Beware of Bleeding Risks With Antacids Containing Aspirin

MONDAY, June 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Antacids that contain aspirin may cause stomach or intestinal bleeding in rare cases, U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials said Monday.

Since it issued a warning about serious bleeding risk with aspirin in 2009, the FDA has recorded eight new cases of serious bleeding caused by aspirin-containing antacid products sold over-the-counter, which include Alka Seltzer and Bromo Seltzer. In some of those cases, patients required a blood transfusion, the agency said in a news release.

“Take a close look at the Drug Facts label, and if the product has aspirin, consider choosing something else for your stomach symptoms,” Dr. Karen Murry Mahoney, deputy director of the division of nonprescription drug products, said in the release.

“Unless people read the Drug Facts label when they’re looking for stomach symptom relief, they might not even think about the possibility that a stomach medicine could contain aspirin,” she added.

“Today we’re focusing on bleeding risk specifically with antacid-aspirin products used to treat upset stomach or heartburn. We’re not telling people to stop taking aspirin altogether,” Mahoney said.

People with a higher risk of serious bleeding with aspirin-containing antacid products include those: aged 60 and older; with a history of stomach ulcers or bleeding problems; who take blood-thinning drugs; who take a steroid medicine such as prednisone to reduce inflammation; who take other medicines containing non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) such as ibuprofen or naproxen; those who drink three or more alcoholic drinks a day.

Warning signs of stomach or intestinal bleeding include feeling faint, vomiting blood, passing black or bloody stools, and abdominal pain. If you have these signs, consult a health care provider right away.

“Some people may have been taking aspirin-containing antacid products frequently for a long time. Apart from the bleeding risk, it’s not normal to have frequent or chronic upset stomach or heartburn. You should talk to a health care provider if that’s happening,” Mahoney said.

More information

The American Academy of Family Physicians has more on antacids.

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Shift Workers at Greater Risk of Heart Ills, Study Says

MONDAY, June 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Sleep deprivation and an abnormal sleep cycle may increase the risk of heart disease, especially for shift workers, a small study suggests.

“In humans, as in all mammals, almost all physiological and behavioral processes, in particular the sleep-wake cycle, follow a circadian rhythm that is regulated by an internal clock located in the brain,” said study lead author Dr. Daniela Grimaldi.

“When our sleep-wake and feeding cycles are not in tune with the rhythms dictated by our internal clock, circadian misalignment occurs,” added Grimaldi, a research assistant professor at Northwestern University in Chicago.

The study results suggest that shift workers “who are chronically exposed to circadian misalignment, might not fully benefit from the restorative cardiovascular effects of nighttime sleep following a shift-work rotation,” she added.

The study included 26 healthy people,
aged 20 to 39, who were restricted to five hours of sleep for eight days with either fixed bedtimes or bedtimes delayed by 8.5 hours on four of the eight nights.

A higher heart rate during the day was seen in both groups, to a greater extent at night when sleep deprivation was combined with delayed bedtimes. Also, there was an increase in levels of the stress hormone norepinephrine in the sleep-deprived and delayed-bedtime group.

Norepinephrine can narrow blood vessels, raise blood pressure and expand the windpipe, the researchers noted.

They said sleep deprivation and delayed bedtime were also associated with reduced heart rate variability at night and reduced vagal activity during deeper sleep phases that normally have a restorative effect on heart function. The main effect of the vagal nerve on the heart is the lowering of the heart rate, the study authors said.

Shift workers should be encouraged to eat a healthy diet, exercise regularly and get more sleep to protect their hearts, the researchers said.

The study was published June 6 in the journal Hypertension.

More information

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

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Women More Prone to Anxiety Than Men, Review Finds

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, June 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Struggling with anxiety? Then odds are you’re a woman and you live in either North America or Western Europe.

That’s the conclusion of a new British study that found that women are twice as likely to suffer from anxiety as men.

Moreover, people in North America and Western Europe are more prone to anxiety disorders than those from other parts of the world. In North America, nearly eight of 100 people suffer from anxiety — the most in the world. In East Asia, it’s fewer than three in 100 — the lowest, the review authors noted.

