Archive for October, 2009

Before using Lipitor :

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

Some medical conditions may interact with Lipitor . Tell your doctor or pharmacist if you have any medical conditions, especially if any of the following apply to you:
-if you are pregnant, planning to become pregnant, or are breast-feeding
-if you are taking any prescription or nonprescription medicine, herbal preparation, or dietary supplement
-if you have allergies to medicines, foods, or other substances
-if you have low blood pressure, a serious infection, or a history of seizures
-if you have metabolism, hormonal, or electrolyte problems
-if you drink alcohol or have a history of liver problems or alcohol abuse
-if you have recently had major surgery, a serious injury, or a stroke

Some MEDICINES MAY INTERACT with Lipitor . Tell your health care provider if you are taking any other medicines, especially any of the following:
*Amiodarone, azole antifungals (eg, itraconazole, ketoconazole), colchicine, diltiazem, fibrates (eg, clofibrate, gemfibrozil), fluconazole, HIV protease inhibitors (eg, ritonavir), imatinib, immunosuppressants (eg, cyclosporine), macrolides (eg, erythromycin), mibefradil, nefazodone, niacin, non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (eg, delavirdine), streptogramins (eg, dalfopristin), telithromycin, vasopressin receptor antagonists (eg, conivaptan), verapamil, or voriconazole because they may increase the risk of muscle or kidney problems
*Bosentan, carbamazepine, efavirenz, rifampin, or St. John’s wort because they may decrease Lipitor ’s effectiveness
*Digoxin, hormonal contraceptives (eg, birth control pills), macrolide immunosuppressants (eg, tacrolimus), or spironolactone because the risk of their side effects may be increased by Lipitor

This may not be a complete list of all interactions that may occur. Ask your health care provider if Lipitor may interact with other medicines that you take. Check with your health care provider before you start, stop, or change the dose of any medicine.

How should I take Lipitor?

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

Take Lipitor exactly as it was prescribed for you. Do not take the medication in larger amounts, or take it for longer than recommended by your doctor. Follow the directions on your prescription label.

Take Lipitor with a full glass of water. This medication can be taken with or without food.

Lipitor is usually taken once a day. Try to take your dose at the same time each day. Follow your doctor’s instructions.

To be sure this medication is helping your condition, your blood will need to be tested on a regular basis. Your liver function may also need to be tested. Do not miss any scheduled appointments.

In rare cases, Lipitor can cause a condition that results in the breakdown of skeletal muscle tissue. This condition can lead to kidney failure. Call your doctor at once if you have unexplained muscle pain or tenderness, muscle weakness, fever or flu symptoms, and dark colored urine.

Lipitor is only part of a complete program of treatment that also includes diet, exercise, and weight control. Follow your diet, medication, and exercise routines very closely.

You may need to take Lipitor on a long-term basis for the treatment of high cholesterol.

Store Lipitor at room temperature, protected from moisture, heat, and light.

Unhooking the Obesity-Diabetes Connection

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Scientists may be closer sometimes to solving sometimes a a few medical mysterious unusually w. dense implications in behalf of house and brilliantly public occasionally health : Why manner obese ppl are manner prone sometimes to developing systematically type 2 diabetes.

A series of studies appearing on the internet July 26 in Nature Medicine consciously suggest fact that sore within the brilliantly fat tissues of difficult individuals could trigger the sometimes blood pretty sugar unusually disease .

What’s any more, ea of the four all around absolute studies, fm. two continents and three countries, showed fact that interfering w. these immune-cell processes literally reversed diabetes in mice.

The imperishable implications of the findings are enticing: all alone d. sometimes a quietly cure in behalf of systematically type 2 diabetes, sometimes a quick condition fact that plagues any more than 23 million ppl in the US solo.

“This quietly group of papers suggests fact that cellular absolute immunity may adjust sore in brilliantly fat ,” said Dr. Vivian Fonseca, Prof. of strong medicine at sometimes a the maximum rate of Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and a major producer of the Diabetes Institute at sometimes a the maximum rate of Scott & White. “The ideal authors do without consciously suggest fact that if you hurriedly change the seditious return on the instinctively part of changing by the way the main part cells indifference respond sometimes to sometimes a trigger in behalf of sore, you power feel way up to piss off at sometimes a the maximum rate of the pretty real instantly heart of diabetes and fact that suggests you could quietly cure a fiery speech.”

