"Health News - Medicine, Diet and Fitness"

Alcoholics given the drug Topamax — more commonly used to treat migraine headaches — were able to cut down their drinking as part of a treatment program but without needing detoxification, according to researchers.

The Associated Press reported Oct. 9 that researchers tracked 371 heavy drinkers for 14 weeks and found that 15 percent of those receiving Topamax had quit drinking for at least seven weeks, compared to 3 percent of patients not receiving the drug. The Topamax group also was more likely to cut back on drinking than the control group.

“The size of the treatment effect is larger than in most of the other medications we’ve seen,” said Mark Willenbring of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. “And all the drinking variables changed in the right direction.”

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A multi-million-dollar class-action lawsuit has been filed by a group of counties in Kentucky over problems associated with the powerful prescription painkiller OxyContin, Pharmaceutical News reported Oct. 7.

The lawsuit alleges that OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma committed fraud and was guilty of conspiracy, negligence and creating a public nuisance in its marketing of the drug, which was at the heart of an epidemic of prescription-drug abuse and overdose deaths in Kentucky and elsewhere in the U.S.

The lawsuit seeks reimbursement of the cost of prescriptions paid by Medicaid and the Kentucky Pharmaceutical Alliance program, as well as damages associated with the addiction-treatment and law-enforcement costs associated with OxyContin use.

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Viagra the New Oyster? Pill Also an Aphrodisiac, Study Shows

New research shows that not only does viagra help men overcome medical barriers to sex, it’s also an aphrodisiac.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report this month that sildenafil, sold in the U.S. as viagra, increases the amount of oxytocin released by the pituitary gland.

Sometimes called the “love hormone” or “cuddle chemical,” oxytocin has been linked to sexual arousal and plays several important roles in social interactions and reproduction, including triggering uterine contractions and lactation. It is also released during orgasm.

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KISS Snorts Viagra

Earlier this week we ran an a more serious excerpt of CC Banana’s excellent interview with Eric Singer from KISS. Since it’s the weekend here we thought we’d let our hair down a little and post a funnier part of the interview for our week in review. Here is C.C. Banana: Have you ever received a kiss from a member of Kiss?

Eric Singer: Ace might have tried to kiss me at some point. I remember Paul telling me that once back in the old days, they were all sitting around the dressing room and for whatever reason, Peter just went over to Ace and put his dick on Ace’s shoulder! Then Ace turned around and kissed it!

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Viagra can move mountains — and watch those goggles

I had the naive belief that viagra was strictly for making “amour”.

Now I learn it may even help adventurers climb Mount Everest.

Normally, blood pressure is lower in lungs than in the rest of the body. But as one ascends Mount Everest in an oxygen-deficient atmosphere, it can become dangerously high resulting in high altitude sickness.

Dr. Martin Wilkins of Hammersmith Hospital in London, England, asked volunteers to breathe low levels of oxygen for 30 minutes. This caused constriction of blood vessels and a 56 per cent increase in pulmonary pressure. The experiment was then repeated after volunteers used (more…)

Viagra can treat pulmonary hypertension

BOSTON, July 27 viagra is being used to treat not only erectile dysfunction, but also pulmonary hypertension, according to a U.S. researcher.

The drug may have potential for treating several other conditions such as mountain sickness and Raynaud’s phenomenon, reports the August issue of Harvard Men’s Men’s health Watch.

viagra is now marketed under the name Revatio for pulmonary hypertension — an uncommon but serious disorder of high pressure in the blood vessels leading to the lungs, the newsletter said.

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Child rapist ‘prescribed Viagra’

A French paedophile accused of raping a five-year-old boy just over a month after he was released from jail was taking the impotence drug viagra that he says was prescribed by a prison doctor, his lawyer said on Sunday.

Francis Evrard, a 61-year-old repeat offender who spent 18 years in prison for raping children before being freed on July 2, snatched the boy from a street in the northern town of Roubaix on Wednesday.

Police said the pair were discovered later in the day partly clothed in a garage used by Evrard after the use of a new nationwide search system. Officers found a packet of (more…)

VIAGRA USE ‘NO LONGER TABOO

The number of prescriptions being written out in Gloucestershire for men with impotence is on the rise.GPs dished out more than 18,300 prescriptions last year, up from 16,500 in 2005/06.

With eight tablets of viagra costing as much as £46.99, the bill to the NHS is running into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The figures were released this week by the Prescription Pricing Authority, which bills all 150 primary care trusts in England.

Medication including (more…)

Trafficking in prescription drugs — many of them bogus — exceeds the use and sale of illicit drugs in many countries, according to the U.N.’s drug office, and the trend is driven in part by Internet sales, Reuters reported Sept. 5.

In the U.S., sale and abuse of prescription medications is second in scope only to marijuana. Stimulants and painkillers are among the top sellers.

Online, phony pharmacies sell drugs that are often equally fraudulent, sometimes with deadly results. Fake malaria drugs have killed people in Cambodia, while a phony anemia medicine resulted in deaths in Argentina.

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People with alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver suffer more drinking-related brain damage that alcoholics who don’t have cirrhosis, researchers say.

Science Daily reported Aug. 29 that researchers drew their conclusions from examination of gene expression in brain tissue samples.

“Cirrhotic patients [have] dysfunctional livers that cannot remove poisons from the blood stream,” said Dayne Mayfield, research scientist at the Waggoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research at The University of Texas at Austin. “These poisons are able to move into the brain and disrupt normal function.”

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