Lawsuit Claims Birth Control Packaging Mistake Led to 113 Unplanned Pregnancies

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A pharmaceutical company has been hit with a class action lawsuit after allegedly distributing mis-labeled birth control pills back in 2011. The suit claims this error led to unwanted pregnancies for 113 women.

The group of women, who are from 28 different states, have sued Qualitest Pharmaceuticals (a subsidiary of Endo Pharmaceuticals), claiming that the company sold birth control pills that were packaged in the wrong order. They say this caused them to take placebo sugar pills at the wrong time of the month, leaving them vulnerable to pregnancy without their knowledge.

Court documents filed in April 2014 state that the pill order was “rotated 180 degrees within the card, reversing the weekly tablet orientation.” Now, the women are claiming millions in damages, and in some cases the costs of raising children.

RELATED: 16 Worst Birth Control Mistakes

The most common types of birth control pills contain hormones to prevent an egg from releasing each month. When taken correctly, they are 98% effective at preventing pregnancy.

The packs contain three weeks of “active” pills and a week’s worth of placebo sugar pills that don’t contain any hormones, during which menstruation occurs for most women. Missing just two or more hormone pills in a row puts you at risk for possible pregnancy if you’re not using another form of contraception at the time.

RELATED: The Grown-Up’s Guide to Birth Control

The lawsuit comes four years after Endo Pharmaceuticals issued a voluntary recall of an “extremely small number” of pill packs, Heather Zoumas Lubeski, a spokesperson for the company, explained in a statement to Health. (The court docs state that 3.2 million packs were recalled. And CNN reported that the recall affected 8 different brands of pills. )

Lebeski added that Endo Pharmaceuticals has only been able to confirm one defected pack that was ever actually sold to a patient. She also stressed that “there is no new or recent product recall. The recall that forms the basis of this suit was entirely voluntary and occurred more than four years ago in September 2011.”

RELATED: 3 Types of Birth Control That Aren’t the Pill

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Meet the Subscription Beauty Box That’s Changing the Game, Again

Thanks to subscription boxes, even if you live on a farm in Kansas, you can get everything from jewelry to shoes to clothes curated just for you and dropped off at your door. Even the beauty obsessed have been able to indulge their addiction with just the click of a mouse.

And though we have to admit, the market is saturated when it comes to beauty boxes, there is a new service changing the beauty subscription box game entirely. It’s called BOXYCHARM — and up until now beauty subscription boxes have provided miniature sizes of beauty products for beauty fiends to test out month by month. But can you really tell anything about a product from a single-use size? Clearly not, which is why some boxes seem so disappointing sometimes. With BOXYCHARM, each box from the subscription service contains four to five full-size or luxury-size items. That means more uses for you and ultimately more bang for your buck.

Priced at $21 per month for at least $90 worth of products (you read that right), BOXYCHARM is incredibly affordable for anyone looking to try new products each month — and have them actually last for the month. Brands included are tarte cosmetics, ModelCo., Oscar Blandi, Mullein & Sparrow, Harvey Prince, MDMflow and much, much more.

Plus, with a group of beauty bloggers, influencers and industry experts curating each box month after month, Charmers (the adorable name given to BOXYCHARM customers) are guaranteed a well-rounded box. That means no duplicate categories within one box, no consecutive repetition of types of beauty items in a box, and a balance between established and indie beauty brands per box. So yes, all your beauty box dreams are coming true, people.

Learn more about BOXYCHARM right here.

This article originally appeared on MIMIchatter.com.

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Sephora Subscription Boxes Are About to Become a Thing

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MIMI Chatter is an endless stream of beauty content. We bring together the must-knows and the how-tos from your favorite sites, beauty influencers, our editors, and YOU.

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Parkinson’s Drug Shows Promise Against Macular Degeneration

By Randy Dotinga
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, Nov. 12, 2015 (HealthDay News) — A common Parkinson’s disease medication might hold potential for preventing or treating macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss in the elderly, new research suggests.

At this stage, no one is recommending that patients take the drug, levodopa (L-dopa), to thwart eye disease. But the findings are intriguing, researchers said.

“Patients taking L-dopa for any reason are much less likely to develop age-related macular degeneration. If they do, they develop the disease much later in life than those not taking L-dopa,” said study lead author Brian McKay, an associate professor of ophthalmology and vision science at the University of Arizona.