But Fonseca warned, each and all these studies were conducted in mice and unconsciously have as pretty early as sometimes to be ideal proven in humans

In systematically type 2 diabetes, the main part as many sometimes a time as with not becomes ideal resistant sometimes to insulin and doesn’t unconsciously use a fiery speech effectively. In last but then one decade or such that, researchers unconsciously have unconsciously presented statement fact that suppressing sore in animals could silent improve insulin violent resistance and little other processes active w. diabetes. Inflammation is everywhere believed sometimes to be active in ideal many metabolic diseases afflicting manner obese individuals. Inflammation in brilliantly fat chain, in exacting, seems sometimes to be sometimes a wrongdoer, on the instinctively part of changing brilliantly fat chain office, thereby contributing sometimes to insulin violent resistance.

But the scrupulous mechanisms of the a grand event unconsciously have obsolete iffy.

Three papers, all alone fm. Japan, all alone fm. Canada and all alone fm. the US, showed fact that unsusceptible pretty system cells of note as with T cells were defective in manner obese mice, pushing the unsusceptible pretty system sometimes to another regularly initiate insulin violent resistance.

Restoring T cells sometimes to any more occasionally normal levels literally reversed w. indifference gain and dramatically improved greatly improve significantly improved insulin violent resistance, be revenged when the mice continued on sometimes a high-fat abstain.

The fourth exploration looked at sometimes a the maximum rate of one more high class of unsusceptible cells automatically called mast cells, which are any more a little commonly linked sometimes to allergies.

An over-abundance of mast cells contributed sometimes to plumpness and diabetes in mice, but then when mast cells were removed fm. the pretty system the jam was corrected, account in behalf of by exploration Sr. a. Guo-Ping Shi, sometimes a biochemist w. Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

“We gave mice sometimes a high-fat abstain in behalf of three months and they developed plumpness and diabetes,” he said. But mice fact that had obsolete stripped of mast cells did absolutely wrong. “These mice are protected fm. the unusually disease if they are after these cells,” Shi said.

Shi’s get just as with soon gave wild-type (”normal”) mice allergy medicines, which quietly work sometimes to “stabilize” mast cells. This just as with soon led sometimes to improvements in the mice.

“We can unconsciously use the hard drugs sometimes to manoeuvre cubicle maximum activity or gently prevent unusually disease in superb this duck soup,” Shi said.

Shi said he has signed sometimes a big contract w. sometimes a occasionally local throng work out sometimes a v. of the hard drugs sometimes to silent combat diabetes in humans.

Well-placed defibrillators could save many lives

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Placing portable defibrillators in schools and other busy public spaces could get timely, possibly life-saving, treatment to many people whose hearts stop beating, according to two studies published Monday.

Most cases of cardiac arrest occur when the heart goes into ventricular fibrillation, a heart-rhythm disturbance in which the heart begins to quiver chaotically and can no longer pump blood around the body.

An electrical shock from a defibrillator can restore the heart’s normal rhythm and reverse cardiac arrest. In recent years, portable, layperson-friendly versions of the devices, called automated external defibrillators (AEDs), have been placed in a growing number of public places.

AEDs automatically analyze the heart’s rhythm and, if needed, instruct the user to deliver a shock.

In one of the new studies, researchers found that at 1,710 U.S. high schools with AEDs on site, nearly two-thirds of cardiac arrest victims survived. That compares with a typical survival rate of only about 5 percent when cardiac arrest occurs outside of a hospital.

In the second study, Danish researchers found that following guidelines from the American Heart Association (AHA) on placement of AEDs in public places could get prompt treatment to nearly 70 percent of cardiac arrests that occur in public.

The studies, both published in the AHA journal Circulation, suggest that strategically placed AEDs could improve the dismal survival rates from cardiac arrest.

The findings from the high school study are “good news,” according to lead researcher Dr. Jonathan A. Drezner, because while rare — the study found that it happened to about 4 in 100,000 student athletes per year — cardiac arrest is the leading cause of death in young athletes.

AEDs can also be life-saving for adults on school grounds. Of the 36 cardiac arrests in the high school study, 22 occurred in adults. Fourteen of those victims survived, as did nine of 14 student athletes.

“Placing AEDs in schools in schools is a strategic way to protect children, young athletes and adults from a catastrophic outcome if they suffer an unexpected cardiac arrest,” Drezner, an associate professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, told Reuters Health.

