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Doubts on suicide-anti-smoking drug Chantix link

Doubts on suicide-anti-smoking drug Chantix link

Despite earlier health agency warnings, there is no strong evidence that the anti-smoking drug Chantix raises the risk of suicidal thoughts or depression compared to other stop-smoking products, researchers reported Thursday in the British Medical Journal.

Back in July of this year, U.S. health officials ordered strong “black box” warnings be added to Chantix (also called varenicline) as well as anti-smoking drug Zyban, following more than five thousand reports of depression, hostility and other behavioral changes possibly associated with use of these drugs.

“There have been recent concerns that varenicline, a relatively new smoking cessation product, may increase the risk of suicidal behavior and suicide,” study co-author Dr. David Gunnell of the University of Bristol, UK, explained in an email to Reuters Health.

“We found no clear evidence of an increased risk of self-harm or depression associated with varenicline,” he said.

The findings stem from data on more than 80,660 would-be quitters in the UK who used different smoking cessation products between September 2006 and May 2008.

A total of 63,265 of these individuals used nicotine replacement products, 10,973 used Chantix, and 6,422 used Zyban, an antidepressant also called bupropion, which has been found to help smokers quit.

When researchers looked at medical records, they didn’t find any evidence of an increased risk of serious mental health problems (i.e., self-harm, suicidal thoughts or depression) while they were using these products and during the three months after the last prescription was filled.

Gunnell cautioned, however, that based on the size of the study, it’s still possible that Chantix does increase the risk of suicide – or even decrease it.

“Other studies should be undertaken to provide further evidence on this issue,” he concluded.

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Diabetes drug kept breast tumors away in mice

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Diabetes drug kept breast tumors away in mice

Adding the common diabetes drug metformin to chemotherapy helped shrink breast cancer tumors faster in mice and keep them away longer than chemotherapy alone, raising hope for a more effective way to treat cancer, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They said metformin appeared to target breast cancer stem cells — a kind of master cancer cell that resists conventional treatment and may be the source of many tumors that grow back.

“What’s exciting here is we now have something that is mechanistically a different kind of killer of cancer that can synergize with chemotherapy,” Kevin Struhl of Harvard Medical School, whose study appears in the journal Cancer Research, said in a telephone briefing.

Many teams have been looking for ways to destroy the master cancer cells in the hope of making cancer easier to cure.

Last month, a team at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported that a chemical called salinomycin could kill breast cancer stem cells.

What is different with his study, Struhl said, is that metformin is a widely used drug with a long safety track record. “There are tens of millions of people who take this drug,” he said.

“Although our studies are limited to mice and cells, metformin has a history of anti-cancer effects,” he said.

Metformin has already been shown to reduce the risk of some cancers, including pancreatic and breast cancer, in large studies of people with diabetes.

Struhl said metformin’s affect on cancer stem cells appeared to be separate from its ability to help the body use insulin and lower blood sugar — which also can improve breast cancer survival.

His team studied metformin and the cancer drug doxorubicin in lab dishes and found they killed both human cancer stem cells and non-stem cancer cells.

Mice that had tumors and got metformin and chemotherapy were less likely to have tumors grow back two months after treatment compared with mice that got chemotherapy alone.

“When we had both drugs together, we lost the tumors faster, but more importantly, there was no relapse,” Struhl said.

He said with metformin, it may be possible to reduce the chemotherapy dose and still get the same benefit.

That will need to be studied in people and a study is getting under way. Dr. Jennifer Ligibel, at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard, is organizing a large trial with colleagues in Canada to study metformin in women with early stage breast cancer.

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Only 10 percent of U.S. adults have low heart risk

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Only 10 percent of U.S. adults have low heart risk

Ninety percent of American adults have at least one risk factor for heart disease, researchers reported on Monday.

Virtually all Americans either have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, are overweight, smoke or exercise too little, the team led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

“Unfortunately, the limited strides that were made toward this goal during the 1970s and 1980s were eroded by the increases in excess weight, diabetes and hypertension during more recent decades,” the CDC’s Dr. Earl Ford, who led the study, said in a statement.

Ford’s team looked at four national studies covering tens of thousands of Americans aged 25 to 74.

Only 10 percent had low risk scores in all five categories, they reported in the journal Circulation.

“Until the early 90s, we were moving in a positive direction, but then it took a turn and we’re headed in a negative direction,” said Ford.

“When you look at the individual factors, tobacco use is still headed in the right direction and so are cholesterol levels, although that has leveled off. The problem is that blood pressure, BMI (body mass index, a measure of obesity) and diabetes are all headed in the wrong direction.”

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer in the United States and many other countries.

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