Friday, March 12, 6-10 p.m. Toast the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick at their St. Patrick’s Day Party at the Dragonfly, 234 N. Second St., Harrisburg. Benefits Lupus Foundation.

          – Tickets are $25, and proceeds will benefit the Lupus Foundation

          – The event will honor Speaker of the House Keith McCall

          – Will feature live music and food from Zia’s

Saturday, April 10 — Join the fun at the Lupus Gala at the Hershey Lodge! Don’t miss our biggest party of the year — dinner, dancing to live music, and bidding on an incredible array of items in our silent auction!

Saturday, May 22 — Join our lupus team and “Walk, Run, Ride, or Roll” at the Highmark Walk for a Healthy Community on Saturday, May 22, on City Island. 5K at 9 a.m.; 1 Mile at 9:15. Or walk virtually! 

To learn more about these events or to volunteer, please contact Marianne Clay: 717-671-9515 or at mclay@lupuspa.org

One of the world’s largest studies of the contraceptive pill has found that women who have taken it can expect longer lives and are less likely to die from any cause, including cancer and heart disease.

British researchers said their study, which should reassure many millions of women across the world who have taken oral birth control pills, found no link between the drugs and an increased long-term risk of dying sooner.

“The results of this study are enormously reassuring and suggest that in the longer term the health benefits of the contraceptive pill outweigh any risks,” said Richard Anderson of Edinburgh University and the Medical Research Council human reproductive sciences unit, who was not involved in the study.

The research, published in the British Medical Journal on Friday, followed 46,000 women for nearly 40 years, creating “more than a million woman-years” of observation, according to Philip Hannaford from Aberdeen University, who led the study.

The results showed that in the longer term, women who used oral contraception had a significantly lower rate of death from any cause, including heart disease and all cancers, compared with women who had never taken it.

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Too much cancer screening, too many heart tests, too many cesarean sections. A spate of recent reports suggest that too many Americans-maybe even President Barack Obama-are being overtreated.

Is it doctors practicing defensive medicine? Or are patients so accustomed to a culture of medical technology that they insist on extensive tests and treatments?

A combination of both is at work, but now new evidence and guidelines are recommending a step back and more thorough doctor-patient conversations about risks and benefits.

As a medical journal editorial said this week about Obama’s recent checkup, Americans including the commander in chief need to realize that “more care is not necessarily better care.”

Obama’s exam included prostate cancer screening and a virtual colonoscopy. The PSA test for prostate cancer is not routinely recommended for any age and colon screening is not routinely recommended for patients younger than 50. Obama is 48.

Earlier colon cancer screening is sometimes recommended for high-risk groups-which a White House spokesman noted includes blacks. Doctors disagree on whether a virtual colonoscopy is the best method. But it’s less invasive than traditional colonoscopies and doesn’t require sedation-or the possible temporary transfer of presidential power, the White House said.

The colon exam exposed him to radiation “while likely providing no benefit to his care,” Dr. Rita Redberg, editor of Archives of Internal Medicine, wrote in an online editorial. Obama’s experience “is multiplied many times over” at a huge financial cost to society, and to patients exposed to potential harms but no benefits.

“People have come to equate tests with good care and prevention,” Redberg, a cardiologist with the University of California at San Francisco, said in an interview Thursday. “Prevention is all the things your mother told you-eat right, exercise, get enough sleep, don’t smoke-and we’ve made it into getting a new test.”

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The Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act would reduce waste, fraud and abuse resulting from lack of oversight on the part of federal agencies.

Making closing arguments for his health care overhaul Wednesday, President Barack Obama gave a shout out of sorts to Congressman Patrick Murphy.

Promising to crack down on the waste, fraud and abuse in health care that costs taxpayers $100 billion each year, the president praised a bill Murphy co-sponsored with California Republican Brian Bilbray.

The Improper Payments Elimination and Recovery Act would reduce waste, fraud and abuse resulting from lack of oversight on the part of federal agencies.

“I’m thrilled the president has highlighted our bill,” Murphy said in a news conference. “Our proposal is a commonsense measure. This is a huge step in our efforts.”

