Hell Hath No Fury Like a Vytorin Investigator Scorned

Sen. Chuck Grassley lobbed another round of letters at Merck and Schering-Plough today, asking the companies to explain their handling of the results of a disappointing clinical test of cholesterol drug Vytorin. The latest missives to the companies from Grassley (R-Iowa) came just a day after Vytorin took a beating at the annual scientific meeting [...]

Whither Vytorin? Consider Canada

With all the Vytorin buzz in the past day, one interesting take has flown under the radar. At the same time the New England Journal of Medicine published the study that’s caused all the fuss, the journal also published a comparison of the use of ezetimibe in Canada and the United States (online here).
Ezetimibe is [...]

Riding the Hospitalist Boom to an IPO

A national physician practice outfit called IPC The Hospitalist Company rode the wave in hospitalist medicine and went public earlier this year. The company’s CEO Adam Singer swung by this morning for a quick video interview.
There are more than 20,000 hospitalists working in this country now — a lot, given that the profession was essentially [...]

Vytorin Pain May Be Abbott’s Gain

What’s bad for Merck and Schering-Plough may be good for Abbott Laboratories. Yesterday’s downbeat discussion about Vytorin at a meeting of caridologists may lead doctors to look farther for alternative cholesterol treatments when statins aren’t getting the job done. The search may lead them to Abbott.
Abbott markets niacin-based drugs called Niaspan and SimCor (a combination [...]

Big Insurers Pay for Online Doctor Visits

Doctors are finally starting to get compensated for online consultations with patients, but whether the practice will catch on is another story.
Aetna recently took a three-state pilot project nationwide, and Cigna plans to start paying for Web visits next year, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
Both companies contract with RelayHealth, a company that has built a system [...]

Hard Lessons from Vytorin’s ‘Trial Out of Hell’

Since 2002, when the first patient was enrolled in the controversial Enhance trial of the cholesterol drug Vytorin, Dutch researcher John Kastelein had been looking forward to presenting the findings to a lecture hall packed with thousands of other heart doctors.
Kastelein (pictured) finally got that chance yesterday in Chicago at the American College of Cardiology, [...]

Hard Lessons from Vytorin’s ‘Trial out of Hell’

Since 2002, when the first patient was enrolled in the controversial Enhance trial of the cholesterol drug Vytorin, Dutch researcher John Kastelein had been looking forward to presenting the findings to a lecture hall packed with thousands of other heart doctors.
Kastelein (pictured) finally got that chance yesterday in Chicago at the American College of Cardiology, [...]

Allergan and J&J Pump Up Weight-Loss Surgery

Minimally invasive surgery to treat obesity is getting the Big Pharma treatment. Salespeople are fanning out to doctors’ offices to push the latest procedure, called gastric banding, while companies are using TV commercials and slick Web sites to pitch it directly to consumers, the WSJ reports.
Centers that perform the procedure are running their own TV [...]

Hospital Quality Measurement Leaves the ‘Pong Era’

Quick: Which of your local hospitals treats patients best? And how does it compare with facilities in the next town?
You’d have been out of luck getting much of an answer in most parts of the country until now. But this afternoon, Mike Leavitt, secretary of Health and Human Services, unveiled the addition of patient satisfaction [...]

Hosptial Quality Measurement Leaves the ‘Pong Era’

Quick: Which of your local hospitals treats patients best? And how does it compare with facilities in the next town?
You’d have been out of luck getting much of an answer in most parts of the country until now. But this afternoon, Mike Leavitt, secretary of Health and Human Services, unveiled the addition of patient satisfaction [...]

The Talk of the Cardiology Meeting: Vytorin

In an unusual twist, the talk of the big American College of Cardiology meeting this weekend is likely to be a study whose outcome has already been reported. The trick is figuring out what the outcome means.
Everybody who follows this stuff already knows that Vytorin, a cholesterol drug that combines a statin with a drug [...]

Pfizer Exec Arrested On Child Pornography Charges

A Pfizer vice president has been arrested on charges of receiving, possessing and distributing child pornography. Alan Hesketh, 61, was arrested at JFK airport by federal agents Wednesday and is being held without bond, reports the newspaper The Day.
A Pfizer spokeswoman told the paper that Hesketh, who works on patent issues in the firm’s offices in New [...]

Dennis Quaid Acts on Medical Errors

Dennis Quaid is smiling now. But the actor, whose newborn twins were almost killed by massive overdoses of blood thinner last year, has become a sober advocate for changes in health care to reduce medical errors. “In my line of work if I make a mistake, we have take two,” Quaid told reporters, including the [...]

