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Female Health’s condom available, no U.S. retail yet

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Female Health’s condom available, no U.S. retail yet

Female Health Co’s new version of its female condom is now available to state health agencies and nonprofit organizations, but the company is still trying to make it more widely available in stores.

The condom, known as FC2, will cost about 30 percent less than the original version at less than a dollar apiece, the company said on Thursday.

FC2, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in March, will be available at Washington, D.C.-area CVS stores in December, Female Health’s senior strategic adviser Mary Ann Leeper told Reuters. Female Health is still seeking a marketing partner to help advertise and sell the product and is in talks with several companies, she added.

“We need the other company to really make a dent into the consumer market,” she said.

The original female condom never had a large following in the United States, where consumers complained it made too much noise and spoiled intimacy. The FC2 uses a new, softer material that the company says is quieter and should be more acceptable.

But the female condom is used widely overseas, especially in countries hard-hit by HIV, where women see it as a way to protect themselves even if their male partners won’t. The U.S. Agency for International Development, which lobbied for the FC2’s approval, has said it plans to distribute it for global programs that aim to curb HIV.

U.S. state health departments and organizations such as Planned Parenthood can also buy it for their programs, which the company hopes will start to spread the word about the product’s improvements.

While FC2 may face an uphill battle at the retail level, it could see greater use with its new lower price.

The original female condom retailed for as much as $4 each. The new material and manufacturing have lowered the price of the new version from distributors to no more than 82 cents per condom, the company said. Male condoms, available in a variety of brands and styles, can cost as little as 50 cents apiece.

Representatives for CVS Caremark Corp, which operates CVS stores, could not be immediately reached for comment.

Shares of Female Health were down 5.7 percent to $4.76 in afternoon trading on Nasdaq.

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Experts urge screening for obesity in kids

Experts urge screening for obesity in kids

Doctors should screen children and teens between 6 and 18 years for extra pounds, a federal task force recommends.

For children who are found to be obese based on their body mass index (BMI), a standard measure of the relationship between height and weight, the task force also calls for referrals to a comprehensive program that includes dietary advice, physical activity, and behavioral counseling to promote weight loss.

The new recommendations update earlier ones from 2005. Skyrocketing rates of obesity have reached between 12 and 18 percent in 2- to 19-year-olds, increasing up to 6-fold since the 1970s, members of the United States Preventive Services Task Force report in the February issue of the journal Pediatrics. Obesity is linked to the early development of diabetes and high blood pressure.

For their update, the task force reviewed 13 studies of behavioral intervention in 1258 obese children and adolescents.

Moderate- to high-intensity programs, involving more than 25 hours of contact with the child and/or the family over a six-month period, resulted in a decrease in BMI 12 months after the beginning of the intervention.

In addition to dietary and physical activity counseling, effective programs included behavioral-management techniques such as self-monitoring and eating management. However, the programs only worked in children who followed through on treatment.

Harms of screening — for example, adverse effects on growth, eating-disorder pathology, or mental health issues — were judged to be minimal.

It is unclear if the recommendations can be applied to children who are overweight but not obese. And there was no convincing support for interventions that lasted less than 25 hours per six months, or for screening children below age 6.

Yet some experts take issue with what they consider the narrow age bracket of the recommendation.

“The USPSTF falls short of the mark in not recognizing the developmental trajectory of obesity in childhood,” writes Dr. Sandra G. Hassink, from the Dupont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Delaware, in a related commentary.

Hassink urges pediatricians to screen all children. “Working with families to screen for high-risk nutrition and activity behaviors that contribute to obesity in early childhood must be part of that task,” she writes.

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For Heart Health, Focus on Risk Factors

For Heart Health, Focus on Risk Factors

Treating multiple factors that contribute to heart attack risk is better than simply focusing on lowering a patient’s cholesterol level, according to U.S. researchers.

“We’ve been worrying too much about people’s cholesterol level and not enough about their overall risk of heart disease,” Dr. Rodney A. Hayward, director of the Veterans Affairs Center for Health Services Research and Development, and a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, said in a news release.

Levels of harmful LDL cholesterol should be less than 130 for most people and less than 70 for high-risk patients, according to the National Cholesterol Education Program.

In their study, Hayward and his colleagues analyzed data from Americans, aged 30 to 75, with no history of heart attack, who took part in clinical trials of cholesterol-lowering statin drugs. The researchers evaluated the benefit of five years of treatment tailored to a patient’s overall heart attack risk based on factors such as age, family history, diabetes, high blood pressure, smoking status and C-reactive protein level.

The results showed that the tailored treatment was more efficient (more benefit per person treated) and prevented substantially more heart attacks, strokes and cardiovascular deaths than simply reducing cholesterol to a certain target. The tailored treatment saved 500,000 more quality-adjusted life years than cholesterol-focused therapy, the researchers said.

“The bottom line message — knowing your overall heart attack risk is more important than knowing your cholesterol level. If your overall risk is elevated, you should probably be on a statin regardless of what your cholesterol is, and if your risk is very high, [you] should probably be on a high dose of statin,” Hayward said in the news release.

“However, if your LDL cholesterol is high, but your overall cardiac risk is low, taking a statin does not make sense for you. If your cholesterol is your only risk factor and you’re younger, you should work on diet and exercise,” he added.

The study was published online Jan. 18 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
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