31.5 percent to 19.87 percent — in recent years.
“Together with an increase in the number of antidepressant prescriptions per antidepressant user (an average of 5.6 vs. 6.93 per year), these broad trends suggest that antidepressant treatment is occurring within a clinical context that places greater emphasis on pharmacologic rather than psychologic dimensions of care,” the authors wrote.
In simple terms, too many doctors are handing out prescriptions for powerful drugs that affect the mind and entire body — supposedly because of mental or emotional illness — without any attempt to see if counseling or therapy might be a safer, and more sane, approach.
Click here for the full report.
Diet Can Help Avoid Diabetes Drugs
September 1, 2009
TIME
By Shahreen Abedin
In the longest-term study of its kind, researchers pitted two popular diets head-to-head — a low-fat American Heart Association-style diet and a carb-controlled Mediterranean diet, each combined with regular physical activity — in a population of overweight patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
Researchers found that over the four-year study, patients who adhered to the Mediterranean-style eating plan maintained lower blood sugar levels for a longer time than those in the low-fat-diet group. Based on their findings, the study’s authors suggest that some diabetes patients may be able to substitute diet and exercise for blood-sugar-lowering medications.
The study involved 215 overweight adults in Naples, Italy, who were newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Patients were randomly divided into two diet groups: The low-fat eaters were instructed to follow a regimen rich in whole grains, fruits and vegetables, and low in additional fats, sweets or high-fat snacks; no more than 30% of daily calories were to come from fat, and no more than 10% from saturated fat. The Mediterranean-diet group was taught to eat lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and “healthy” fat, including olive oil, with an emphasis on lean protein sources such as fish, chicken and nuts. Mediterranean dieters were instructed to limit carbohydrate intake to less than 50% of their daily calories.
All dieters were encouraged to exercise regularly, and received regular nutrition counseling throughout the course of the four-year study. Regardless of the specific eating plan, the study’s participants were required to restrict their daily caloric intake: 1,800 calories maximum per day for men, and 1,500 calories daily for women — a significant reduction from what the average American eats daily (about 2,600 calories for men and 1,800 calories for women, according to government statistics).
By the end of the study, which was published in the September 1 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine, 56% of patients following the Mediterranean diet were able to control their blood sugar without medication, compared with 30% of those on the low-fat regimen. The Mediterranean dieters were also able to maintain slightly more weight loss than the low-fat group — 8.4 lb. versus 7.1 lb. — and showed small improvements in triglyceride and HDL cholesterol (the good kind) levels, both risk factors for heart disease.
“A Mediterranean-style diet is a very important part in the treatment of diabetes. We knew that,” says Dr. Loren Greene, a New York University Medical Center endocrinologist, who was not involved in the study. “But there just hasn’t been a good study to confirm this before.” Some past studies have suggested that eating fewer carbohydrates can help diabetes patients lower their blood sugar; other research has shown that intake of monounsaturated fats like olive oil can improve patients’ insulin sensitivity, allowing the body to naturally control blood sugar more effectively.
The current study does not make clear, however, whether diet alone can reduce blood sugar enough to eliminate the use of diabetes medication, or whether it is even advisable to forgo medication at all. Participants in the new study were kept off drugs when their A1C levels — a measurement that indicates a patient’s blood-sugar levels over the previous three months — were below 7%, the standard cutoff for what is considered controlled blood sugar. But “we don’t know for sure if people with A1C levels under 7% still need to be on drugs,” says Greene. “The research just hasn’t answered that question yet.” Recent studies suggest that using blood-sugar-controlling medication even among the 57 million Americans who have prediabetes — meaning they have elevated, but not dangerously high blood sugar, and are at very high risk of developing diabetes — may prevent the future development of heart disease and stroke.
While diabetes doctors generally agree that the first line of defense against type 2 diabetes should always be exercise and diet, many recommend also using drugs. For its part, the American Diabetes Association advises patients with type 2 diabetes to make appropriate lifestyle changes, and to start a drug regimen immediately upon diagnosis. Dr. R. Paul Robertson, spokesperson for the organization, says that for people with diabetes, “the goal should not be to avoid drugs. It is to do everything you can to keep your sugar levels down.”
Still, many doctors acknowledge patients’ aversion to chronic drug-taking. “Almost universally, people don’t want to make medicine if they can avoid it,” says Greene. And physicians, including internist Dr. Christine Laine, who is the editor of the Annals of Internal Medicine, point out that the direct and indirect costs associated with taking a drug — even one as widely prescribed as the generic diabetes medication metformin — can serve as a barrier for many patients, especially among disadvantaged populations and those without health insurance.