Harvard Neurosurgeon Accused of Gender Bias

The chief neurosurgeon at a prestigious Boston hospital is being accused of sexual discrimination, the Boston Globe reports.
In a lawsuit, a neurosurgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital says she was passed over for promotion at the hospital because of her gender. Several affidavits in the case describe the behavior of the hospital’s chief of neurosurgery, [...]

Clinton Would Cap Premiums for Health Insurance

Hillary Clinton would cap health insurance premiums at 5% to 10% of income, the New York Times reports. She’d previously said she’d put a lid on premiums, but hadn’t put a number on it.
The high end of her range is about where average prices are now. Family policies bought by individuals in the last couple [...]

Caveat Foodies: The Great Mozzarella Scare of 2008

Italy’s Agriculture minister went before the TV cameras today and ate cheese. It was part of the country’s efforts to prevent a buffalo mozzarella panic from spreading through the EU, after some samples of the cheese were found to be tainted with dioxins, a class of chemicals that cause cancer.
During the publicity stunt, the minister [...]

Viagra Turns 10: Bedroom Miracle, but No Romantic Cure-All

Ten years ago today, the FDA approved Viagra. The drug became an instant cultural icon, and sales took off immediately, prompting some optimistic analysts to predict that annual sales could reach $20 billion some day, the WSJ reported at the time.
Viagra turned into a world-famous brand, a legend that shifted the notion of what the [...]

Smallish Shire Bets on ADHD, Specialists

When it comes to pharmaceuticals, is small beautiful? Shire, the U.K.’s third-largest drug maker, thinks so. Best known for its ADHD drug Adderall XR, Shire has thrived by concentrating on medical niches where it develops and sells drugs prescribed by specialists. The company’s shares have shined at a time when the stocks of many bigger [...]

HMO Accidentally Exposes Private Info of 75,000 Members

A dental HMO accidentally put the social security numbers of 75,000 members online last month, and the people weren’t notified until three weeks later, the Baltimore Sun reports.
So far, nobody’s reported any trouble as a result of the problem. But the insurer, a BlueCross BlueShield unit known as The Dental Network, is offering the affected [...]

Do Deadlines Lead to Faulty Decisions on Drugs at FDA?

FDA has deadlines for how fast it’s supposed to respond to applications for new drugs. But those deadlines may be pushing the agency to make hasty decisions, a study in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests.
Drugs approved in the two months before the deadline are more likely to wind up with serious safety problems [...]

Amid Worries, Angioplasty Declines

A wave of studies suggesting doctors may have been overzealous in their use of angioplasty and stents looks to be having an impact: The number of angioplasty procedures performed annually declined by 10% to 15% over the past two years, according to an analysis commissioned by USA Today.
Threading a tiny catheter through the groin to [...]

Is Belly Fat Bad for Your Brain?

People who have a big belly during middle age are more likely to develop dementia in old age, researchers are reporting. It’s another sign that the belly is an especially bad place to be fat.
Scientists at Kaiser looked at measurements taken from more than 6,500 people between 1964 and 1973, when the patients were between [...]

In Roche-Amgen Anemia Drug Fight, Judge Can’t Make Up His Mind

Roche’s anemia drug Mircera infringes on Amgen’s patents for its anemia drug Epogen, a jury ruled last year. But maybe Roche should be allowed to sell the drug anyway, and pay a royalty to Amgen.
That’s what Roche has been arguing in federal court, anyway. Amgen says the judge should issue an injunction to keep Mircera [...]

Rock and Roll May Never Die, but Sometimes It Gets Sick

Small businesses are leading the national retreat from employer-based health coverage. More than half of the 6 million Americans who lost health insurance between 2000 and 2006 worked at small companies or were self-employed, a recent Health Affairs online article reported. So the Health Blog was intrigued to learn that Gov’t Mule, the Southern Rock jam [...]

Cherry Blossoms and Medicare Doom Mark Spring in Washington

Federal officials told Congress yesterday that the Medicare trust fund will become insolvent 2019, as health-care costs rise and Baby Boomers retire.
That’s the same warning bell officials rang last year, in what’s become one of Washington’s rites of spring, writes Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank.
“I noted today in Washington, D.C., that the cherry blossoms are [...]

Cigarette Maker Funded Lung Cancer Scanning Study

A cigarette company was a major funder of a much-publicized study of CT scanning as a way to screening smokers for lung cancer.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2006, had a long list of backers, including the National Institutes of Health. In the middle of the list was the Foundation [...]

Lilly Settles Alaska Zyprexa Case for $15 Million

Eli Lilly has put its first statewide Zyprexa case behind it. The company said this morning that it agreed to pay the state of Alaska $15 million to settle the state’s allegations that the company had concealed the risks of its antipsychotic drug.
The settlement means the end of an Anchorage jury trial that people were [...]