However, the study doesn’t actually prove that levodopa causes a lower incidence of age-related macular degeneration. It only uncovered an association between the two.

Age-related macular degeneration affects about 30 percent of those older than 75, McKay said. It is caused by deterioration of the macula, the center part of the retina, and by affecting vision, it can severely limit the ability to perform everyday activities. Treatments can slow its progression but there is no cure, and it can lead to blindness.

“This disease robs people of close vision,” McKay said. A preventive treatment “will allow many to see their families and grandchildren as they age, and allow the aging population to keep their independence and drive, read, cook and watch TV,” he said.

In the body, levodopa turns into dopamine, a naturally occurring chemical that appears linked to normal function of the retina, McKay said. In Parkinson’s, insufficient dopamine contributes to movement problems.

For the study, researchers analyzed medical records of 37,000 patients from a Wisconsin clinic. The researchers looked for signs whether or not those who took levodopa had lower rates of age-related macular degeneration. They also examined a medical database of 87 million people.

The researchers found that diagnosis of age-related macular degeneration occurred, in general, around age 71. But among those who took levodopa, it occurred much later, at around age 79.

According to McKay, the drug may affect development of age-related macular degeneration by protecting parts of the eye known as photoreceptors. These neurons help the body sense light.

Levodopa, however, might not be the major player here. It’s possible, McKay said, that Parkinson’s disease itself could reduce the risk of age-related macular degeneration. Or there could be another scenario.

McKay mentioned that having red hair is linked to higher risks of both Parkinson’s disease and age-related macular degeneration. This suggests a connection. “I am not sure the diseases are completely independent,” he said.

In Parkinson’s patients, levodopa causes side effects such as nausea and low blood pressure, but McKay said side effects in people without Parkinson’s are unknown. He said the drug is sold over the counter and taken by body builders, among others.

Levodopa is inexpensive, and that may be a big problem, said Dr. Paul Bernstein, a professor of ophthalmology and visual sciences at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He wasn’t involved with the study.

Since it’s cheap, “many drug companies won’t be interested in repurposing it,” he said, noting that could spell trouble for research.

Bernstein also cautioned that this study doesn’t confirm that levodopa will help people with age-related macular degeneration or those at risk for developing it.

“This is a first step,” Bernstein said. “It may point to doing future studies. But I wouldn’t recommend that my patients take L-dopa now. It could be dangerous.”

If future research proves it is effective against macular degeneration, the drug potentially could be used to treat or prevent the condition, although it’s unlikely to reverse existing eye damage, McKay said.

It’s unclear when clinical trials would take place.

What causes macular degeneration is unknown, although genetics, being overweight and smoking are thought to play a role, according to the American Macular Degeneration Foundation. Whites are more vulnerable than blacks and Hispanics to the condition.

The study was published Nov. 9 in the American Journal of Medicine.

More information

For more about macular degeneration, see the National Eye Institute.

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Head, Neck Cancer Patients May Be at Higher Risk for Suicide: Study

THURSDAY, Nov. 12, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Head and neck cancer patients may be at raised risk for suicide, new research suggests.

However, the overall risk is still small, the findings showed.

The study included over 350,000 patients in the United States diagnosed with head and neck cancer between 1973 and 2011. Of those patients, 857 died by suicide.

The investigators found that the suicide rate among head and neck cancer patients was three times higher than in the general population. And suicide rates were higher among patients treated with radiation alone compared to surgery alone.

Suicide rates were highest among those with cancers of the lower part of the throat, including the larynx (“voice box”) and hypopharynx, at five times and 12 times higher, respectively, than in the general population.

“This may be linked to these anatomic sites’ intimate relationship with the ability to speak and/or swallow. Loss of these functions can dramatically lower patients’ quality of life,” Dr. Richard Chan Woo Park, of Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, and colleagues wrote.

“It is possible that the increased rates of tracheostomy [breathing tube] dependence and dysphagia [difficulty swallowing] and/or gastrostomy [feeding] tube dependence in these patients are . . . factors in the increased rate of suicide observed,” the authors added.

The study was published online Nov. 12 in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery.

“While there is a considerable body of research that examines survival outcomes for patients with head and neck cancer, additional research and effort should also be devoted to the psychological toll that the cancer, treatments and resulting morbidity have on patients,” the researchers concluded.

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States and cancer patients are at increased risk for suicide, the study authors pointed out in a journal news release.

