For five of the past six seasons, attendance at NCAA football games has broken records. Nearly 49.7 million attended college football games last year, according to the NCAA, which doesn’t include the 127 million who watched TV games. What the audience and, most importantly, the players themselves aren’t aware of is the potentially devastating long-term…
DetailsOlder adults use more medicines than younger people and also tend to experience more serious side effects, including death. Yet drug makers often exclude older adults from clinical trials, according to the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen. In particular, a new analysis of four popular medications often taken by older adults – rosuvastatin (Crestor) for…
DetailsA new analysis concluded that many of the reports that are conducted on new drugs and medical devices come from studies conducted on a small number of patients in clinical trials with less-than-reliable methods and, often, missing data! Dr. Robert Califf of the Duke Translational Medicine Institute in Durham, N.C., told Reuters Health that these…
DetailsThe U.S. Food and Drug Administration isn’t doing a very good job of tracking drugs once they’re on the market to see if they’re safe, according to the Institute of Medicine, a government watchdog group. Some drugs are put on the market despite evidence that they might have bad side effects, the IOM said, and…
DetailsThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has warned about the risk of infection when clinics re-use injections intended for single-use only. According to MSNBC.msn.com, 10 patients in Arizona and Delaware got serious infections requiring hospitalization after they were injected with diluted drugs intended to be administered to one patient only. A nationwide shortage of…
DetailsU.S. Food and Drug Administration staff have sent word to agency advisers meeting this week that there should be more and consistent tests to study the effect of metal in hip implants on surrounding body tissue. The staff said these tests might help lower high failure rates on implants made by Johnson & Johnson and…
DetailsAs the U.S. Food and Drug Administration prepares to examine how safe metal-on-metal hip implants are, the agency released a report saying it received more than 16,800 reports of adverse events associated with the devices from 2000-2011. Complaints increased after Johnson & Johnson began recalling its ASR hip implants in 2010, according to Bloomberg News. More…
DetailsA British manufacturer of a metal-on-metal component for an artificial hip has voluntarily withdrawn the metal liner (or cup) from the market, as some patients were forced to have the liner removed after complaining of infections, fractures and dislocations. The liner was part of Smith & Nephew’s R3 Acetabular System. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, about…
DetailsLast year, the FDA received nearly 180,000 reports of serious, disabling, and fatal adverse drug events in the United States – most of them through drug makers – that affected up to 4 million Americans, which makes an industry watchdog group wonder if anybody out there cares. “In fact, the 2011 data illustrate that many…
DetailsWe love our cars. They get us everywhere we need to go in relative comfort. In return, we wash them, wax them, regularly change the oil, and keep them well-fueled. But when is the last time you checked the air in your tires? According to a recent survey by AAA Arizona and the Rubber Manufacturers…
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