March 31, 2008

•   Sufferer Fights For More Treatment
  (Shropshire Star) -- A Shropshire man who suffers from a rare life-threatening disorder is battling against proposed new medical recommendations which could see vital funding for treatment scrapped.
  

• Jailed Diet-Drug Lawyers Appeal Bail Ruling
  (Louisville Courier-Journal) -- Hoping to get out of jail after nearly six months, suspended lawyers William Gallion and Shirley Cunningham Jr. offered an unusual bail earlier this year: their share of several racehorses' future earnings, including Curlin, the 2007 Horse of the Year.
  

• Teen Awaiting Lungs Transplant
  (The Republican) -- Sixteen-year-old Cassie E. Tessier is waiting for a life-saving double lung transplant that could come at any moment, but she is not letting that or her illness stop her from living as full a life as she can.
  

• Miracle Lung Transplant Patient
  (WJHG) -- One local man is 76 years old and is the oldest living lung transplant patient to ever walk out of the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville.
  

•   Heart Ops Halve Due To Lack Of Organs
  (Irish Independent) -- The ongoing plight of people desperately in need of an organ transplant was revealed yesterday as Donor Awareness Week, which begins next Saturday, March 29, was launched.
  

•   Lung Patients 'Condemned To Death As NHS Withdraws Their Too Expensive Drugs'
  (Daily Mail) -- The condition, pulmonary hypertension, affects an estimated 4,000 people in the UK.
  

• Teen Awaiting Lungs Transplant
  (The Republican) -- Sixteen-year-old Cassie E. Tessier is waiting for a life-saving double lung transplant that could come at any moment, but she is not letting that or her illness stop her from living as full a life as she can.
  

• Basic Lung Function Measures Detect Pulmonary Hypertension In Pulmonary Fibrosis
  (Medscape/Reuters) -- A formula that uses common measurements of lung function to screen for pulmonary hypertension in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which was first published last fall, has now been validated by the same researchers in a study published in the March issue of Chest.
  

• One-Third Of Patients On Transplant List Not Eligible
  (Chicago Tribune) -- The list of patients waiting for organ transplants---widely used to promote organ donations---includes thousands who are ineligible for the operations, according to statistics kept by the national network that manages the allocation of organs.
  

• Dakota's Story: The Fight Of A Lifetime
  (NBC29, VA) -- Dakota is like any other 11-year-old boy. He likes to play video games and spend time with his family. But since the summer of 2006, life has become a lot harder for the Falls. Dakota was diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension.
  

• Diet By Robot
  (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- When it comes to losing weight, most everyone can use a helping hand. But imagine if you had a weight-loss coach around to help you 24-7? Now -- imagine if that coach was a robot?
  

• Payers Aim To Rein In Specialty-Drug Spending
  (WSJ) -- Specialty-drug spending in the U.S. could reach $99 billion by 2010, nearly double the $54 billion spent in 2006, says Steven Miller, chief medical officer of Express Scripts, which manages drug benefits for health plans that cover 55 million people.
  

•   Axe Falls On Peak Organ Transplant Group Australians Donate
  (The Daily Telegraph) -- The nation's organ donation system is in unprecedented crisis as the transplant rate remains one of the worst in the world - and falling.
  

• Methamphetamine Use Associated With PAH In Patients With Previously Unknown Risk Factors
  (EarthTimes) -- While national and regional variances in methamphetamine use exist, one study conducted at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), observed methamphetamine use in approximately 24 percent of patients with previously unknown risk factors for the disease.
  

• Severe Lupus May Respond To Drug Combo
  (Reuters) -- The two drugs are rituximab, known as Rituxan or MabThera, which targets the B cells of the immune system, and cyclophosphamide, a strong immune suppressant drug.
  

• Pulmonary Hypertension In Heart Failure
  (Medscape) -- Dr. Mathier presents a review of the current data on treatment options and management of pulmonary hypertension in heart failure.
  

• Hospital Helps Slow Progress Of Child's Pulmonary Hypertension
  (Los Angeles Daily News) -- The Van Wormers said they're trying to start up a support group for their son, whose physical activity is limited, and other young pulmonary hypertension patients, tentatively called Soldiers of the Light.
  

• Molecular Biology Of Sleep Apnea Could Lead To New Treatments
  (EurekAlert) -- The team found that in an animal model of sleep apnea poorly folded proteins accumulate in one compartment of a muscle nerve cell, which, under certain conditions, tells a cell to heal itself or destroy itself. The findings appear in a recent issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.
  