Universal Health Care No Cure Without Primary Care Fix

Universal health care may solve one health problem but it would worsen another, Benjamin Brewer writes in his latest WSJ.com column. The nation is already facing a shortage of family doctors and that would be further exacerbated if 47 million uninsured were granted coverage, says Brewer, a family practitioner in rural Illinois. A projection from [...]

‘Le Weekend’ Pill Gets French Sales Partner in America

Sanofi-Aventis of France is partnering with Eli Lilly of America’s heartland to give Lilly’s impotence pill Cialis a boost over here. The effects of Cialis can last as long as 36 hours, earning it the nickname “Le Weekend” pill on the Continent. But Sanofi will be helping sell a daily version of the popular medicine [...]

As Botox Soars, Cosmetic Surgery Sags

Skip the cosmetic surgery. A needle to the face will fix you right up.
Since 2000, Allergan’s Botox has soared in popularity, while the number of cosmetic surgery procedures has declined, according to numbers the American Society of Plastic Surgeons released today. The graphic at right shows the change in the most popular procedures; note the [...]

Drugstore Shopping List: Aspirin, Shampoo, Paternity Test

Through the miracle of DNA technology, a trip to the drugstore can sort out those nagging paternity questions that bubble up at the family picnic. A company called Identigene said today that its paternity test is now available over the counter at Rite Aid and Meijer drugstores around the country.
The test, which costs $29.99 at [...]

AFL-CIO Poll: Most Americans Struggle With Health Costs

What do working stiffs think about health care? The AFL-CIO and its affiliate group Working America released the findings of a survey of more than 26,000 people and their health-care concerns today. The results aren’t pretty.
Most of the people polled were insured and employed and more than half were in union jobs and/or college graduates, [...]

California Tardy in Tracking Drugs to Combat Counterfeits

If everything had gone as planned, electronic systems would have started tracking all the drugs sold in California from factory to pharmacy on Jan. 1. But the industry said it wasn’t ready, and the deadline on the plan to fight counterfeits was pushed back two years. Today, the state’s pharmacy board will hear a request [...]

Zyprexa: Balancing Serious Side Effects With Serious Illness

Lawyers for the state of Alaska have spent weeks arguing in an Anchorage courthouse that Eli Lilly hid the dangers of its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa — a claim Lilly denies.
In a state courtroom one floor down, a less remarked upon case earlier this month illuminated the complex questions patients and doctors have to wrestle with [...]

Bristol’s Cornelius Gets $11.3 million in 2007

It’s good to be James Cornelius. Cornelius (pictured) spent part of 2006 as Bristol-Myers Squibb’s interim chief and was named permanent CEO last April. For his toils in 2007, Bristol gave him a pay package worth $11.3 million, according to the drug maker’s proxy. That’s up quite a bit from his 2006 package, which amounted [...]

Big Employers Cover Contraceptives But Not Weight-Loss Meds

Some 77% of large employers provide drug coverage for contraceptives without limits on quantity or cost, but the number falls to 33% when it comes to coverage of emergency contraceptives, according to a survey out from Mercer, one of the big human-resource consulting shops.
Meanwhile, 25% of large employers covered smoking-cessation drugs without limits, and 15% [...]

JAMA Editor: Pfizer Shouldn’t Get to Peer at Peer Reviews

The editor of JAMA sounded off today on Pfizer’s unusual and unsuccessful attempt to get behind the curtain on the medical journal’s secretive processes for vetting medical studies for publication.
In short, JAMA said in an an editorial published online today that Pfizer’s subpoenas seeking the inside dope “significantly threatened the integrity” of the journal’s decision-making [...]

Truckload of SEC Problems for Biovail

Did you hear the one about about the Canadian drug maker that missed earnings estimates because a truck carrying a load of antidepressant pills tipped over? Well, the joke’s on Biovail now, which had blamed a big chunk of an earnings shortfall in the third quarter of 2003 on an accident involving a truckload of [...]

Mass. Rep. Frank Moves to Legalize Personal Pot Use

Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank has jumped back into the debate over medical marijuana. He plans to introduce a bill in the House this week decriminalizing small amounts of the drug, the Associated Press reports. “Do you really think people should be prosecuted for smoking marijuana? I don’t think most people agree with that. It’s one area [...]

Night Shift May Hurt Your Health

Some 20% of American workers toil on the the night shift as truck drivers, nurses, police officers, hotel desk clerks and the like. This morning, when they’re all presumably asleep, the Los Angeles Times looks at the toll those overnight hours are taking on workers’ health.
A statistic served up by the LAT suggests a fundamental [...]

Stolen Laptop Carried Personal Data from NIH Trial

Add the National Institutes of Health to the list of entities, from hospitals to the VA to a slew of other government agencies, that can’t seem to hang on to people’s confidential records. A laptop with medical information on 2,500 people enrolled in a clinical trial was stolen last month from the locked trunk of [...]

