The author is a writer based in New Jersey.
February 11, 2008
Article
NCCN's new guidelines for nonsmall cell lung cancer contain new recommendations relating to drug therapy.
February 05, 2007
Last July, an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report estimated that, on average, a hospital patient is subject to at least one medication error per day, although error rates vary by hospital and most do not lead to injury. The report urged the Food & Drug Administration to work with other agencies and healthcare providers to address drug labeling and packaging to minimize errors. In response to this recommendation, the FDA held a one-day public workshop last month to discuss how to improve the labeling of intravenous drug containers.
January 22, 2007
The Food & Drug Administration recently approved paliperidone (Invega, Janssen, L.P.), an atypical antipsychotic, for the treatment of schizophrenia, a disease that affects more than two million Americans. It is the first new treatment for schizophrenia to be approved since 2003.
December 11, 2006
A recent study by researchers at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine has raised questions about the safety of administering nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) to smokers in the intensive care unit (ICU). Until now, use of NRT was not thought to be associated with serious adverse events. In fact, the Agency for Healthcare Research & Quality (AHRQ) recommends smoking cessation treatment for hospitalized patients.
November 20, 2006
Protocolized Care for Early Septic Shock (ProCESS), a new multicenter research consortium, is beginning a large-scale study to determine whether specific interventions can halt the progression to severe sepsis or septic shock. Every year, about 750,000 people in the United States are affected with severe sepsis and about 200,000 people die from it. Sepsis is a syndrome characterized by a systemic response to infection that can rapidly lead to death. It is the leading cause of death in noncoronary intensive care units.
Over the years, long-term use of immunosuppressive medications has shown that they reduce morbidity and mortality in transplant patients. One of physicians' challenges is to balance the risk of organ rejection caused by underimmunosuppression with the risk of drug toxicity, secondary infections, and posttransplant lymphoproliferative disorders caused by overimmunosuppressing the patient.