Murphy, a two-term Democrat in the 8th District, said, “At a time when Pennsylvania families are watching our expenses, Americans expect government to do the same. There is simply no excuse to lose billions of taxpayer dollars to improper payments every year. The savings from this bipartisan bill should be redirected to middle class tax cuts.”

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A widely used test to detect blockages in the heart’s arteries often turns up little or no evidence of disease, a new study found, suggesting that patients are frequently exposed unnecessarily to the risks and costs of the invasive examination.

The test is a called a coronary angiogram, in which cardiologists thread a catheter into the heart to take an X-ray movie to look for obstructions that might cause chest pain or increase the risk of a heart attack. More than a million U.S. patients undergo the diagnostic test each year at a cost of about $10,000 each, according to government data. In cases where significant obstruction is found, the test helps doctors determine whether a patient should undergo coronary bypass surgery or have a stent implanted to alleviate the problem.

The new study, published in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, is based on data on nearly 400,000 angiograms performed between 2004 and 2008 that 633 hospitals in the U.S. submitted to a registry maintained by the American College of Cardiology. The patients weren’t previously diagnosed with heart disease, but because of symptoms, family history or other reasons ended up getting the test. Such patients represent about 20% of all people who are referred for angiograms, researchers said.

The study found that 62% of the patients didn’t have evidence of significant obstructions, while 38% had important blockages, researchers found. In all, 39% were determined not to have coronary-artery disease.

“The rate of obstructive disease isn’t as high as we had hoped,” said Manesh Patel, a cardiologist at Duke University’s Duke Clinical Research Institute, who led the study. “Our process of diagnosing coronary artery disease needs improvement.”

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A panel of medical experts on Wednesday recommended steps to reverse a trend that has dismayed many pregnant women: the increasing difficulty of finding doctors and hospitals that will let a woman try to give birth normally if she has had a Caesarean section in the past.

The new recommendations came at a conference held in Bethesda, Md., by the National Institutes of Health to examine why the rate of vaginal birth after Caesarean, or VBAC (pronounced VEE-back), has plummeted, to less than 10 percent from 28.3 percent in 1996. The repeat operations are feeding the nation’s overall Caesarean rate of 31.8 percent, which has been rising steadily for the last 11 years.

“We found the use of VBAC is certainly a safe alternative for the majority of women who’ve had one prior” Caesarean, provided that the incision was horizontal and low on the uterus, said Dr. F. Gary Cunningham, the conference chairman and a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. About 70 percent of women who have had Caesareans are good candidates for trying for a normal birth, and 60 percent to 80 percent of those who try succeed.

Although the panel was chosen by the institutes, it acted independently and based its findings on technical reports and presentations by experts at the conference. It also took comments from the public.

In the past, the rule was “once a Caesarean, always a Caesarean” because of fears that the scar on the uterus would rupture during labor, which can be life-threatening for both the woman and the child. The thinking changed gradually as it became clear that women could safely have normal births after Caesarean, and an expert panel in 1980 declared vaginal birth safe for many women who had had Caesareans.

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Two research teams have independently decoded the entire genome of patients to find the exact genetic cause of their diseases. The approach may offer a new start in the so far disappointing effort to identify the genetic roots of major killers like heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

In the decade since the first full genetic code of a human was sequenced for some $500 million, less than a dozen genomes had been decoded, all of healthy people.

Geneticists said the new research showed it was now possible to sequence the entire genome of a patient at reasonable cost and with sufficient accuracy to be of practical use to medical researchers. One subject’s genome cost just $50,000 to decode.

“We are finally about to turn the corner, and I suspect that in the next few years human genetics will finally begin to systematically deliver clinically meaningful findings,” said David B. Goldstein, a Duke University geneticist who has criticized the current approach to identifying genetic causes of common diseases.

Besides identifying disease genes, one team, in Seattle, was able to make the first direct estimate of the number of mutations, or changes in DNA, that are passed on from parent to child. They calculate that of the three billion units in the human genome, 60 per generation are changed by random mutation — considerably less than previously thought.