• Some Imperfect Hearts OK For Transplant
  (HealthDay News) -- Five-year results for people given hearts with mild-to-moderate left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) -- a thickening of the heart's main pumping chamber -- were as good as for those who got hearts with no problems, cardiologists at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles report.
  

• New Kidney 'Changed My Whole Personality'
  (Daily Telegraph) -- Cheryl Johnson, 37, says she has changed completely since receiving the organ in May. She believes that she must have picked up her new characteristics from the donor, a 59-year-old man who died from an aneurysm.
  

•   Organ Donors' Families Refusing Consent
  (Belfast Telegraph) -- Nearly half the families of people on the Organ Donor Register in Northern Ireland who died between 2005 and 2007 refused to give consent for a transplant to take place, the Belfast Telegraph reveals today.
  

• Terminal Options For The Irreversibly Ill
  (New York Times) -- My Feb. 5 column, “A Heartfelt Appeal for a Graceful Exit,” prompted a deluge of information and requests for information on how people too sick to reap meaningful pleasure from life might be able to control their death.
  

• Diseases Like Mine Are A Growing Hazard
  (Washington Post) -- Autoimmune diseases -- a group of about 100 conditions in which the body's immune system turns on the body itself -- are reaching epidemic proportions. In the past decade, 15 top medical journals have reported rising rates of lupus, multiple sclerosis, scleroderma, Crohn's disease, Addison's disease and polymyositis in industrialized countries around the world.
  

• Study Shows Obesity Drug Safe
  (Forbes) -- Lorcaserin was under scrutiny because it has similar characteristics to Wyeth's former fen-phen diet pill, once touted as a miracle drug but which later was found to cause heart-valve damage, sparking massive lawsuits.
  

• Artificial Sweetener: Diet Aid Or Saboteur?
  (LA Times) -- Some researchers say artificial sweeteners in sodas and other foods may confuse systems that assess calorie intake and control appetite.
  

• Anticoagulants, Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension, And Scleroderma
  (Medscape) -- Is the PAH that is associated with scleroderma the same as IPAH, and is anticoagulation therapy useful?
  

• Medicare Announces Final Coverage Policy For Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Therapy For Obstructive Sleep Apnea
  (Medical News Today) -- The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) expanded Medicare coverage for continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) devices to include beneficiaries who have been diagnosed, using a home sleep test, with obstructive sleep apnea. CMS also announced changes to simplify certain test requirements.
  

• Lung Damage In Babies With Congenital Heart Disease Under Study
  (EurekAlert) -- Dr. Black and his colleague, Dr. Jeffrey Fineman, a whole-animal physiologist and physician at the University of California, San Francisco, are using sheep – whose four-chambered hearts are essentially identical to human hearts – as a model to identify events that trigger blood vessel production, called angiogenesis, and the abrupt halt.
  

• The Age Of Consent For Organ Donation Will Drop From 18 To 15 Years Old
  (WSAW) -- The age of consent for organ donation in Wisconsin will drop from 18 to 15 years old. A new bill would lower the age in hopes of increasing the number of available organ donors.
  

• Woman Is Living With PH
  (The Rolla Daily News) -- Something wasn’t registering, so House started digging around for answers. She hit pay dirt when she discovered a little known disease called pulmonary hypertension (PH).
  

• Lupus Advocates Urge Increased Funding For Lupus Research And Education
  (PRNewswire) -- On Tuesday, March 11, more than 300 individuals with lupus, their families, and health professionals urged Members of Congress to increase government funding for lupus medical research and enact legislation that will greatly expand federal efforts on lupus.
  

• Personal Contact Helps Maintain Weight Loss
  (HealthDay News) -- Statistics on maintaining weight loss are often dismal, but a new study finds that when people have monthly personal contact with a weight-loss professional, they're able to keep off more weight.

•   Poorly Tot Kept Alive By Viagra
  (The Sun) -- Brave Oliver takes the sex drug four times a day to control pulmonary hypertension (PH), a rare condition that causes chronic high blood pressure.
  

• The Power Of A Bagel
  (The Huffington Post) -- The woman discussing how she needed to eat this bagel has more motivation to lose weight than most people ever will. She needs to be thinner in order to be a candidate for a lung transplant.
  