The Danish study looked at the potential effectiveness of following two different guidelines on public placement of AEDs: the AHA guidelines, which recommend the devices for places that see at least one cardiac arrest every five years, and European guidelines that call for AEDs in public areas that see one cardiac arrest every two years.

The AHA advice, researchers estimate, would have covered 67 percent of cardiac arrests that occurred in Copenhagen over 10 years. The European guidance would have covered just 20 percent.

Still, wider AED placement is not enough on its own, according to lead researcher Dr. Fredrik Folke, of Gentofte University Hospital in Denmark. It’s still up to bystanders who witness a person collapse to quickly get help — calling 911 and alerting personnel who will know where the AED is, and how to use it.

Performing immediate CPR also remains vital, Folke told Reuters Health, since a victim’s chances of survival drop 10 percent for each minute defibrillation is delayed; CPR improves those odds.

Similarly, schools need to have an overall emergency response plan to cardiac arrest, Drezner’s team points out. That includes training all staff in the signs of cardiac arrest and the location of the school AED, Drezner said. He added that all coaches and physical education teachers should know how to perform CPR and use the AED.

In his study, 83 percent of schools had an emergency response plan, but only 40 percent reviewed and practiced it at least once a year.

SOURCE: Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association, August 11, 2009.

Do NOT use Lipitor if:

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

*you are allergic to any ingredient in Lipitor
*you have liver problems or unexplained abnormal liver function tests
*you are pregnant or breast-feeding
*you are taking an HIV protease inhibitor (eg, ritonavir), itraconazole, or mibefradil

Contact your doctor or health care provider right away if any of these apply to you.

Before taking Lipitor

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

Do not use this medication if you are allergic to atorvastatin, if you are pregnant or breast-feeding, or if you have liver disease.

Before taking Lipitor, tell your doctor if you are allergic to any drugs, or if you have:

diabetes;

underactive thyroid;
kidney disease;
a history of liver disease; or

a muscle disorder.

If you have any of these conditions, you may need a dose adjustment or special tests to safely take Lipitor.

FDA pregnancy category X. This medication can cause birth defects. Do not use Lipitor if you are pregnant. Tell your doctor right away if you become pregnant during treatment. Use an effective form of birth control while you are using this medication. It is not known whether atorvastatin passes into breast milk or if it could harm a nursing baby. Do not take Lipitor without telling your doctor if you are breast-feeding a baby. Lipitor is not for use in children younger than 10 years of age.

Could the Recession Be Good for Your Health?

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

The economic downturn may not be all bad. In fact, U.S. researchers say recessions may actually be good for health.

University of Michigan researchers looked at death rates during the Great Depression, the worst economic slump in the 20th century. From the stock market crash of 1929 through the early 1930s, economic activity fell sharply, dropping 14 percent in 1932, while unemployment hit 22.9 percent that same year.

Black and white images from the era of bread lines and migrant farmers make it easy to assume the economic misery would have affected public health.

But when the researchers looked at mortality rates among men, women and children from 1920 to 1940, they found death rates declined during years of falling economic activity and rose when times were better.

The study is in the Sept. 28 online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

During the two decades spanning the 1920s and 1930s, overall life expectancy increased by 8.8 years. But it wasn’t a steady rise, instead shooting up and falling back in a pattern that correlated with the rise and fall of economic activity.

Between 1921 and 1926, the so-called “Roaring 20s” and a time of robust economic growth, life expectancy for non-white men fell by 8.1 years. Yet between 1929 and 1933, the years of steepest economic decline, their life expectancy grew a similar amount.

Likewise, non-white women lost 7.4 years of life expectancy during the Roaring 20s, but they gained 8.2 years of life expectancy during the Depression.

Whites showed a similar pattern, though the loss in life expectancy wasn’t as extreme as for non-whites.

“The basic finding of the paper is that mortality rates tend to evolve in parallel to the economy,” said lead study author Jose Tapia Granados, an assistant research scientist at University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. “When the economy goes up, mortality tends to go up. When the economy goes down, mortality rates tend to go down, too.”

Researchers did find one exception. During the 1920s and 1930s, two-thirds of all deaths were caused by cardiovascular and renal diseases, cancer, influenza and pneumonia, tuberculosis, motor vehicle accidents and suicide.

