Heartburn drug for the heart
Over-the-counter antihistamine drugs used to treat heartburn and acid reflux might be useful against chronic heart failure, a Japanese study suggests.
Though it was a small study with only 50 patients, the results point to possible benefits for many of the 23 million Americans with heart failure, says a report in the Oct. 3 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The potentially fatal condition occurs when the heart cannot pump blood effectively.
The initial work focused on Pepcid, because a major study of medical databases found that people with heart failure who also were taking the antihistamine appeared to have fewer heart-failure symptoms.
The chemistry is complex, but the idea is that one kind of histamine can accelerate the damage done to heart cells, so blocking the activity of histamine can protect those cells. But researchers say a much larger study is needed.
Blinding disease persists
Antibiotics alone offer no effective treatment for trachoma, an infectious eye disease that is the second leading cause of blindness after cataracts, a study indicates.
Some 600 million people worldwide are vulnerable to trachoma, and 146 million need treatment to preserve their sight, the World Health Organization estimates.
The new study, done in Vietnam, found that the benefits of antibiotic treatment were short-lived. Treatment with azithromycin cut the infection rate for two years, but the disease rebounded two years after the last treatment.
The research team, from Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute in California, reported the findings in the Sept. 27 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.
More dying of kidney cancer
More kidney cancers are being diagnosed and treated early, but the number of deaths from the disease continues to increase, University of Michigan researchers report.
That the number of cases has been growing is largely due to the detection of small, presumably curable tumors, so scientists say they aren’t exactly sure why so many people are still dying. But one expert notes that the trend might be explained by the lack of effective chemotherapy drugs to give kidney cancer patients once they have had surgery to remove tumors.
Kidney cancer is the third most common cancer of the reproductive and urinary systems. There will be about 38,890 new cases of kidney cancer in the United States this year, and some 12,840 people will die from the disease, the American Cancer Society estimates.
The latest research was published in the Sept. 20 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