“Anxiety is important and shouldn’t be overlooked,” said lead researcher Olivia Remes, who’s with the department of public health and primary care at the University of Cambridge’s Strangeways Research Laboratory. “Sometimes people think that anxiety is just a part of their personality or that there’s nothing they can do about it, but there is.”

Anxiety disorders are characterized by excessive worry, fear and avoidance of potentially stressful situations, such as social gatherings.

“There are treatments, including psychological treatments and medication, and other things people can do to help their mental health, such as physical activity, meditation and yoga,” Remes said.

For the review, Remes and her colleagues looked at more than 1,200 previously published studies about anxiety, and focused on 48 of them.

The investigators found that from 1990 to 2010, the overall number of people with an anxiety disorder remained about the same — approximately four out of every 100.

Women were nearly twice as likely as men to have an anxiety disorder (9 percent). And as many as 10 percent of men and women under 35 had an anxiety disorder, the researchers found.

It’s not known why women seem more prone to anxiety, but it could be differences in brain chemistry between the two genders, Remes suggested.

Women are also more likely to suffer from other mental health problems, such as depression, she said. In addition, men may also be less likely to report mental health problems.

It’s not known why young people are more likely to develop anxiety. It might be that older people are better able to hide their anxiety, Remes said.

In addition, those suffering from other health problems are more likely to have anxiety disorders, with as many as 70 percent reporting anxiety among their physical ills, the review found.

Among people with heart disease, for example, about 11 percent living in Western countries have an anxiety disorder, especially women, Remes said. People with multiple sclerosis are the most affected, with as many as 32 percent reporting an anxiety disorder.

In addition, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which is an anxiety disorder, may sometimes only affect women during pregnancy and after giving birth, the researchers found. Only one in 100 in the general population is affected by OCD. But, among pregnant women, the number is doubled and slightly higher than that among women right after giving birth, the review showed.

In the United States, anxiety disorders are estimated to cost $42 billion a year. In the European Union, more than 60 million people suffer from anxiety disorders in a given year, according to background information in the report.

Remes and her colleagues also found that information for some populations was lacking or of poor quality. This was particularly true for certain communities, such as native populations in North America, Australia and New Zealand.

“Anxiety can be expressed differently in other cultures,” Remes said. “For example, social anxiety in the West — people are worried that people are always looking at them, being critical — they are extremely self-conscious, whereas people in Asian cultures are afraid of causing others offense.”

Dr. Jeffrey Borenstein is president and CEO of the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation in New York City. He said more research is needed on anxiety disorders and treatments that are culturally sensitive.

“Anxiety disorder hasn’t gotten the attention it should,” he said.

“There are effective treatments, including talk therapy, medication and lifestyle changes,” Borenstein said. “There are a number of steps people can take to help their condition.”

The study findings were published in the June issue of the journal Brain and Behavior.

More information

For more about anxiety, visit the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.

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This Teen’s Brave Pics Turned the Internet’s Attention to Invisible Diseases

Longer Use of Certain Drugs Cuts Recurrence for Breast Cancer Survivors

MONDAY, June 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Many survivors of breast cancers that are sensitive to estrogen are advised to take hormone-suppressing drugs such as tamoxifen for five years, to cut their odds for a recurrence.

Tamoxifen can have onerous side effects, however. Now, new research finds that taking an alternative, and less troublesome, class of medications for a full decade can reduce the risk for recurrence even more — without affecting a woman’s quality of life.

The newer class of hormone-suppressing drugs are called aromatase inhibitors, and include drugs such as letrozole (Femara), anastrozole (Arimidex) and exemestane (Aromasin).

“Aromatase inhibitors do not have all the side effects of tamoxifen and overall are much better tolerated than tamoxifen,” explained one breast cancer expert, Dr. Stephanie Bernik.

She believes the new study supports the benefit of aromatase inhibitors, and “women are much more likely to continue a longer course with this therapy” than with tamoxifen.

