Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Hepatitis C News; Vertex Patient Website, Liver Cancer and More..

"Better To Know C" is a new website by Vertex for HCV patients.
The site has this lovely greeting;
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Times Have Changed
Over the years, scientists have learned more and more about hepatitis C. Discovered in 1989, the virus is currently the leading cause of liver transplants in the U.S.,1 but with successful treatment, hepatitis C can be cured. Learn more about hepatitis C treatment by exploring this website or calling 1-888-552-2494. It really is Better To Know C.
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Vertex must be getting ready for the big launch of Telaprevir, the site is full of great information folks.
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By Ed Silverman // March 9th, 2011 // 10:07 am
Two days ago, the European Association for the Study of the Liver released summaries of abstracts in advance of its annual meeting, which starts later this month. Among these were results showing that preliminary data on two hepatitis C meds from Pharmasset suggest a breakthrough because 94 percent of the patients displayed undetectable levels of the virus after two weeks.....Read Full Article
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EASL Update; The 46th Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL) takes place in Berlin, Germany, March 30 - April 3, 2011.
You may have noticed a link located on the sidebar of this blog which includes the upcoming Oral Presentations and Abstracts/Poster Sessions.
You can find abstracts through the link below.
.The International Liver Congress™ 2011 by EASL (46th annual meeting)
During the meeting all media updates will be posted on the blog in the order they are received, you will find them under this link also on the sidebar; The News EASL .
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Hepatitis In The News
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Hepatitis B
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World Journal of Gastroenterology
A research team from China evaluated the effect of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection on liver metastasis of colorectal cancer. The study showed that HBV infection decreases the risk of liver metastasis in patients with colorectal cancer and elevates the surgical resection rate of liver metastatic lesions. National Natural Science Foundation of China
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Decompensated liver disease is characterised by failure of the liver to maintain adequate function, usually due to severe scarring, leading to fibrosis and/or cirrhosis caused by chronic liver inflammation.¹ It represents the end stage of hepatitis. Natural history data demonstrate that up to 40% of patients with CHB develop cirrhosis over their lifetimes, at a reported rate of 2-6% per year. Among CHB patients with cirrhosis, 3-5% per year progress to decompensated cirrhosis and 2-5% develop hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).²,³ Currently, the median survival rate in decompensated patients is two to three years, with only 28% of patients surviving for more than five years.¹,⁴
Once liver disease progresses to the decompenstated stage, a liver transplant is often necessary.
“The approval of this additional indication is an important milestone for CHB patients living with decompensated liver disease, a difficult to treat population whose mortality rates are high,” said Professor Jorg Petersen. “The data used to support this indication shows that BARACLUDE® is efficacious in treating decompensated patients.”
This approval is based on a randomised, open-label, multi-centre study (ETV-048) that compared the efficacy & safety of BARACLUDE® (1.0 mg once daily) with adefovir (10.0 mg once daily) administered in patients with HBeAg positive or negative CHB who had evidence of liver decompensation.............
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Liver Cancer
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Your Health: New procedure kills cancer cells naturally
By: Ivanhoe Broadcast News
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Updated 03/07/2011 09:16 AM
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According to the Mayo Clinic, liver cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer in the world.
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Now, researchers at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine are testing a revolutionary new procedure that uses the body's own natural killers to keep liver cancer from coming back. The treatment utilizes specialized cells in the body known as natural killer cells.
After a liver transplant, these natural killers can attack any liver cancer cells remaining in the body. Natural killer cells are extracted from a donor liver, cultured in the lab so they multiply, and are injected into the patient's bloodstream.
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These cells act like "smart bombs," honing in and destroying any lingering cancer cells. They also have the added bonus of being 10 times more aggressive against the hepatitis C virus Liver cancer is uncommon in the United States. Most cancer that occurs in the liver in the U.S. begins in another area of the body such as the colon, breast, or lung. Doctors call this metastatic cancer, rather than primary liver cancer. This type of cancer is named after the organ in which it began.
According to the National Cancer Institute, about 15,000 men and 6,000 women are diagnosed with primary liver cancer in the U.S. each year. Most of these people are over age 64.
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There are a variety of treatment options for patients with liver cancer.
Some of these include:
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• Surgery - Doctors remove the cancer and part of the healthy tissue that surrounds the tumor.
