A combination of arthritis medications and herbal remedies can prove fatal, as per survey reported in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.
This survey disclosed that not only the affected patients but the healthcare professionals looking after them are also ill informed about the severe complication.
The participants were also asked whether they knew of any possible side effects of the remedies they were taking, interactions with their conventional treatment, and whether they had sought the advice of a healthcare professional before taking the remedy.
Almost half (44%) of patients had used a herbal or over the counter remedy within the preceding six months. Around a third had taken cod liver oil, and one in five had taken glucosamine and/or chondroitin. Around one in 10 had used evening primrose oil.
One in 10 were taking remedies that could interact with conventional drugs. These included echinacea, which boosts the risk of liver toxicity when taken with arthritis drugs, and ginkgo biloba, garlic, and devil’s claw, all of which increase the risk of bleeding disorders when taken with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or steroids.
Twenty four of the 26 patients who had put themselves at risk were unaware that they had done so, and 10 of them had sought advice from a healthcare professional before opting for complementary treatment.
“Doctors may not recognise the potential adverse effects associated with herbal remedies, and patients may be reluctant to report either the use of herbal remedies or adverse effects,” say the authors.
It was noted by the authors that patients as well as the practitioners need to gain more of information education in relation to the involved risks and potential interactions.
Researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have been able to discover a genetic cause in relation to a severe kidney complication, which is the second leading cause of kidney failure among children. This finding was disclosed by The NephCure Foundation.
The study was published online by Nature Genetics and may provide insights for developing effective treatment options to treat patients with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS).
FSGS attacks the kidney’s filtering system, causing proteins to be lost into the urine and reducing the kidney’s ability to filter wastes from the blood. According to NephCure, which helped fund the study, 26 million Americans suffer from chronic kidney disease, of which FSGS is one of the most common forms.
Patients with FSGS are often treated with steroids, which are only partially effective and have very harsh side effects. In addition, they often face several trips a week to the hospital for dialysis, and many require a kidney transplant, along with lifelong treatment with powerful immunosuppressants to prevent organ rejection.
The research team was led by Elizabeth Brown, MD of Children’s Division of Nephrology, working in the laboratory of Martin Pollak, MD of the Renal Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Pre-school-aged children at high risk for asthma and suffering from breathing complications can expect significant relief when inhaledcorticosteroids are used on a daily basis, as per results from the Childhood Asthma Research and Education(CARE) Network supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI).
It was however noted during the study that inhaled corticosteroids are not useful to prevent the development of persistent asthma in these children.
Studies in older children and adults show that the most effective long-term control medicine for persistent asthma (symptoms more than two days a week or more than twice a month at night) is inhaled corticosteroids, which reduce airway swelling and help prevent asthma symptoms (e.g., asthma attacks). The Prevention of Early Asthma in Kids (PEAK) multicenter clinical trial, published in the May 11, 2006, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, answers a question that pediatricians and researchers have been asking for years: Can medicine that treats the inflammation of asthma be used to prevent the disease if given early enough in at-risk patients?
“Asthma is an enormous public health problem, and this study was designed to see if we could stop the development of asthma in its tracks - while the lungs are still developing - in young children known to be at high risk,” said NHLBI Director Elizabeth G. Nabel, MD. “Although this study shows that inhaled corticosteroids do not prevent chronic asthma, it provides clear evidence that inhaled corticosteroids benefit even some of our youngest patients.”
The PEAK study results endorse extending the use of inhaled corticosteroids to pre-school children at high risk for asthma.
The fact that most asthmatic people do not take their inhaled steroidmedications on time may be the reason behind a majority of asthma hospitalization cases, as per a research that featured in an issue of the Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology (JACI).
The JACI is the peer-reviewed scientific journal of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (AAAAI).
L. Keoki Williams, MD, MPH, and colleagues from the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, and the Medical College of Georgia are the first to study the relationship between medication adherence and asthma related outcomes in adult patients with asthma. They examined the records of 405 asthma patients ages 18-50 to determine if poor adherence to directions for taking inhaledsteroids resulted in poor asthma-outcomes. Researchers analyzed outpatient visits, emergency department visits, hospitalizations and oralsteroid use.
The study found:
* Overall adherence to inhaled steroids was approximately 50%.
* Patients who missed one out of four doses of their prescribed inhaled
* Steroid doubled their risk of being hospitalized.
* 60% of hospitalizations could have been prevented had patients taken
* Their inhaled medication as directed.
* Poor medication adherence was also associated with emergency
* Department visits and the need to use oralsteroid medications, which
* Are associated with more severe asthma.