The study findings were presented Sunday in Chicago at the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO).

The new research involved more than 1,900 postmenopausal women who had already received five years of Femara treatment after surviving an early stage, hormone-sensitive form of breast cancer.

Some of the women continued receiving Femara for another five years, while others received a placebo.

Those who received Femara for the five additional years had a 34 percent lower risk of breast cancer recurrence than those who received the placebo, said a team led by Dr. Paul Goss, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

There were also no significant differences in the women’s overall quality of life, or menopausal symptoms, between the two groups.

While the rate of breast cancer recurrence was lower with the extended therapy, the approach did not seem to have any effect on the women’s overall odds of dying from any cause, the researchers noted.

According to Goss, “women with early stage hormone-receptor positive breast cancer face an indefinite risk of relapse.

“The study provides direction for many patients and their doctors, confirming that prolonging aromatase inhibitor therapy can further reduce the risk of breast cancer recurrences,” said Goss, who also directs Breast Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital.

In an ASCO news release, he said that “longer [aromatase inhibitor] therapy also showed a substantial breast cancer preventative effect in the opposite, healthy breast.”

For her part, Bernik noted that “many women don’t want to take tamoxifen because of the side effects.”

Those side effects can include “hot flashes, increased rate of uterine cancer, DVTs [clots in the deep veins of the leg that can break off and travel to the lung], increased rate of strokes, amongst other risks,” said Bernik, who is chief of surgical oncology at Lenox Hill Hospital, in New York City.

She said that many experts had assumed that a 10-year course of aromatase inhibitors like Femara might be a safe, attractive alternative to tamoxifen for patients — but no study had yet supported that notion.

“Therefore it is exciting that a new study backs the assumption of the added benefit of an extended course of the drug,” Bernik said.

According to background information supplied by the researchers, in 2012, there were more than 6 million women worldwide who had survived at least five years after a breast cancer diagnosis. Most of them had estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer, Goss’ team said.

Because the new findings were presented at a medical meeting, they should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more on breast cancer.

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Gruesome Cigarette Pack Images Seem to Help Some People Quit

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, June 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Ghastly smoking-relating photos on cigarette packs do encourage smokers to quit, a new study finds.

“This is the first top-quality evidence available that these warnings do change behavior,” said lead researcher Noel Brewer. He is an associate professor of health behavior at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Such habit-changing images show smoke emerging from a hole (stoma) in the neck, smoke-ravaged lungs, badly stained teeth, or a patient near death.

In a four-week trial, Brewer’s team found that 40 percent of smokers who had these visual warnings were likely to try to quit, compared with 34 percent of those whose packs had only print warnings. By the end of the trial, nearly 6 percent of the picture-pack group had quit for a week, compared with about 4 percent of the others.

Brewer said the labels worked because smokers couldn’t get the pictures out of their minds. “They didn’t feel any more at risk. They didn’t think that smoking was any more dangerous, but they were a little more worried, and they couldn’t stop thinking about the harms of smoking,” he said.

The U.S. Tobacco Control Act of 2009, which gave the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authority over tobacco products, mandated photo warning labels on cigarette packs.

The FDA proposed several images, but tobacco companies filed a lawsuit against the agency in 2012. A federal appeals court struck down the visual packaging requirement, ruling that the FDA had not provided evidence to show the explicit images would deter smoking.

“The FDA is undertaking research to support a new rule-making consistent with the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act,” said agency spokesman Michael Felberbaum. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any timeline to share.”

Brewer said the new study results should bolster the FDA’s case.

“I believe the FDA is now in a very good position to return to this issue,” Brewer said. “They really have no choice in the matter, they’re required to.”

Smoking is the chief cause of preventable death worldwide, and anti-smoking advocates welcomed the new findings.

“This new study adds to the extensive evidence from around the world that large, graphic health warnings are most effective at informing consumers about the health risks of smoking, discouraging children and other non-smokers from starting to smoke, and motivating smokers to quit,” said Matthew Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

“The United States needs to update its woefully outdated and nearly invisible cigarette warnings and catch up with the more than 89 countries that now require graphic warnings,” he said.

