(CNN) -- A voluntary recall has been issued for more than 40 over-the-counter drugs for children, including Tylenol and Motrin, because they don't meet quality standards.
"This recall is not being undertaken on the basis of adverse medical events," McNeil Consumer Healthcare said in a statement Friday. "However, as a precautionary measure, parents and caregivers should not administer these products to their children."
FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg gave a similar recommendation in a statement Saturday, saying, "we want to be certain that consumers discontinue using these products," though she called the chance for serious health problems "remote."
"Some products in the recall may have a higher concentration of active ingredient than specified while others may have inactive ingredients that don't meet testing requirements, the company said.
The company said it issued the recall after consulting with the Food and Drug Administration. The affected brands include: Tylenol Infants' Drops, Children's Tylenol Suspensions, Children's Tylenol Plus Suspensions, Motrin Infant Drops, Children's Motrin Suspensions, Children's Zyrtec Liquids in Bottles and Children's Benadryl Allergy Liquids in Bottles.
The drugs were made in the United States and distributed to Canada, the Dominican Republic, Dubai, Fiji, Guam, Guatemala, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Panama, Trinidad & Tobago and Kuwait.
"There are a number of other products on the market, including generic versions of the recalled products, which are intended for use in infants and children and are not affected by the recall," the FDA said Saturday in issuing guidance to parents.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Temporary fix helps patients around drug allergy
WASHINGTON - Having a bad reaction to penicillin as a infant doesn't guarantee you are still allergic decades later. & if the oncologist says you must switch chemotherapies because of an allergic reaction, well, perhaps not.
More medical centers are recommending a lesser known choice: Drug desensitization, a carefully controlled system of helping patients temporarily tolerate medications - from aspirin to antibiotics to chemo - that their bodies one times rejected.
"You don't know how lucky I feel" to have been desensitized, says Vanessa Greenleaf of Marblehead, Mass.
Not everyone's a candidate. But for those who are, the system can mean the difference between getting the best treatment or a runner-up that may not do the job, says Dr. Mariana Castells, an allergist at Harvard & Brigham & Women's Hospital who helped pioneer the care.
"I kept mumbling, 'I require to stay on,'" recalls Greenleaf, 52, who finally got her wish. "All the nurses kept telling me, 'You can, we'll get the drug in to you safely.'"
Greenleaf developed a severe allergy to a mainstay of ovarian cancer treatment, carboplatin. Even as a burning sensation engulfed her body during the allergic attack, Greenleaf's chief fear was that doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital would take her off the chemo combination he believed her best shot.
Allergies make up 5 percent to 10 percent of all adverse reactions to medications, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. Sometimes drug allergies kill. So anyone who is ever reported an allergic reaction to a medicine, even decades earlier, is told seldom to take that drug.
More medical centers are recommending a lesser known choice: Drug desensitization, a carefully controlled system of helping patients temporarily tolerate medications - from aspirin to antibiotics to chemo - that their bodies one times rejected.
"You don't know how lucky I feel" to have been desensitized, says Vanessa Greenleaf of Marblehead, Mass.
Not everyone's a candidate. But for those who are, the system can mean the difference between getting the best treatment or a runner-up that may not do the job, says Dr. Mariana Castells, an allergist at Harvard & Brigham & Women's Hospital who helped pioneer the care.
"I kept mumbling, 'I require to stay on,'" recalls Greenleaf, 52, who finally got her wish. "All the nurses kept telling me, 'You can, we'll get the drug in to you safely.'"
Greenleaf developed a severe allergy to a mainstay of ovarian cancer treatment, carboplatin. Even as a burning sensation engulfed her body during the allergic attack, Greenleaf's chief fear was that doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital would take her off the chemo combination he believed her best shot.
Allergies make up 5 percent to 10 percent of all adverse reactions to medications, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology. Sometimes drug allergies kill. So anyone who is ever reported an allergic reaction to a medicine, even decades earlier, is told seldom to take that drug.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Chocolatarians Rejoice: Daily Dose of Chocolate Can Be Heart Healthy
A joyous day indeed when the research done by the medical community actually finds that one of your favorite foods can aid your heart, cut your stroke risk and lower blood pressure. And just in time for Easter!
Tomorrow’s publication of the European Heart Journal includes the results of an eight-year study by German researchers, the first to track the effects of chocolate over a long period of time. Following nearly 20,000 participants, all who were similar in health, risk factors and Body Mass Index (BMI), the researchers sent periodic queries on diet, exercise and health issues. The end result showed that eating 6 grams of chocolate—the equivalent of one square—per day, lowered the risk of heart attack and stroke by 39 percent.
Last month, an analysis of three prior studies of chocolate and stroke was conducted by researchers from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Findings of the research indicate that eating about one bar of chocolate per week can help decrease the risk of stroke by 22 percent, as well as reduce the risk of death after a stroke. Another recent study, done on the Kuna tribe of Indians in the Caribbean who drink on average 5 cups of cocoa per day, discovered that chocolate has a relaxing effect on blood vessels, allowing for better blood flow due to the presence of flavanoids.
Even those who have already suffered a heart attack can benefit from the consumption of chocolate. A study released last September issue of the Journal of Internal Medicine, indicates death from heart disease in previous heart attack victims are cut threefold when sufferers eat two are more servings of chocolate weekly, compared to those who refrain from eating chocolate.