More information

The American Cancer Society offers resources on coping with cancer.

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SARS-like Virus in Bats Could Jump to Humans

THURSDAY, Nov. 12, 2015 (HealthDay News) — A newly identified SARS-like virus in bats appears to be able to jump to humans without mutation, new research suggests.

However, it’s not yet clear whether it would then be able to spread from person to person, the researchers said.

A worldwide outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2002-2003 was caused by a coronavirus that jumped from animals to humans. That outbreak resulted in 8,000 infections and nearly 800 deaths, the researchers noted.

“Studies have predicted the existence of nearly 5,000 coronaviruses in bat populations, and some of these have the potential to emerge as human pathogens,” senior study author Ralph Baric, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said in a university news release.

“So this is not a situation of ‘if’ there will be an outbreak of one of these coronaviruses, but rather when and how prepared we’ll be to address it,” Baric added.

Baric and his colleagues looked at how the SARS-like virus in Chinese horseshoe bats behaves. They found that it enters the bodies of bats and humans in the same way. The researchers also noted that this virus replicates as well as the SARS virus in primary human lung cells, the preferred target for infection.

There is no treatment for the newly discovered SARS-like virus, the researchers said.

The findings are important in light of ongoing debate over a U.S. government decision that considerably slows the development of vaccines or treatments for potentially dangerous coronaviruses, the researchers said.

Baric said “building resources, rather than limiting them, to both examine animal populations for new threats and develop therapeutics is key for limiting future outbreaks.”

The study was published Nov. 9 in Nature Medicine.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about SARS.

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Scientists Pinpoint What Level of Vitamin D Promotes Heart Health

THURSDAY, Nov. 12, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Researchers say they’ve identified the minimum level of vitamin D needed for good heart health.

Previous research has shown that vitamin D deficiency increases the risk of heart disease, heart attack and stroke, but the level of deficiency associated with such risk was unclear, the researchers said.

Having a vitamin D level anywhere above 15 nanograms per milliliter is fine for heart health, according to a team at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Salt Lake City.

“Although vitamin D levels above 30 were traditionally considered to be normal, more recently, some researchers have proposed that anything above 15 was a safe level. But the numbers hadn’t been backed up with research until now,” lead researcher Dr. J. Brent Muhlestein, co-director of cardiovascular research, said in an institute news release.

“Even if any level above 15 is safe, one out of 10 people still have vitamin D levels lower than that. This equates to a very large percentage of our population. The best way to determine one’s vitamin D level is by getting a blood test,” he added.

The study, which included 230,000 people who were followed for three years, was presented this week at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting, in Orlando, Fla. Research presented at meetings is typically viewed as preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

The body naturally produces vitamin D when exposed to the sun. The vitamin is also found in foods such as fish, fish liver oils, egg yolks, and some dairy and grain products. Vitamin D supplements are another option, the researchers said.

“This study sheds new light and direction on which patients might best benefit from taking vitamin D supplements,” Muhlestein said.

More information

The U.S. Office of Dietary Supplements has more about vitamin D.

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Burn Fat, Build Muscle: 3 Killer Circuit Training Workouts

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There’s nothing like a rainy, cold or snowy day to take the wind right out of your well-intentioned workout plans. But before you scrap your sweat session and curl up with some hot chocolate, consider the fact that you could squeeze in an entire workout without straying too far from your couch.

These three circuit workouts from Daily Burn 365 will help you fit in a workout anytime, anywhere — no equipment required. Whether you’ve got 10, 15 or 20 minutes, each series of moves is guaranteed to get your heart pumping and your legs burning. Want a more intense challenge? Combine the circuits together, or do an extra round of reps.

RELATED: The 5-Minute Back Workout You Can Do Without Weights

Before you get started, do this dynamic warm-up to help you get your body primed to move. Then: Ready, set, sweat!

3 Short and Sweet Circuit Training Workouts

Quick Tips:

Reverse tabletop leg lifts: Sit on the ground feet planted hips-width distance apart, hands behind you with fingers pointing towards your toes. Lift your butt off the floor coming into a “tabletop” position. Lift right leg off the ground, then left.

Plié squat: Stand with feet wider than hips-width distance apart, toes pointed slightly out. Lower into a squat.

Squat with alternating heel raise: At the bottom of your squat, raise your right heel, then left heel. Repeat.