• Sleep Apnea Costly For Older Adults
  (Reuters) -- Elderly and middle-aged adults with obstructive sleep apnea may be a bigger drain on healthcare services than their counterparts without the common sleep disorder, new research suggests.
  

• Anti-Rejection Nanotherapy Shows Promise In Rodent Lung Transplant Model
  (Newswise) -- A multidisciplinary team from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, in collaboration with The University of Texas at Austin, is testing a novel nanoparticle aerosol therapy to prevent post-transplant rejection.
  

•   Gift Of Life: 8,000 Sign Up To Save Lives
  (The Star) -- The Star launched our Gift of Life campaign six weeks ago to help tackle the situation - and since then more than 8,000 readers have joined the register as we aim to find 25,000 potential donors by August.
  

• Kidneys Affected In 40 Percent Of People With Lupus
  (Medical News Today) -- It is estimated that as many as 40 percent of all people with the autoimmune disease lupus, and as many as two-thirds of all children with lupus, will develop kidney complications that require medical evaluation and treatment.
  

• Northwestern Memorial Study Tests Cancer Drug on Scleroderma Patients
  (Sun Herald) -- The study is the first of its kind to examine if Gleevec, a cancer drug commonly used to treat leukemia, will treat the skin thickness in scleroderma patients by blocking the pathway that causes fibrosis.
  

• Little Blue Pill Saves Newborn
  (Times of India) -- The jury may still be out on Viagra, but the magic blue pill saved the life of a newborn suffering from pulmonary hypertension. A neonatologist, Dr Girish Arora, of local hospital claimed that the drug was used on an "experimental basis" after the newborn did not respond to any other treatment.
  

• Lung Transplants Skewed By Race
  (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) -- The numbers of African-Americans on waiting lists for new organs are about half of what they should be based on the prevalence of certain lung diseases, researchers at Columbia University in New York found.
  

• Gene Variant Predicts Response To Warfarin
  (MedPage Today) -- Response to warfarin (Coumadin) occurs much more rapidly in patients with one variation in the gene for vitamin K epoxide reductase, researchers here found.

• Early Intervention in PAH: Current Strategies and New Clinical Trial Evidence (Slides With Transcript)
  (Medscape) -- An indepth look at the current literature, incidence and treatment of PH in systemic sclerosis.
  

• Portopulmonary Hypertension May Be Treated By A Combination Therapy Of 3 Vasodilators
  (Medical News Today) -- Combination therapy of Prostacyclin, Sildenafil, and Bosentan helped a young male patient with severe portopulmonary hypertension improve enough to receive a liver transplant. It was also used post-transplant to help him maintain his health.
  

• Survival Rates Exceed National Averages For UCSF Heart, Liver And Lung Transplant Programs
  (Medical News Today) -- One-year survival rates for patients receiving heart, liver and lung transplants at UCSF Medical Center exceed national averages at statistically significant levels, according to new data compiled by the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR).
  

•   'Sympathy' For Organ Donor Change
  (BBC) -- The health secretary has admitted she is becoming "increasingly sympathetic" to a system of presumed consent to overcome an organ donation shortage.
  

Set your DVRs!
• Mystery Disease
  (Staten Island Advance) -- In the episode, "The Girl Nobody Believed," premiering at 10 p.m. (channel 115), viewers ultimately will learn that Ms. Larson has pulmonary hypertension (PH), a rare and incurable blood vessel disorder of the lungs. They will see her journey through her eyes, as well as those of her doctors, best friend and mother.
  

affects UK, but worth reading
•   National Institute For Health And Clinical Excellence Releases Appraisal Consultation Document On Treatment Of PAH In Adults
  (ITNews) -- The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has today published on its website the preliminary recommendations of its Appraisal Committee on the use of epoprostenol, iloprost, bosentan, sitaxentan and sildenafil for the treatment of pulmonary hypertension in adults.
  

• Taking The Air Out Of Pulmonology
  (MedPage Today) -- I had a talk with a friend who is a pulmonologist today. I was complaining to her about how hard it is to get somebody in to see her or one of the other pulmonologists in town. While it is hard to throw a rock and not hit a cardiologist, and nephrology groups seem to be growing steadily as well, the supply of good pulmonary physicians is scarce.
  

• March 3–9, 2008--National Sleep Awareness Week
  (CDC) -- Insufficient sleep is associated with a number of chronic diseases and conditions—such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and depression—which threaten our nation’s health. Notably, insufficient sleep is associated with the onset of these diseases and also poses important implications for their management and outcome.
  

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