The German researchers wouldn’t go so far as to say definitively that you should partake in chocolate on a regular basis. "It's a bit too early to come up with recommendations that people should eat more chocolate, but if people replace sugar or high-fat snacks with a little piece of dark chocolate, that might help," said Brian Buijsse, a nutritional epidemiologist at the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Nuthetal, Germany, the study's lead author.
Moderation seems to be the key, adding healthy ingredients into your diet, of which you can pretty safely say chocolate is one.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Risk-Taking Peaks In Adolescence, Male Study
UK and French researchers investigating how boys and men aged from 9 to 35 chose between risky and safe options in a computer gambling game concluded that adolescents took the most risks, with 14 year olds showing the most risk-taking behaviour.
You can read about the study by researchers at University College London, UK, and the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, in Bron, France, in the journal Cognitive Development, where an in press corrected proof has been available online since 26 March.
Lead author Dr Stephanie Burnett from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and colleagues, wanted to investigate why the onset of adolescence marks such an explosion in risk-taking, such as dangerous driving, unsafe sex, poor dietary habits, physical inactivity and experimenting with alcohol.
They found that teenage boys, unlike children, are quite good at weighing up the pros and cons of decision options, but take risks because they enjoy the thrill of risk taking more than other age groups: they seemed particularly to enjoy it when they had a "lucky escape".
"The reason that teenagers take risks is not a problem with foreseeing the consequences. It was more because they chose to take those risks," Burnett told the media, explaining that their study offers the first lab-based evidence that adolescents are risk-takers.
"We are one step forward in determining why teenagers engage in extremely risky behaviours such as drug use and unsafe sex," she added.
For the study, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society, Burnett and colleagues recruited 86 boys and men aged from 9 to 35 and invited them to play a computer game based on a "probabilistic gambling task" where they had to make decisons to win points and that enabled the researchers to measure how satisfied or dissatisfied they were with the result afterwards.
They found that the ability to maximize expected value of a decision improved with age, but there was an "inverted U-shaped" pattern for risk-seeking that peaked at 14.4 years, and that the onset of teenage years marked an increase in how much they enjoyed winning games that involved a "lucky escape".
This could explain why teenagers are more likely to take big risks.
"Although emotion ratings overall did not differ across age, there was an increase between childhood and young adolescence in the strength of counterfactually mediated emotions (relief and regret) reported after receiving feedback about the gamble outcome," wrote the authors, concluding that this suggests:
"Continuing development of the emotional response to outcomes may be a factor contributing to adolescents' risky behaviour."
Co-author Dr Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, also from the UCL Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, said:
"Understanding why adolescents take such risks is important for public health interventions and for families."
You can read about the study by researchers at University College London, UK, and the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, in Bron, France, in the journal Cognitive Development, where an in press corrected proof has been available online since 26 March.
Lead author Dr Stephanie Burnett from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, and colleagues, wanted to investigate why the onset of adolescence marks such an explosion in risk-taking, such as dangerous driving, unsafe sex, poor dietary habits, physical inactivity and experimenting with alcohol.
They found that teenage boys, unlike children, are quite good at weighing up the pros and cons of decision options, but take risks because they enjoy the thrill of risk taking more than other age groups: they seemed particularly to enjoy it when they had a "lucky escape".
"The reason that teenagers take risks is not a problem with foreseeing the consequences. It was more because they chose to take those risks," Burnett told the media, explaining that their study offers the first lab-based evidence that adolescents are risk-takers.
"We are one step forward in determining why teenagers engage in extremely risky behaviours such as drug use and unsafe sex," she added.
For the study, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society, Burnett and colleagues recruited 86 boys and men aged from 9 to 35 and invited them to play a computer game based on a "probabilistic gambling task" where they had to make decisons to win points and that enabled the researchers to measure how satisfied or dissatisfied they were with the result afterwards.
They found that the ability to maximize expected value of a decision improved with age, but there was an "inverted U-shaped" pattern for risk-seeking that peaked at 14.4 years, and that the onset of teenage years marked an increase in how much they enjoyed winning games that involved a "lucky escape".
This could explain why teenagers are more likely to take big risks.
"Although emotion ratings overall did not differ across age, there was an increase between childhood and young adolescence in the strength of counterfactually mediated emotions (relief and regret) reported after receiving feedback about the gamble outcome," wrote the authors, concluding that this suggests:
"Continuing development of the emotional response to outcomes may be a factor contributing to adolescents' risky behaviour."
Co-author Dr Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, also from the UCL Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, said:
"Understanding why adolescents take such risks is important for public health interventions and for families."
Scorpion venom may help understand cause, treatment of pancreatitis
Washington, Mar 30 : Researchers at North Carolina State University and East Carolina University have gained insight into scorpion venom's effects on the ability of certain cells to release critical components - a finding that may prove useful in understanding diseases like pancreatitis or in targeted drug delivery.
Stomach pacemaker can help treat stomach disorders, chronic vomiting
Washington, Mar 30 : Individuals suffering from acute stomach disorders can occasionally suffer from chronic vomiting. According to a study from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, this symptom can be treated with electrical impulses from a pacemaker in the stomach.
Chocolate bar a day cuts risk of stroke and heart disease
London, Mar 31 : Here's some happy news for chocolate lovers: A bar of the sweet treat can slash your risk of heart disease and stroke by 39 per cent, according to an expert.
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