Those countries include Canada, Australia and nations in the European Union.

A tobacco researcher agreed.

“If this [new study] isn’t enough evidence to blast the FDA and the Obama administration off their behinds, nothing is,” said Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco.

For the study, Brewer and his colleagues used four graphic images from the FDA’s original proposal. They included text warnings required by the Tobacco Control Act, such as “Cigarettes cause fatal lung disease” or “Cigarettes are addictive.”

The four text-only packs carried the standard U.S. Surgeon General’s warning statements mandated since 1985.

For the trial, more than 2,000 smokers in California and North Carolina were randomly assigned to receive packs with text warnings alone or packs with photo warnings on the fronts and backs. According to the study, 1,900 people completed the trial.

The report was published online June 6 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

More information

For more on quitting smoking, visit the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Useless Treatments Common in Young, Terminal Cancer Patients

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, June 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Three-quarters of young or middle-aged Americans with terminal cancer receive aggressive treatment during the last month of their lives, even though such care may provide nothing but misery, a new study estimates.

An analysis of insurance records found that cancer patients often undergo chemotherapy, radiation therapy or surgery in their final 30 days.

One-third die in the hospital, while fewer than one in five use hospice care to ease their suffering, according to findings presented Monday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago.

“Additional efforts are critically needed to improve end-of-life care for patients with terminal disease, to ensure that the care provided meets the goals and preferences of patients and their families,” said lead researcher Dr. Ronald Chen. He is an associate professor of radiation oncology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

In 2012, ASCO issued a set of guidelines for physicians that recommended against using aggressive measures in patients with advanced cancer who are unlikely to benefit from such treatment. Instead, doctors should focus on easing the patient’s pain and symptoms, the guidelines say.

Dr. Andrew Epstein, an ASCO expert in palliative care, said, “Much more often than not, these types of care at the end of life are not helpful, and they are emotionally and physically harmful for patients, and emotionally harmful to the patients’ loved ones.” Epstein is a medical oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

To see if these guidelines are being followed, Chen and his colleagues reviewed claims data for more than 28,000 terminally ill cancer patients younger than 65 who died between 2007 and 2014. The patients lived across 14 different states, and had been diagnosed with advanced lung, colon, breast, pancreatic or prostate cancer.

The researchers defined aggressive care as chemotherapy, radiation therapy, hospital/emergency room treatment, admission to an intensive care unit (ICU), or dying in a hospital.

The investigators found that between 71 percent and 76 percent of patients received some form of aggressive care at the end of life, depending on their type of cancer:

• Chemotherapy use ranged from 24 percent to 33 percent.
• Rates of radiation therapy ran between 9 percent and 21 percent.
• Between 25 percent and 31 percent of patients underwent an invasive procedure, such as a biopsy or surgery.
• About 16 percent to 21 percent of patients were admitted to the ICU.

Cancer doctors want to provide good care for very ill patients, and sometimes have a hard time intuiting when enough is enough, Chen said.

“When a cancer progresses, we want to be able to help our patients by offering them treatments,” he said. “Along with that, we as doctors are really bad at estimating a patient’s life expectancy. We are not very good at realizing when a patient is approaching the end of life.”

At the same time, patients and their families also appear to play a role in the use of aggressive treatment.

Chen noted that the most-often used form of aggressive care was hospital/ER treatment, which between 62 percent and 65 percent of cancer patients underwent during their last month of life.

“That’s probably patient-driven, going to the emergency room or the hospital,” he said. “Part of it may also be that these younger patients want to continue to receive aggressive care for their cancers.”

Epstein added that patients may seek aggressive treatment based on the desires of family members who don’t want to feel like they’re giving up.

“There’s very often regret from the patient’s loved ones, who not uncommonly say, ‘If I had known it was going to be like this, we never would have wanted this,'” he said.

Epstein believes aggressive care can be avoided not by the implementation of guidelines, but through end-of-life planning involving “very challenging conversations about the end of life and what’s important to patients and their families.”