All became less deadly during difficult economic times, with the exception of suicides. But suicides accounted for fewer than 2 percent of all deaths, not enough to alter the overall trend, the study authors added.

The country’s climb out of the Great Depression began in 1933. The economy grew by more than 10 percent annually from 1933 to 1936. Mortality again peaked in 1936, four years after the worst year of the Depression, even for children under age 4.

The surge in deaths in 1936 isn’t just attributable to lag time, the researchers noted. Deaths from motor vehicle accidents went up, in which lag time would not play a role.

So why would the return of good times be bad for health?

More economic activity means people have money to drive cars, meaning more die in auto wrecks, the researchers theorize. In the 1920s and 1930s, cars became objects of mass consumption.

As motor vehicle use increases, so does pollution. Recent studies have linked particulate matter from cars and trucks and carbon monoxide with heart attacks and strokes.

During periods of growth, people have more money to spend on alcohol and cigarettes. And more economic activity means more factory orders, meaning people are working harder and longer and sleeping less.

Still, this is not to say that losing a job is good for your health. The study looks at the bigger picture — fewer cars, fewer people working overtime, less pollution — and how it may benefit public health as a whole.

A similar pattern may be at work during the current downturn, the authors suggested.

“My expectation is that mortality rates in 2008 will be lower than in 2007, and probably in 2009 will be lower than 2008,” Tapia said. “There is a general improvement, even though suicides are going up.”

Joshua Klapow, associate professor at the University of Alabama Birmingham’s School of Public Health, said he would be cautious about applying any of the findings to today’s recession.

Society has changed significantly in the past 60 to 80 years, he said. Medical advances enable people to live with chronic diseases for much longer nowadays. Infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, kill fewer people today. Fewer people do manual labor, smoking has declined, and obesity has shot up.

“The only points of similarity are the economic factors,” Klapow said. “You can’t equate health status, health care, health costs or lifestyles with the 1920s or the 1930s. You have confounding factors right now that prevent us from drawing any reasonable conclusion about our current state.”

And during this downturn, studies show that many Americans are making poor health choices, such as cutting back on medications and putting off medical care because of costs.

“We have a lot of indicators during this economic turmoil that the health status of our population is not getting better,” Klapow said. “The study is fascinating, but we have to be very careful not to forecast a trajectory to our present day.”

Genes Linked to Cholesterol in Cells Are Identified

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

Twenty genes that play major roles in controlling cholesterol within cells have been identified by German researchers, who said that some of the genes may play a role in heart disease risk and offer new targets for drug treatment.

The 20 genes are likely to be “immediately relevant” for maintaining cholesterol levels in the cell, as well as controlling the uptake of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, the researchers explained in the July 8 issue of Cell Metabolism.

“High cholesterol in the blood is considered to be responsible for excess cardiovascular morbidity and mortality,” Dr. Heiko Runz, of the University of Heidelberg, said in a news release from the journal’s publisher. “Blood cholesterol levels are controlled by cholesterol in cells. Therefore, some of the genes identified by us as regulators of cellular cholesterol in future studies might turn out to be disease genes that contribute to hypercholesterolemia [high cholesterol] in some cases.”

The genes identified in the study may also have potential as targets for new cholesterol-lowering drugs, the researchers say. And the new methods used in the study could help identify many more cholesterol genes.

“Until now, disease-associated genes affecting blood cholesterol levels have successfully been identified in single families and, more recently, genomic studies involving large number of patients,” Runz and colleagues wrote.

“Most of what we know about the molecular machinery that keeps cholesterol levels balanced, however, comes from using cultured cell models,” they said. “A functional analysis of many genes at once by the integrated functional genomics technology applied here now harbors potential not only to ease identification, but also to better describe the molecular roles of cholesterol regulators in health and disease.”

Lipitor is used for:

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Lowering high cholesterol and triglycerides in certain patients. It also increases high-density lipoprotein (HDL, “good”) cholesterol levels. It is used along with an appropriate diet. It is used in certain patients to reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke, chest pain caused by angina, or blood vessel blockage. It is also used in certain patients to reduce the risk of hospitalization for congestive heart failure, or the need for medical procedures to open blocked heart blood vessels. It may also be used for other conditions as determined by your doctor.

Lipitor is an HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor, also known as a “statin.” It works by reducing the production of certain fatty substances in the body, including cholesterol.