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.

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.