Doctors, nurses and other cancer care professionals need to be better trained in having these conversations, Epstein said.

“It needs to be a patient-centric approach to care delivery,” he explained.

“Very basic questions are very infrequently asked,” Epstein said. “What is important to you as a person living with this serious illness? What are you hoping for? What is a life worth living for you, in general, and what would be a fate worse than death? Very hard questions, understandably, and that’s why they’re not often asked, but these are extremely difficult situations and the stakes are extraordinarily high.”

Research presented at meetings is typically considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

Here’s more on the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s guidelines.

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Drug Duo Cures a Tick-Borne Disease — in Mice

MONDAY, June 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Babesiosis is a sometimes serious illness transmitted to humans by ticks. Now, researchers say a two-drug combo seems to have cured the illness in mice.

Babesiosis — transmitted by the same ticks that transmit the bacteria behind Lyme disease — is caused by the B. microti parasite, which can develop resistance to current treatments.

“This is the first radical cure against this parasite,” said lead researcher Choukri Ben Mamoun. He’s an associate professor of infectious diseases at Yale University, in New Haven, Conn.

People infected with the babesiosis parasite sometimes have no symptoms. However, in other cases they can develop symptoms that range from mild and flu-like, to severe and life-threatening.

Babesiosis is becoming more common in the United States, the researchers noted, and is more widespread in the Northeast and northern Midwest. The Yale team said that up to 19 percent of ticks, and up to 42 percent of mice (and other rodents) that carry the Lyme bacterium also carry B. microti.

The new treatment involved giving mice infected with babesiosis low doses of two drugs — atovaquone and another drug known by the acronym ELQ-334.

The researchers picked atovaquone because it targets a particular enzyme that, when mutated, gives the babesiosis parasite a chance to mutate and resist current drugs. ELQ-334 works similarly, but it targets a different enzyme, the research team explained.

According to Ben Mamoun’s team, the treatment not only cured mice of babesiosis, it also prevented the recurrence of the disease. The researchers noted that with current treatments, babesiosis can return to sicken the patient again.

“The novelty of the study was identifying a combination therapy that will both kill the parasite and also paralyze the target enzyme, making it nearly impossible for the parasite to develop resistance,” Ben Mamoun said in a Yale news release.

However, research that works in mice and other animals often fails in a human trial. So, the researchers said the next step is to conduct clinical trials of this combination therapy in people. The researchers are currently refining one of the medicines, ELQ-334, to first assure that it will be safe for use in humans.

The study was published online June 6 in The Journal of Experimental Medicine.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on babesiosis.

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Intensive Blood Sugar Control May Be Too Much for Some With Type 2 Diabetes

MONDAY, June 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Intensive treatment of blood sugar levels in some people with type 2 diabetes may cause serious complications, new research suggests.

“In this study, we found that, particularly among older patients and patients with serious chronic conditions, intensive treatment nearly doubled the risk of severe hypoglycemia requiring medical attention, including hospitalization,” said lead author Dr. Rozalina McCoy. She is an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

Hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) is a serious potential complication of diabetes treatment. The researchers said it can worsen quality of life and has been linked with cardiovascular events, dementia and death.

The researchers reviewed information from more than 31,500 American adults. All had stable and controlled type 2 diabetes. None was taking insulin. None had a prior history of severe hypoglycemia. Both of these factors are known to increase the risk for future hypoglycemia, the researchers explained.

Nearly 19 percent of older patients and those with serious chronic conditions (clinically complex patients) received intensive blood sugar management. More than 26 percent of non-complex patients received intensive treatment of blood sugar, the study authors reported.

Overall, older and clinically complex patients were nearly twice as likely to develop severe hypoglycemia as non-complex patients. Intensive treatment increased that risk by an additional 77 percent over two years, the researchers said.

“This means that 3 out of 100 older or clinically complex patients with [type 2] diabetes who never had hypoglycemia before, whose [blood sugar] is within recommended targets and who are not on insulin will experience a severe hypoglycemic episode at some point over two years,” McCoy said in a Mayo news release.