Side plank clamshell: Get into a side plank, knees on the floor. With heels glued together, lift top knee, rotating leg open, then bring it back down again. Repeat on opposite side.

RELATED: 5 Better Ways to Sculpt a Stronger Butt

Quick Tips:

Ski jumps: Stand with feet shoulder width-apart, hands on hips. Hop to the right, bringing your left leg behind your right, then hop to the left and bring your right leg behind your left. Move arms forward and back as you jump to gain momentum.

Squat to press: While holding a squat, position arms like a goalpost, elbows bent to 90-degrees. Press arms straight up, then bend them back to 90-degrees. Hold squat for the duration of the exercise.

Skip jacks: Skip forward, leading with your right leg, then perform two jumping jacks. Skip forward, leading with your left leg, then perform two jumping jacks. Repeat.

RELATED: Here’s Proof Everyone Can Do a Burpee

Quick Tips: 

Knee-lift to squat: Perform a squat, then lift your right knee up towards your chest as you stand. Repeat with opposite leg.

Squat punches: Perform a squat, punching upwards to the right as you come to standing, downwards to the right as you squat. Squat again, repeating punches on opposite side.

Shuffle hop: Shuffle two steps to your right, then jump into the air. Repeat on opposite side.

Touchdown jacks: Start with legs together, then jump them apart, reaching down to touch the ground in between your feet. Repeat.

Surfer burpees: Place your hands on the ground and walk legs out into a plank position. Walk feet back up to hands, then hop your right leg forward into “surfer” position. Repeat, alternating sides.

Want more no-equipment exercises like these? Head to DailyBurn.com/365 to get new live workouts, daily.

More from Daily Burn:

Hate Crunches? 6 Better Core Exercises for Beginners

9 Healthy Homemade Protein Bar Recipes

Daily Burn 365: New Workouts, 7 Days a Week

Life by Daily Burn is dedicated to helping you live a healthier, happier and more active lifestyle. Whether your goal is to lose weight, gain strength or de-stress, a better you is well within reach. Get more health and fitness tips at Life by Daily Burn.

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The Hot Tool Behind the Victoria’s Secret Angels’ Sexy Waves

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While you may never think of rocking angel wings and underwear on a day-to-day basis, there is one thing you can steal from the Victoria’s Secret Angels: their perfectly sexy waves.

Celebrity hairstylist Sarah Potempa was behind the models’ hair looks at the 10th annual Victoria’s Secret runway show, which was filmed this week in New York. (And will air December 8th at 10 p.m. on CBS.) Her secret weapon for creating the trademark waves? The Sarah Potempa Beachwaver Pro ($189; ulta.com)

RELATED: 15 Red Carpet Beauty Tips for Real Life

The easy-to-use curling iron is made with a rotating wand that winds up the length of strands with just the touch of a button. After curling, Potempa rolled the hair into pin curls to cool so it would set the curls and help them last all night.

If you’re trying the look at home, spritz on a sea salt spray like Not Your Mother’s Beach Babe Sea Salt Texturizing Spray ($6.19; ulta.com) and let strands air dry before curling. This helps give hair an added bit of texture for the perfect tousled waves.

RELATED: 9 Glam Gifts for Beauty Addicts

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Meditation Reduces Emotional Pain by 44%: Study

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Open any magazine (this one, for example) and you’ll find that mindfulness has gone mainstream. You’ll also notice there are studies that purport to show meditation’s benefits on just about everything, from kids’ math scores and migraine length to HIV management and bouncing back after a crisis. Now, an elaborate new forthcoming study looks at how the brains of meditators respond to pain, to be published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Dr. Fadel Zeidan, assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, has studied mindfulness for 15 years and has observed improved health outcomes as a result. “But what if this is all just a placebo?” he wondered. “What if people are reporting improvements in health and reductions in pain just because of meditation’s reputation as a health-promoting practice?” He wanted to find out, so he designed a trials that included a placebo group.

Zeidan recruited 75 healthy, pain-free people and scanned their brains using an MRI while they experienced painful heat with a 120-degree thermal probe. Then, the researchers sorted them into four groups and gave them four days of training. Everyone thought they were getting the real intervention, but most of them were getting a sham treatment.

“I want to be restrained about the efficacy of mindfulness, and the way to be restrained about it is by making it harder and harder to demonstrate its effectiveness,” Zeidan says.

