Category: Health

The companies that market the popular cholesterol drug Vytorin may have deliberately delayed the release of research showing that the drug had no benefit in preventing the build-up of plaque in arteries, according to e-mails obtained Monday from the office of a U.S. senator who has been investigating the matter.

James Stein, a University of Wisconsin-Madison cardiologist who had been hired by Merck/Schering-Plough to provide expert advice for the trial, said he was troubled by the e-mails.

“The e-mails have very serious allegations,” Stein said. “I am very bothered to hear this.”

Nearly two years ago James Stein, a cardiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, got an unusual call.

Researchers for Merck/Schering Plough Pharmaceuticals, who were conducting a clinical trial of the blockbuster cholesterol drug Vytorin, wanted him to look at ultrasound images of the carotid arteries of a few people in the trial, which had just finished enrolling patients. Stein, an expert on the use of carotid ultrasound to detect heart disease, looked at a few of the ultrasounds and didn’t hear much from Merck/Schering-Plough for nearly a year and a half.

In the two years after Stein was contacted, Vytorin, which had already received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, was heavily promoted in TV ads, and its sales skyrocketed, though the results of the trial had not been released, and, when they were finally released, in January, they showed that the drug did not limit the buildup of plaque in arteries.

The results presented in Chicago Sunday show that while the combined drug, Vytorin, reduced cholesterol about 17% more than just Zocor, there was no significant difference in the plaque thickness found in the carotid arteries of the 720 patients in the trial, who were about equally divided between Zocor and Vytorin. In other words, Vytorin did no more for artery health than Zocor alone.

As John Mirasola sat reading a college textbook nearly 18 years ago, a strange thing happened. A few of the words on each page disappeared as though they had been whited out. “It was just little white spots, and then it would come back,” said the 39-year-old. Unfortunately, the incident was a prelude to a neurological condition that would worsen and eventually thrust him into the frontier of brain research.

A few months later, after suffering his first seizure, Mirasola was diagnosed with epilepsy, a condition caused by electrical disturbances emanating from deep within his brain. As the source of his seizures, the faulty impulses have beaten the best of what modern medicine has to offer.

His epilepsy has remained uncontrolled, dominating his life and costing him two jobs and his driving privileges. Last month, he took a plunge into an arcane field of medical science that is in its infancy, a discipline known as neurostimulation.

In a five-hour operation, doctors at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in Madison inserted two thin electrodes about five inches into his brain, at the back of his head. They carved out a section of his skull that was deep enough to cradle a device about the size of an iPod Shuffle, and his scalp was pulled back over the device.

It seems that people can acquire the ability to feel emotions such as kindness and compassion, just as they learned skills like reading and writing, a new study says.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison say that by monitoring subjects with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, they could see that the part of the brain that controls empathy is affected when a person is engaged in compassionate meditation.

Weâ??re in the midst of a revolution in brain science. The long-held dogma that brain connections are unchangeable after age five, is being usurped with findings that the brain is more plastic than we thought.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison published a study in PLoS One this week, showing that our capacity for empathy can be learned and mastered â?? as one might learn to play soccer or piano. The skill here comes from meditation. (Audio.)

THURSDAY, March 27 (HealthDay News) — New research suggests that qualities the world desperately needs more of — love, kindness and compassion — are indeed teachable.

Imaging technology shows that people who practice meditation that focuses on kindness and compassion actually undergo changes in areas of the brain that make them more in tune to what others are feeling.

A UW-Madison researcher has found evidence that a cholesterol-lowering statin drug may help slow the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

The research by Dr. Cynthia Carlsson showed that middle-aged adult children of persons with Alzheimer’s disease who took 40 milligrams of simvastatin daily performed better cognitively than those who took a placebo pill.

Madison-based TomoTherapy, which went public and installed its first cancer treatment machines in China and India last year, is poised to embark on another venture: pet therapy.