Inhaled steroids significantly improve asthma symptoms besides reducing the concerned complications and these are just some of the reasons why they have become the standard form of treatment for persistent asthma.
A combination therapy involving airway opening drug and inhaled steroids having inflammation-minimizing characteristics rather than a normal steroid dose is better in order to prevent severe asthma attacks, as per a review of studies.
This study noted that high doses of steroids may do the trick for preventing the occurrence of asthma attacks.
Asthma patients who used both LABA medication and an inhaled steroid were significantly less likely to have a severe asthma flare-up requiring treatment with an injected or swallowed steroid than patients taking the steroid alone, according to Muireann Ni Chroinin, M.D., of the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital in England, and colleagues.
The reviews appear in the current issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research. Systematic reviews draw evidence-based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing medical trials on a topic.
The rate of severe attacks dropped from 27 percent to 22 percent in patients taking the combination therapy. Ni Chroinin and colleagues calculate that 18 patients would need to be treated with LABA for one year to prevent at least one patient from having such an attack.
Jerry Krishnan, M.D., an asthma researcher and assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine said that practitioners have a habit of initiating combination therapy with LABAs (long acting beta-2 agonists) and inhaled corticosteroids among practitioners at an early stage and that must be analyzed.
A drug that is currently used to treat varying severe health complications can be used to treat membranous nephropathy.
Rituximab, the drug, may prove effective for providing relief to patients suffering from membranous nephropathy. This finding appeared in the April 2009 print issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN).
To investigate rituximab’s potential, Andrew Bomback, MD (University of North Carolina Kidney Center), and his colleagues conducted the first systematic review of rituximab use in patients with membranous nephropathy. They collected and analyzed all of the data available on rituximab therapy in this patient population. They found 21 articles to date, all of which were either case reports or case series without controls, meaning that patients taking rituximab were studied for a certain length of time but were not compared with patients not taking the drug.
Dr. Bomback said that future studies are needed to confirm the value of this drug. Till that time, the use of Rituximab for membranous nephropathy must be done only in research settings.
The addition of proteins to sport drinks is of no additional use, as per researchers at the McMaster University.The involved researchers remarked that cyclic time trial performance does not get any better when proteins are added to a carbohydrate-electrolyte sports drink.
“Previous studies that suggested protein was beneficial used ‘ride to exhaustion’ tests that do not resemble normal athletic competition. In addition, the subjects in those studies received less than the optimal recommended amount of carbohydrate,” says Gibala. “Our study shows that protein confers no performance benefit during ‘real life’ exercise when athletes consume sufficient amounts of a sports drink.”
The study, which was funded by Gatorade, comes at a time when the sports drink industry is under pressure to create new products by adding ingredients that might further enhance performance. Some companies have heavily marketed protein-laced sports drinks as the next magic bullet, but Gibala’s research disputes such claims.
Martin Gibala, an Associate Professor of Kinesiology at McMaster, said that no conclusive evidence suggest that protein addition to sport drinks is needed by athletes though a small protein amount may be useful for repairing damaged muscles.
There is nothing better and reliable than corticosteroids that are recommended as a first-line therapy for DMD, according to a finding that was presented in a new practice guideline published in the Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
It was remarked by Richard T. Moxley III, MD, of the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y. and lead author, that corticosteroidscan be the only effective drugs when it comes to offering relief to children with DMD.
The guideline authors reviewed all available research for the use of corticosteroids in the treatment of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Corticosteroids are man-made drugs that are similar to the body’s hormone cortisone. Two corticosteroids, prednisone and deflazacort, were found to slow the rate of muscle deterioration, and are recommended as potential treatments to minimize the effect of Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
Prednisone was found to help muscle strength and function and should be offered as a treatment option. Deflazacort, a drug similar to prednisone, is also recommended as a treatment option but is not available in the United States at this time.
“Corticosteroids are the only effective drugs in providing improvements in children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy,” said lead author Richard T. Moxley III, MD, of the University of Rochester in Rochester, N.Y.
Two corticosteroids, prednisone and deflazacort, were found to be exemplary and recommended as potential forms of treatment with the ability to slowing down the rate of muscle deterioration leading to reduced effects of DMD.
A combination of steroids and antibiotics is a better option than antibiotics alone for patients suffering from pneumonia, as per scientists from the UT Southwestern Medical Center.
It was noted in a study available online that mice infected with a type of severe bacterial pneumonia and treated with a combination of steroidsand antibiotics recovered faster than mice treated with antibiotics alone when it comes to reduction of lung inflammation.