Philippines Health Minister: Get a Tetanus Shot Before Getting Crucified

Philippines Health Minister Francisco Duque has a message for his countrymen getting crucified today: Get a tetanus shot first, and be sure to use clean nails. Oh, and for those getting whipped, “the best penitents can do is ensure that their whips are well-maintained,” he told AFP.
For years, ritual crucifixions have been part of Good [...]

Health Blog Obit: A Pioneer in Using Drugs to Treat the Mind

Frank J. Ayd, a psychiatrist who was a pioneer in using drugs to treat mental illness, died this week from complications of heart disease. He was 87.
Ayd made his name in the 1950s, when he showed that a drug called Thorazine could ease the symptoms of patients with schizophrenia. The finding resonated through psychiatry at [...]

In Mass., Costs Rise Again for Universal Health Coverage

The cost of subsidizing health insurance keeps going up in Massachusetts. That’s noteworthy because the state’s rule requiring everyone to buy insurance resembles Hillary Clinton’s proposal to mandate health insurance for all Americans, and because the Mass. plan has been cited as a possible model in several other states.
The subsidized-insurance program — aimed at those [...]

Genes: The Biological Link Between Geography and Destiny

Genes are nature’s way of saying geography is destiny. In his WSJ science column this morning, Lee Hotz describes projects mapping hundreds of thousands of genetic markers in people from scores of ethnic groups on five continents to understand how varying geographic circumstances shaped human variation. “We are tying together what we know about human [...]

Match Day: Nervous Med Students Open 15,000 Envelopes

Graham Walker opened a plain envelope a few minutes ago and read some good news: “Institution name: St Luke’s-Roosevelt-NY”
As we wrote yesterday, Walker (pictured) is one of some 15,000 graduating U.S. med students who found out today where he’ll be going for his medical residency. He’ll be learning emergency medicine, and St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in [...]

First Day of Spring: Golfers Beware

Spring starts today–time to start playing golf again, if that’s your thing. But for hypochondriacal golfers, there’s plenty to worry about.
Sure, walking 18 holes is a decent way to stay in shape. Regular walking of any kind offers all sorts of health benefits. But let’s be honest, how many folks skip the cart for the [...]

Are Guns a Public Health Issue?

A handgun case landed in the Supreme Court this week, stirring up an old question: Are handguns a public health issue? You betcha, argues an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Deaths and injuries from handguns are “a serious public health issue that demands a response not only from law enforcement and the courts, [...]

Miles White: Abbott’s $33.4 Million Man

Abbott’s stock did well last year, and so did the company’s CEO Miles White (pictured at left, smiling). White’s compensation package was worth $33.4 million, according to the company’s proxy.
That was up from $26.9 million the year before, largely on a big increase in the value of his options — from $8.5 million in ‘06 [...]

Rising Spending on Specialty Drugs Leads to Pushback

Specialty pharmaceuticals are among the biggest drivers of rising health costs, and, not surprisingly, the folks picking up the tab are searching for ways to rein in costs, the WSJ reports. Employers, health plans and pharmacy benefit managers are pushing Congress for the creation of a clear pathway for generic biotech drugs; reinforcing rules [...]

Novartis Takes Another Step in Management Shuffle

James Shannon The management shake-up at Novartis continues. The latest casualty is James Shannon, head of global drug development, who will be succeeded by two Novartis executives, the WSJ’s Jeanne Whalen reports.
Novartis has been reorganizing its pharmaceutical division after regulatory setbacks–including the withdrawal of constipation drug Zelnorm and a delay in FDA approval for diabetes pill [...]

Rising Spending on Specialty Drugs Leads to Pushback

Specialty pharmaceuticals are among the biggest drivers of rising health costs, and, not surprisingly, the folks picking up the tab are searching for ways to rein in costs, the WSJ reports. Employers, health plans and pharmacy benefit managers are pushing Congress for the creation of a clear pathway for generic biotech drugs; reinforcing rules [...]

Vytorin Languishes as Cardiology Meeting Looms

Sales reps have been pounding doctors’ doors on behalf of Merck and Schering-Plough’s beleaguered cholesterol drug Vytorin, but their pleas aren’t getting them very far.
It’s been two months since the results of the controversial Enhance trial suggested Vytorin was no better than a cheap generic at slowing the progression of cardiovascular disease. The hullabaloo appears [...]

Match Day: Med School Students About to Learn Their Fates

Fifteen thousand med school students will find out tomorrow where they’re going to spend the next few years of their lives, working 80-hour weeks and learning the ins and outs of a medical specialty. March 20th is Match Day, the day when a great big computer spits out a long list matching graduating med students [...]