UW-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine plans next year to install the first TomoTherapy machine anywhere designated for veterinary use.

Part of the data was tested and analyzed in Madison at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, where the group conducted some studies to look for specific genes but also ran tests to see what they could find.

“Whats really cool is that the technology used was not widely available 10 years ago, but now with it, we can screen lots and lots of genes and identify novel genes,” said Christina Kendziorski, an associate professor in biostatistics and medical informatics at UW.

For millions of frustrated smokers, drugmakers promise to help them quit with a little pill. But studies from the companies themselves don’t show very promising results.

“The drugs are approved because they’ve shown in FDA studies that they’re better than placebo,” said Dr. Edward Levin, a psychopharmacological researcher at Duke University Medical Center in Raleigh, N.C. “But being better than placebo doesn’t take a whole lot, so there really is room for improvement.”

Pfizer’s Chantix is the most effective therapy in quitting smoking, according to test results from a company-funded study conducted by Dr. Douglas Jorenby of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. During the 12 weeks that patients were on the drug, a little less than half were able to quit smoking.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office today upheld the final two stem cell patents taken out by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation that had been challenged by foundations in California and New York.

The actions are the second time in two weeks that the patent office has supported the claims of key stem cell patents held by WARF, a private supporting organization of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. On Feb. 25, the office affirmed the claims of a third patent also relating to Dr. James Thomson’s work with human embryonic stem cells.

Some UW Hospital patients will soon test an unusual treatment: They’ll drink a cocktail of worm eggs, which will hatch inside their bodies.

Doctors say the low-grade infection of worms, harvested from pigs, can help regulate faulty immune systems. The patients have multiple sclerosis, in which the immune system attacks nerve cells.

Kyle Holen and Herbert Chen, doctors at UW Hospital, are studying an experimental drug that could someday give hope to patients with a rare form of cancer for which existing treatments rarely work.

The drug could treat neuroendocrine tumors, which involve cells that produce insulin, serotonin, thyroid and other hormones.

Patricia Keely is fighting cancer on two fronts:
â?¢ In her lab, she and her colleagues at UW-Madison are discovering secrets of breast cancer, including why it occurs more often in dense breast tissue.

â?¢ In her life, she volunteered for a clinical trial at the Mayo Clinic of a new drug in hopes of surviving her own cancer of the esophagus.

For several years, scientists have suspected that our hyper-hygienic world of vaccinations, antibacterial soap and bottled water actually might be making some people sick by bewildering their immune systems and causing them to turn on their bodies.

Now, doctors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are about to carry that theory to the ickiest extreme.

MADISON, Wis. — Some groundbreaking research being done at the UW could greatly affect those at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

The goal of the research is to try to identify Alzheimer’s disease before symptoms start occurring, and researchers believe to do that, you must look at the brain.

That’s exactly what Dr. Sterling Johnson is doing. He’s been doing work where healthy people, both with a family history of Alzheimer’s disease and without, have MRI’s done while performing memory tasks.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office delivered some good news to the University of Wisconsin-Madison today (Thursday).

In dismissing a key challenge to James Thomson’s breakthrough discovery on stem cells by New York and California interests, the office cleared the way for the UW to benefit from the research in the years ahead.

Congratulations to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which holds the patent, and Thomson, who pioneered the stem cell procedures. Not only will the school benefit, but so will Wisconsin taxpayers.

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation has won a key patent battle for one of its stem cell patents, after the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office upheld the foundation’s claim to the patent.

The decision affirms WARF’s contention that an initial UW-Madison human embryonic stem cell discovery is a patentable invention.

The decision was announced in a press release this morning from WARF.

MADISON, Wis. — The Wisconsin Women’s Foundation is releasing a first-of-its-kind report Thursday that targets health concerns for women in Wisconsin.

The report targets more than 10 pressing issues related to women’s health. Dr. Teri Woods, of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, examined the results and shared them with WISC-TV.