This is a medicine to prevent heart attacks and strokes in patients who suffer acute coronary syndrome, the condition that occurs after a heart attack or serious heart-related chest pain.
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So when you see the press in full cry over some drug the question to ask is this: Is this medicine a genuine threat, or has it simply lost its star billing?
This is not a medicine that is likely to be used in patients with garden variety high cholesterol, or even those with less serious versions of the genetic disease FH.
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And, despite the tone of much of the coverage, this is not a medicine only taken by a few people.
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This is a common practice in American medicine and a major reason for its expense.
The question is, and all kidding aside this is a really serious question: Is the Republican success tonight because of not enough of this medicine, or too much of this medicine?
Behind this renewed interest in traditional medicine is a palpable sense of pride in reviving one's heritage.
Is this just a case of an experimental medicine getting bogged down in hypothetical worries?
The basic problem is this: What should patients and doctors do when insufficient data is collected on a new medicine?
"I think this is reassuring, " says Christie Ballantyne , a cardiologist at the Baylor College of Medicine who is heading up a Crestor clinical trial for AstraZeneca.
But this is a time of great challenge for everyone in medicine, and challenges mean learning to excel in new ways.
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Unfortunately, this is a great example of the realities between personal medicine in the media and how it works in the field.
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This is obviously a big lift and a big change for medicine.
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"It appears that this is a class effect, " New England Journal of Medicine Editor Jeffrey Drazen writes in a blunt editorial accompanying the three studies.
That is important, said Curran, because fighting bioterrorism is at this point as much a matter of law enforcement as medicine.
Every time an ordinary sick person get carded for buying cold medicine, she is a victim of this second kind of policy error.
No other fields except medicine have concluded that this kind of system is a rational way to match applicants and schools or job-seekers and jobs.
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But turning this alliance into a new medicine won't be easy, and there is already competition.
Kythera: This aesthetic medicine company is probably the most interesting IPO of the group from a venture perspective.
This is called a vaso-vagal response and we consider this a SIDE EFFECT of the medicine.
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As George Church, a geneticist at Harvard, explains, this is what is now happening in personalized medicine.
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"My belief is that if you are talking about patient safety, this is the number one problem in medicine, " says Dr. Robert Brook, a UCLA professor and director of health sciences for Rand.
"Medicine as a profession has survived a long time and with luck this is a temporary blip, " he said.
"This is the first time that an oral diabetic medicine has been shown to have this benefit in a prospective study, " said John Dormandy , of St.
"This is the end of a Medicare program that forces seniors to choose between food on the table and the medicine that they need, " he said.
Scientists predict this will eventually lead to an age of personalized medicine, in which a person's DNA is analyzed before treatment and he is given a cocktail of drug treatments customized for his genetic profile.
"Most of us agree this virus is not a single-drug disease, " says Dr. Jeffrey Crippin of Washington University School of Medicine in St.
This can motivate companies to study drugs against untreatable diseases first, in the hopes that once a medicine is approved, doctors will start prescribing it for other indications, increasing sales.
If this medicine doesn't pan out, the next competitor to Avastin is VEGF-Trap, a treatment that Sanofi is developing with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals (nasdaq: REGN - news - people ).
Andrew Prentice, a professor of nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, suggested this week that obesity is now so widespread (hem) that it represents an evolutionary shift in human body-shape.
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