• Liver transplant surgery - A patient's diseased liver is removed and replaced with a healthy liver from a donor.
• Freezing cancer cells - Cryoablation uses extreme cold to destroy cancer cells.• Heating cancer cells - In a procedure called radiofrequency ablation, electric current is used to heat and destroy cancer cells.
• Injecting Alcohol - Pure alcohol is injected directly into tumors either through the skin or during an operation.
• Chemotherapy - Chemoembolization is a type of chemotherapy that supplies strong anti-cancer drugs directly to the liver.
• Radiation - High-powered energy beams destroy cancer cells and shrink tumors.
• Targeted Drug Therapy - Sorafenib (Nexavar) is a targeted drug designed to interfere with a tumor's ability to generate new blood vessels.
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While liver transplants may be a good option for some patients, the cancer cells still in the body may eventually attack the new, transplanted liver. This happens in about 20 percent of cases
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Growth Hormone Connected to Fatty Liver and Liver Cancer
Full story: Examiner.com
Fatty Liver Disease occurs when excessively high levels of fat deposits are found in the liver. This disorder was originally thought to be a strictly related to alcoholism, however, it is also found to be prevalent with obesity, diabetes and malnutrition.A If untreated, a fatty liver can lead to liver scarring and liver cancer. At the UCSF ...
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Pharmaceutical News
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By REUBEN KRAMER
PHILADELPHIA (CN) - CVS Pharmacy raked in millions by selling consumers' confidential prescription information to some of the nation's largest pharmaceutical manufacturers, according to a class action Monday.
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Automated Medication Dispensing For Improved Patient Safety
08 March 2011Although it won't be obvious to UCSF Medical Center patients, behind the scenes a family of giant robots now counts and processes their medications. With a new automated hospital pharmacy, believed to be the nation's most...
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Healthy You
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Is Coffee a Wise Adjunct to Hepatitis C Therapy?
In the debate over coffee's effect on health, coffee lovers who are undergoing treatment for Hepatitis C have just scored a victory.
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Related On The Blog; The Health Benefits Of Coffee
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Gastrointestinal Endoscopy
For National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, GIE: Gastrointestinal Endoscopy has published a special March issue on colonoscopy and colorectal cancer which includes a study showing that colonoscopy has prevented a substantial number of colorectal cancer deaths and that many more could have been prevented with more widespread use. The analysis reports that approximately 13,800 to 22,000 colorectal cancer deaths could have been prevented in 2005, whereas 7,300 to 11,700 were actually prevented through colonoscopy use.
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PLoS Medicine
It's all too familiar: researchers announce the discovery of a new drug that eradicates disease in animals. Then, a few years later, the drug bombs in human trials. Now, two medical ethicists argue that this pattern of boom and bust may be related to the way researchers predict outcomes of their work in early stages of drug development. Canadian Institutes of Health Research
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Off The Cuff
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Pour Yourself A Cup Of Coffee And Read The Latest @Grand Rounds
Grand Rounds is a weekly summary of the best health blog posts on the Internet. Each week a different blogger takes turns hosting Grand Rounds, and summarizing the best submissions for the week.
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This weeks host is Dr. Pullen
This week for Grand Rounds I asked for submissions of the best work from blogger’s sites in the last week or two, and promised to judge them on Olympic scoring of 0-10. I also asked readers to submit posts from blogs other than their own (these have a *** after the score), and to agreed to give these submissions extra credit in the scoring. Each post has two scores, one for content, and one for writing. I think of content as the importance or interest of the topic of the post, and writing as how well and interestingly written the post itself is. I’ll take full blame for the fact that these are absolutely subjective, that only I did the judging, and that there is no appeal process. Nobody should feel be discouraged as I truly enjoyed every submission, and am honored to host Grand Rounds again this week. Thanks for your submissions, and keep up the great work.
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Gold Medal for Content goes to John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog he writes The HMO in Your Future. He takes to task the march towards ACO’s and suggests that this is far from evidence based. We do seem to be moving quickly towards ACO’s whatever that really means. Check out this post at least to hear Aretha Franklin sing I Say a Little Prayer.
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Gold Medal for Writing goes to At the Road the Hellth blog where Dr. Doug Perednia writes How American Healthcare Gets Hellthier in a satire and sad but believable post where he shows the unintended consequences of instituting a three handed clock to improve patient care in a hospital. Content 9.0 Writing 9.7
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