“This does not even capture the more mild episodes of low blood sugar that patients can treat at home, without having to go to the doctor, emergency department or hospital,” she added.

“These findings are concerning for many reasons,” McCoy said. “Overtreatment results in greater patient burden, higher risk of medication side effects, and more severe hypoglycemia, which can lead to serious injury and even death. It adds more unnecessary costs for patients and the health care system.”

McCoy stressed the need for providing individualized treatments for people with type 2 diabetes.

The study was published online June 6 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

More information

The American Academy of Family Physicians has more about blood sugar levels in diabetes patients.

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Superior Results for Myeloma Drug That’s Added Earlier in Treatment

By Dennis Thompson
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, June 6, 2016 (HealthDay News) — A recently approved immunotherapy drug for a blood cancer called multiple myeloma can provide even better benefits if patients receive it earlier in their treatment, new clinical trial results show.

Darzalex (daratumumab) reduced patients’ risk of cancer progression by 70 percent when added to a standard two-drug regimen for people with recurring myeloma, said lead researcher Dr. Antonio Palumbo. He is chief of the myeloma unit at the University of Torino department of oncology in Italy.

The new drug essentially doubled the response that doctors expect from the standard regimen of bortezomib (another immunotherapy drug) and dexamethasone (a steroid drug).

About 19 percent of patients given Darzalex had their cancer go into full remission, compared with just 9 percent of those taking the standard treatment, researchers found. “Very good” response rates doubled to 59 percent in the Darzalex group from 29 percent in the standard treatment group.

“It’s clear now that we’ll be moving to a three-drug regimen, with daratumumab as the standard of care,” Palumbo said.

Multiple myeloma is a cancer of the plasma cells that make infection-fighting antibodies, researchers said in background information.

Abnormal plasma cells grow out of control in myeloma, crowding out other blood-generating cells in a person’s bone marrow. Anemia, excessive bleeding, and a decreased ability to stave off infections are the result.

Myeloma is relatively uncommon. About 30,330 new cases are expected in 2016, and about 12,650 deaths, the American Cancer Society estimates.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted accelerated approval to Darzalex last November, for treatment of multiple myeloma patients who have undergone at least three prior rounds of treatment.

Darzalex targets a protein on the surface of cancer cells called CD-38, and appears to attack cancer cells in several ways, said Dr. Amrita Krishnan, a hematologist/oncologist at City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, Calif.

The drug stimulates the immune system’s ability to attack tumor cells, Krishnan said. At the same time, it can directly kill myeloma cells, causing rapid tumor shrinkage, the researchers said.

Palumbo and his colleagues suspected that Darzalex might produce even stronger results if included earlier in treatment. The team recruited nearly 500 patients who had undergone one or more prior rounds of therapy. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either a three-drug regimen that included Darzalex or the usual two-drug combination.

Patients received eight cycles of either drug regimen, followed by Darzalex maintenance therapy for patients assigned to the three-drug group.

Not only did Darzalex produce superior results, but it did so in a very short period of time, Palumbo said.

“In many cases, tumors shrank in less than a month,” he said. “As a result of shrinkage and slower tumor growth, patients had less pain and a better quality of life.”

Adding the drug did not substantially worsen the most common side effects from the standard two-drug regimen, Palumbo added. However, patients receiving Darzalex did have slightly higher rates of blood toxicity, including anemia, infections, and damage to peripheral nerves, the study found.

Krishnan said the clinical trial “sets a new paradigm, suggesting that this is something that should be considered earlier in the course of a patient’s therapy.”

While it’s too soon to tell if Darzalex will provide a significant life-extending benefit to patients, “I do think it is going to be explored as a front-line therapy,” Krishnan added.

Palumbo presented the clinical trial findings Sunday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago. The study received funding from the drug’s marketer, Janssen Biotech of Horsham, Pa.

Research presented at meetings is generally considered preliminary until it’s peer-reviewed.

More information

For more on multiple myeloma, visit the American Cancer Society.

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