Whether or not avoidance of medication in certain cases proves to be reasonable, for now it can at least be used as an effective incentive to improve lifestyle habits, says Greene: “If you are told, ‘If you don’t want to go on medicine, stick to this diet,’ then that’s a pretty valuable tool at least for patient compliance.”
Click here for the full report from TIME
Statins Cause Serious Structural Muscle Damage
August 27, 2009
Natural News
By S.L. Baker
If there is a super star in Big Pharma’s list of money making drugs, it may well be the group of medications known as statins. The New York Times reported last year that statins are, in fact, the biggest selling drugs in the world. Their names, like Lipitor and Crestor, are familiar from countless television and magazine ads and almost everyone knows someone taking a statin. Promoted widely as safe, they are actually known to cause a litany of potential side effects. For example, the National Institutes of Health web site notes that about one in 1,000 of those taking statins suffer from muscle pain. Usually, these aches go away. But not always. And now new research shows that in some people statins cause serious structural damage to muscles.
The study, just published in CMAJ (the Canadian Medical Association Journal) suggests that patients who are taking statins and who complain to their doctors about muscle tenderness or pain could well be describing severe muscle problems due to the drugs. Although muscle damage is usually associated with elevated levels of an enzyme called creatine phosphokinase, the CMAJ research shows that’s not always the case. And it may take muscle biopsies to show that underlying structural injury has occurred.
The study was conducted by scientists from the University of Bern, Switzerland and the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. The research team investigated muscle biopsies from 83 patients. Twenty of these had never taken statins. The results showed significant muscle injury only in people who had taken statin drugs. Perhaps what was most surprising is that several people who were no longer taking statins were found to still have significant structural muscle damage.
“Although in clinical practice, the majority of patients with muscle symptoms improve rapidly after cessation of therapy, our findings support that a subgroup of patients appears to be more susceptible to statin-associated myotoxicity, suffering persistent structural injury,” Dr. Annette Draeger from the University of Bern and her coauthors wrote in the CMAJ article.
The study did not address whether statins might cause other significant body-wide damage. However, it is interesting to note that the very organ statins are supposed to protect, the heart, is a muscle. And that raises troublesome questions about possible long term, not-yet-known side effects statin drugs may have on the heart itself.
The researchers did note in a statement to the media that there is “a need to evaluate alternative treatment strategies for patients with significant muscle symptoms.” As Natural News readers are well aware, there are already well-known natural health strategies that lower cholesterol levels safely, without any possibility of muscle damage. For example, previous research has shown certain foods, including tofu, almonds, cereal fiber and plant sterols, can lower total cholesterol and LDL, the “bad” cholesterol, better than statins. Weight loss, increased intake of Omega-3 fatty acids and exercise are also drug-free strategies that lower cholesterol safely.
Click here for the full report from Natural News
Statins May Cause Muscle Damage in Some Patients
July 6, 2009
Forbes
Statins, medications widely used to lower cholesterol, may cause structural damage to the muscles of people experiencing muscle aches and weakness, a new study has found.
The damage may occur even when tests for a protein thought to signal injury are normal, and may persist even after statin use is halted, according to the study in the July 7 issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
The researchers stressed that people not experiencing significant pain had no cause for alarm and should continue taking the medicine.
About 10 to 15 percent of people taking statins report myalgia, or minor muscle aches and weakness, according to the study authors. A smaller number have stronger, persistent pain, called myopathy.
In the study, researchers biopsied leg muscle tissue from 83 patients: 44 were taking statins and had serious and persistent muscle pain; 19 were taking statins and had no myopathy, and 20 had never taken statins or suffered myopathy.
Of the 44 with myopathy, 29 were still taking a statin at the time of the biopsy, while 15 had discontinued their use for at least three weeks.
Biopsies showed that 25 of the 44 with myopathy had muscle damage, defined as injury to 2 percent or more of the muscle fibers.
Yet only one patient showed elevated levels of creatine phosphokinase (CPK), an enzyme expressed inside skeletal muscle cells, said study co-author Dr. Richard Karas, director of preventive cardiology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.
Elevated levels of CPK in the blood can mean the enzyme is leaking out of the muscle cells, indicating muscle damage.
“This paper is challenging the dogma that if the CPK level is low, it rules out the possibility of muscle damage,” Karas said. “You can have microscopic muscle damage and the level of CPK can still be normal.”
The researchers also found that most participants showed signs of muscle injury even after they’d stopped taking statins.
“Although in clinical practice, the majority of patients with muscle symptoms improve rapidly after cessation of therapy, our findings support that a subgroup of patients appears to be more susceptible to statin-associated myotoxicity, suffering persistent structural injury,” said senior study author Dr. Annette Draeger of the University of Bern, Switzerland.