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The disagreement between Blue Cross of Northeastern Pennsylvania and local pharmacies over a mail-order prescription option for the insurer’s customers illustrates one of the biggest difficulties of reforming American health care.

Any proposal to cut health care costs invariably hurts somebody in the system. In the case of the Blue Cross proposal, it’s neighborhood drug stores that will suffer.

Blue Cross says the new program – Select Home Delivery – will allow members to receive mail-order delivery of “maintenance medications” for chronic conditions. The insurer says volume discounts and lower copayments will cut costs. Local pharmacists say Blue Cross has stacked the deck against them by making it difficult for clients to stay with their neighborhood drug stores. Blue Cross counters that switching to mail order delivery is strictly optional, but every member will have to make a choice.

It remains to be seen whether neighborhood pharmacies will become the latest businesses to fall to the economies of scale, a great wave of consolidation that has swallowed everything from the corner market to the local bank.

If Congress manages to pass a health care reform bill, no matter how modest, the wheels will be set in motion for changes that are long overdue. These changes must reduce waste, cut back on unnecessary tests and scale back on America’s “there’s a pill for everything” mentality.

With so many well-heeled interests invested in the system, proposals to streamline it not only generate opposition, but sometimes bring hysterical reactions, such as the fear that President Obama wanted to establish “death panels.” As the president said at Arcadia University on Monday, “Health care is hard. It’s easily misrepresented. It’s easily misunderstood.”

Concerns about the cost of current health care proposals are legitimate. Americans should be terrified about the mushrooming national deficit. But those who say Congress should not make fundamental changes to a system that accounts for one-sixth of the economy ignore the reality that unchecked health costs eventually will bankrupt our children.

Change has to start somewhere and those changes inevitably hurt someone in the system. As the prescription wars demonstrate, it may be the little guy – in this case, the neighborhood pharmacy – who feels the pain first.

Staff members at the Food and Drug Administration are doing something unusual. They are leaving Washington to help drug makers take a crucial step in developing drugs for rare diseases.

The staffers help administer the Orphan Drug Act, which provides incentives to create therapies for so-called orphan diseases—those that affect fewer than 200,000 Americans. There are about 7,000 such maladies, most of them serious, that have few or no drugs to treat them, from adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare head and neck cancer, to Zollinger-Ellison syndrome, which is associated with a tumor that causes the production of high levels of stomach acid.

As a result, doctors may end up prescribing drugs developed for other diseases off-label, but not all insurers will cover this kind of use.

Getting an orphan-drug designation opens the door to incentives once the FDA approves a medicine for sale in the U.S., including seven years’ marketing exclusivity and tax breaks. Last year, just 250 requests for orphan-drug designation were filed, and 160 received it.

“We’re barely scratching the surface,” says Timothy Coté, director of the FDA’s Office of Orphan Products Development, the workshop’s sponsor. He says there are roughly 350 orphan drugs approved, covering about 150 rare diseases.

Tim Cunniff, vice president of global regulatory affairs at Lundbeck Inc., which has a number of approved orphan drugs, says most companies developing orphan drugs are small.

Big companies are starting to get more interested in rare diseases, but the key issue is the high cost of developing a drug and the typically long time it takes to move it from a lab into a clinic as a treatment that gets prescribed. Before starting down this arduous path, a company needs to feel there is a reasonable chance of making a profit.

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Reports Reuters:

It may not be surprising, but a new study offers some proof that patients who are worried about their medications are more likely to have side effects from them.

Health

The study involved patients with a particular kind of arthritis. While more research has to be done in patients with other illnesses to know for sure, “my guess would be that this is happening across a wide range of drugs,” Dr. Yvonne Nestoriuc of Philipps-University Marburg in Germany, the study’s lead author, told Reuters Health. “This is really something that happens in a lot of patient populations.”

While most medication side effects are not life threatening or seriously harmful, she and her colleagues note in the journal Arthritis Care & Research, they can still be “frightening and distressing” to patients, and can also lead to patients not taking drugs as recommended.

People with a variety of illnesses who don’t feel their medications are necessary and are concerned about their side effects are known to be less likely to take these drugs as directed, the researchers add.

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