“Some people might think that if you give steroids, it would counteract the effect of the antibiotic,” said Dr. Robert Hardy, associate professor of internal medicine and pediatrics and the study’s senior author. “But it turns out you need the antibiotic to kill the bug and the steroid to make the inflammation in the lung from the infection get better. The steroids don’t kill the bugs, but they do help restore health.”
Pneumonia is a lung infection typically characterized by breathing difficulties and spread by coughing and sneezing. Symptoms include headache, fever, chills, coughs, chest pain, sore throat and nausea. Pneumonia caused by the Mycoplasma pneumoniae bacterium is generally a less severe form of the disease that can occur in any age group. It accounts for 20 percent to 30 percent of all community-acquired pneumonia cases.
In the current study, mice infected with the M pneumoniae bacterium were treated daily with a placebo, an antibiotic, a steroid, or a combination of the antibiotic and steroid in order to investigate the effect on M pneumoniae-induced airway inflammation. The animals were then evaluated after one, three and six days of therapy.
“It turns out that the group that got both the antibiotic and the steroids did the best,” Dr. Hardy said. “The inflammation in their lungs got significantly better.”
The list of other UT Southwestern researchers involved in this study included Dr. Christine Salvatore, infectious-disease fellow in pediatrics; Dr. Chonnamet Techasaensiri, postdoctoral trainee in pediatrics; Dr. Asunción Mejías, assistant professor of pediatrics; Dr. Juan Torres, visiting senior researcher in pediatrics; Kathy Katz, senior research associate in pediatrics; and Dr. Ana Maria Gomez, assistant professor of pathology along with researchers from the University of Milan making contributions.
The life of Mark McGwire, eminent baseball slugger, has taken a hit in the last few years and mostly the last few weeks immediately after he confessed using steroidsduring his illustratious career.
McGwire insisted that his dramatic on-field performances were results of God-given talent and hand-eye coordination and not because he used steroids.
“It’s unfortunate I played in this era,” he said repeatedly, somehow failing to understand that he defined that era. In many ways, we’re still being played for fools.
He said his embarrassing, reputation-shrinking performance in front of Congress in 2005 was a result of his fear of putting his family, friends and teammates through the misery of the subpoena process. In the next breath, he says none of them ever knew — or even asked — whether he’d taken steroids. (Could be because they, like us, already knew.) He wanted to shield them from his “mistake.” A mistake is throwing the wrong kind of garbage in the recycling bin, not a decade-long, systematic program to use illegal drugs — undoubtedly under a doctor’s supervision — to help a baseball career.
(By the way, Costas killed. It was as though he’d been waiting for that interview for years. He knew his stuff. He brilliantly straddled the line between head-shaking disbelief and respect for his subject. He asked the right questions, struck the right tone and refrained from falling prey to McGwire’s displays of emotion.)
McGwire has always come across as conflicted, a private man in a public world. I found it telling that he said he kept nothing — presumably no ball, bat or uniform piece — as a memento of the record-breaking 1998 season. He considers it a testament to his selflessness, and maybe it is. It could also be a sign of guilt, reinforced by his decision to place a phone call to Pat Maris — Roger’s widow — Monday before his admission became public. More than anything, it is just plain sad.
Though he has made his fans proud by making the confession, it is hard to believe that the recognition and respect that were once unique to him will be back with him again.
A combination of arthritis medications and herbal remedies can prove fatal, as per survey reported in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.
Researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston and Brigham and Women’s Hospital have been able to discover a genetic cause in relation to a severe kidney complication, which is the second leading cause of kidney failure among children. This finding was disclosed by 
Pre-school-aged children at high risk for asthma and suffering from breathing complications can expect significant relief when 
The fact that most asthmatic people do not take their inhaled steroid medications on time may be the reason behind a majority of asthma hospitalization cases, as per a research that featured in an issue of the Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology (JACI).
A combination therapy involving airway opening drug and inhaled steroids having inflammation-minimizing characteristics rather than a normal steroid dose is better in order to prevent severe asthma attacks, as per a review of studies.
A drug that is currently used to treat varying severe health complications can be used to treat membranous nephropathy.
The addition of proteins to sport drinks is of no additional use, as per researchers at the 
There is nothing better and reliable than corticosteroids that are recommended as a first-line therapy for DMD, according to a finding that was presented in a new practice guideline published in the Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
A combination of 
The life of Mark McGwire, eminent baseball slugger, has taken a hit in the last few years and mostly the last few weeks immediately after he confessed using