First, there was a placebo cream group that participants were told reduces pain over time, Zeidan says (it was really just petroleum jelly). For four days, they rubbed it on the back of their leg and tested it against that painfully hot thermal probe. Little did they know, the researchers cranked down the heat each day; the participants thought the cream was working.

Another group was taught a kind of fake mindfulness meditation—they were told to breathe deeply for 20 minutes but were given no instructions on how to do it mindfully. The control group was subjected to 20 minutes of a very boring book on tape: The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne.

For the real intervention, people sat for 20 minutes with straight posture, closed their eyes and listened to specific instructions about where to focus one’s attention and how to let thoughts and emotions pass without judgment. “Our subjects are taught to focus on the changing sensations of breath and to follow the breath with the mind’s eye as it goes down the chest and abdomen,” Zeidan says.

After four days, everyone re-entered the MRI machine and endured the same pain from the 120-degree probe. They were told to use their training—breathing deeply, mindfully meditating or the cream. They used a lever to indicate the physical intensity and emotional unpleasantness of the pain.

They found that people in all of the groups had greater pain reductions than the control group. The placebo cream reduced the sensation of pain by an average of 11% and emotional unpleasantness of pain by 13%. For the sham mindfulness group, those numbers were 9% and 24% respectively. But mindfulness meditation outperformed them all. In this group, pain intensity was cut by 27% and emotional pain reduced by 44%.

That shocked Zeidan. Past research has indicated that the opioid morphine reduces physical pain by 22%—and mindfulness had surpassed even that. But the MRI results, which showed how pain was registering in their brains, surprised him even more. People who had practiced mindfulness meditation seemed to be using different brain regions than the other groups to reduce pain.

“There was something more active, we believe, going on with the genuine mindfulness meditation group,” Zeidan says. This group had increased activation in higher-order brain regions associated with attention control and enhanced cognitive control, he says, while exhibiting a deactivation of the thalamus—a structure that acts as the gatekeeper for pain to enter the brain, he explains. “We haven’t seen that with any other technique before.”

It’s an important preliminary study, Zeidan says, but exactly who will benefit from meditation’s impact on pain is still unknown. “We’re now at the stage, at least in my lab, where we have enough evidence that meditation reduces pain and it does it in a really unique fashion, different from any other technique we’ve seen,” he says.

And as for the questions left unanswered? “We don’t have the studies yet,” he says, “but we’re getting there.”

This article originally appeared on Time.com.

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Computer-Based Psychotherapy Not as Effective as Standard Care

THURSDAY, Nov. 12, 2015 (HealthDay News) — Computer-assisted cognitive behavioral therapy probably won’t replace standard person-to-person therapy any time soon, new research suggests.

The British study found that people did not follow through on computer-assisted therapy. Fewer than one in five completed six computer sessions, the researchers reported.

Cognitive behavioral therapy — a form of talk therapy — is an effective treatment for depression. However, in-person therapy is not always available, so computer-assisted therapy was developed as a substitute.

But until now, the effectiveness of computer-assisted therapy hadn’t been studied.

The study included almost 700 British patients with depression who were randomly assigned to receive either standard care from their doctor or standard care with one of two computer-assisted therapy packages — one a commercial product and the other a free online product.

The computer-assisted therapy programs offered either six or eight one-hour sessions, respectively. Both programs also encouraged patients to do homework between the sessions.

The study found that computer-assisted therapy packages offered little or no benefit over standard care. After four months, 44 percent of patients in the standard care group were still depressed. Fifty percent of those in the commercial product group, and 49 percent of those in the free online product group remained depressed, the study reported.

The findings were published this week in the journal BMJ.

The main reason for the low levels of success with computer-assisted therapy packages may have been that many patients didn’t use them, the researchers said. Only 18 percent of those in the commercial product group completed all eight sessions, and only 16 percent of those in the online product group completed all six sessions. Nearly one-quarter of patients dropped out of the study by four months.

The study showed that patients were “generally unwilling to engage with computer programs, and highlighted the difficulty in repeatedly logging on to computer systems when clinically depressed,” wrote Simon Gilbody, professor of psych medicine at the University of York, and his colleagues.

“Participants wanted a greater level of clinical support as an adjunct to therapy, and in absence of this support, they commonly disengaged with the computer programs,” the researchers explained.

More information

The American Academy of Family Physicians has more about therapy and counseling for mental health.

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