A study presented in September at the American Physiological Society meeting found that statins may hinder the body’s ability to repair muscles. Muscle cells exposed to increasing doses of simvastatin (Zocor) showed less ability to multiply and, therefore, heal and regenerate.
Over the past decade, statins have become the best-selling drug in America, accounting for $14.5 billion in sales in 2008. The drugs, which work in the liver to prevent the formation of cholesterol, are used in the prevention of coronary artery disease.
In the new study, 41 percent of those experiencing myopathy were taking simvastatin (Zocor); 31 percent were taking pravastatin (Pravachol); 17 percent were taking atorvastatin (Lipitor); 7 percent were taking fluvastatin (Lescol), and 3 percent were taking rosuvastatin (Crestor).
The study participants were experiencing pain severe enough to interfere with daily tasks and exercise.
The authors note that the sample size was too small to determine if one drug was associated with increased complaints of muscle pain or damage.
American Heart Association spokesman Dr. Roger Blumenthal said studies such as this may help doctors learn why some people develop statin-related side effects while others don’t.
In the study, the researchers noted that expression of ryanodine receptor 3 was heightened in those with structural muscle damage, offering a clue to the genetic underpinnings for those who suffer statin-related side effects.
“It’s a very interesting study,” said Blumenthal, director of the Johns Hopkins Ciccarone Preventive Cardiology Center in Baltimore. “This whole issue of why about one in 50 people on statins gets recurrent or severe muscle pain is very frustrating for physicians.”
Known risk factors for muscle pain include old age, high doses of statins, exercising vigorously while on statins and certain medications, including warfarin (Coumadin), cancer drugs, oral medications for fungal disorders and certain antibiotics, which interfere with the removal of statins from the body.
In 2001, cerivastatin (Baycol) was withdrawn from the market because of a high incidence in rhabdomyolysis, a widespread breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue.
Click here for the full report from Forbes.com
Common Chemo Drug Kills Women
July 02, 2009
Natural News
by Sherry Baker
Chemotherapy drugs used in standard cancer treatments are associated with a huge list of side effects, from hair loss and nausea to nerve pain, sexual problems and mouth sores. Now a new study from the Research on Adverse Drug Events and Reports (RADAR) pharmacovigilance program at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine has identified another side effect caused by a commonly used chemotherapy drug — death.
A startling number of women have died from a severe allergic reaction after being injected with Cremophor-based paclitaxel, a solvent-administered taxane chemotherapy. What makes this extra tragic is that the researchers found some of the dead women had already been treated for early stage breast cancer and could well have been cured — if the chemo prescribed to prevent a theoretical recurrence of cancer in the future had not killed them.
The report, presented at the 45th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology held recently in Orlando, Florida, found there were 287 unique cases of hypersensitivity reactions submitted to the FDA’s Adverse Event Report System between 1997 and 2007 in patients who received the solvent-laced chemo drug. Of these, an alarming 38 percent, 109, died. Because adverse event reports usually only document from one to 10 percent of the actual incidence of serious side effects, the number of hypersensitivity reactions as well as deaths is probably much greater.
The severe allergic reactions are believed to be caused by the chemical solvent used to dissolve some chemo drugs before they can be injected into the blood stream. Two of the women who died from an allergic reaction had early-stage breast cancer, which had already been surgically removed. They were being subjected to the Cremophor-containing paclitaxel to supposedly keep the cancer from returning.
Although both of these patients were given additional drugs before the chemotherapy to reduce the risk of hypersensitivity reactions, they still died. In fact, RADAR researchers found that 22 percent of all the deaths from the chemo drug occurred in patients who had been pre-treated with medications to prevent hypersensitivity reactions. Another 15 percent of these chemo patients experienced life-threatening respiratory arrest.
“The deaths of women with early-stage breast cancer are particularly disturbing because without the adverse reaction, they could have likely had 40 years of life ahead of them,” study leader Charles Bennett, M.D., RADAR program coordinator and a professor of hematology/oncology at Northwestern’s Feinberg School, stated in a media release.
“Patients receiving Cremophor-based paclitaxel should be given medications to prevent hypersensitivity reactions, but what is sobering, as the study has shown and as the black-box warning indicates, women suffer anaphylaxis despite receiving steroid premedication,” he added. “Physicians may also want to consider exploring other alternative chemotherapy options that do not include Cremophor.”
Cremophor-containing paclitaxel has been associated with a wide range of hypersensitivity reactions, ranging from mild skin irritations to cardiac collapse. “The results of our review suggest that physicians should be vigilant in monitoring the safety of their patients undergoing chemotherapy treatment,” said Dr. Bennett, who also is the A.C. Buehler Professor in Economics and Aging at the Feinberg School and a member of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University.
Click here for the full report from NaturalNews.com
