The type of heating coil used in an e-cigarette and the amount of voltage sent through it could be contributing to vaping-related lung injuries, a new animal study contends. Laboratory rats suffered lung injuries when exposed to vapor from devices using high-powered heating coils made of nickel-chromium alloy, something that did not occur in earlier experiments using stainless steel heating coils, researchers report. “When we looked at their lungs, we saw they had very severe damage to the lung structure,” said lead researcher Michael Kleinman, a professor of occupational and environmental medicine at the University of California, Irvine. “We found we got the worst effects in coils that contained nickel and chromium, which is a typical kind of coil.” E-cigarettes turn liquid into vapor using a heating coil similar to those found in toasters, Kleinman said. The coil is surrounded by the liquid, and when voltage is sent through the coil, it rapidly heats up. Kleinman and his colleagues were doing vaping research on lab rats using devices equipped with stainless steel coils when they made their discovery. The manufacturer stopped making the specific device they were using, so they had to switch to a compatible model that used nickel-chromium coils, Kleinman recalled. “When we got the new coils and we ran them at the high power settings, we immediately noticed after the first set…  read on >

For at least two decades, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been approving new formulations of prescription opioids without requiring drug manufacturers to gather important information on safety and effectiveness, a new study claims. The FDA approved dozens of these highly addictive medications for treatment of chronic pain between 1997 and 2018 based on clinical trials that: Lasted no longer than 12 weeks, Failed to systematically gather data on adverse events or safety concerns, Actually weeded out of the final results from people who didn’t initially respond well to the drug. “No trial was longer than 84 days, whereas people take these medicines for years and they’re labeled for chronic use,” said senior researcher Dr. G. Caleb Alexander, co-director of the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. The FDA continued to approve opioid drugs based on limited and flawed information even as the opioid epidemic swept across the United States, Alexander and his colleagues argue. “The primary harms that have driven the opioid epidemic have been because of the oversupply of opioids, especially for chronic use,” Alexander said. “The FDA has missed important opportunities to require manufacturers to produce more meaningful and clinically useful information about the safety and effectiveness of these products.” PhRMA, the leading trade group for pharmaceutical manufacturers, responded to…  read on >

Parents of kids with food allergies probably won’t be surprised to hear that Halloween is an especially risky time for their youngsters. A new study found that serious allergic reactions (anaphylaxis) triggered by peanuts jumped 85% when kids were trick or treating. Serious reactions triggered by an unknown tree nut or peanut exposure rose by 70% on Halloween compared to the rest of the year. And the risk is similar on Easter — when kids are hopping around collecting chocolate eggs and other candy. Compared to other times, anaphylaxis from unknown nut exposure spiked 70% at Easter and there was a 60% increase in peanut-triggered anaphylaxis. Fortunately, other holidays — including Christmas, Chinese New Year, Diwali and Eid al-Adha — didn’t seem to lead to an increase in serious reactions in kids with food allergies. “The most common cause of anaphylaxis is food. When I was working in the emergency department, I was told [anaphylaxis] was higher on Halloween,” said study co-author Dr. Moshe Ben-Shoshan, an associate professor of allergy and immunology at Montreal Children’s Hospital and McGill University in Canada. “With this study, we wanted to establish whether there actually was an increased risk of anaphylaxis on holidays compared to the rest of the year.” Anaphylaxis is a potentially life-threatening allergic reaction, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. It’s treated with…  read on >

Reacting to an upsurge in abuse of benzodiazepine sedatives such as Valium, Xanax and Ativan, U.S. officials on Wednesday added a “Boxed Warning” to the drugs’ labels, cautioning about the danger. Benzodiazepines are tranquilizers commonly prescribed to help ease issues such as anxiety, seizures, insomnia and panic disorders. But “while benzodiazepines are important therapies for many Americans, they are also commonly abused and misused, often together with opioid pain relievers and other medicines, alcohol and illicit drugs,” U.S. Food and Drug Agency Commissioner Dr Stephen Hahn said in an agency news release. So he said the FDA is now “taking measures and requiring new labeling information to help health care professionals and patients better understand that while benzodiazepines have many treatment benefits, they also carry with them an increased risk of abuse, misuse, addiction and dependence.” Illicit use of “benzos” has been on the rise, and the drugs are often taken along with opioid drugs — sometimes to deadly effect. In fact, in a report released last year by the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, benzos were found to be involved in a full third of all fatal opioid overdoses. The drugs were also involved in nearly two-thirds of overdoses tied to the lethal synthetic opioid fentanyl. The report looked at 2017-2018 data from 25 states. According to the FDA, in 2019 alone,…  read on >

Drinking lots of sugary beverages can wreak havoc on your health, but new research finds more Americans are turning away from those high-calorie drinks. And that includes many people who used to drink large quantities of sweetened beverages — the equivalent of 3.5 cans of soda daily. “Our study found the percentage of children and adults who are heavy [sugar-sweetened beverage] drinkers has declined significantly over time,” said study author Kelsey Vercammen. She’s a doctoral degree candidate in the department of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in Boston. For the study, the researchers reviewed data from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 2003 to 2016, studying responses from more than 21,000 children (aged 2 through 19 years) and 32,000 adults. The investigators found that the percentage of heavy consumers of sugar-sweetened beverages — 500 calories or more daily — among children declined from 11% to 3%. The percentage of heavy sugar-sweetened beverage consumers among adults dropped from 13% to 9%. “Our research team was particularly interested in looking at the heavy sugar-sweetened beverage consumers because these individuals are the ones who are obviously drinking the most sugar-sweetened beverages, so we think that they likely face the biggest health risks,” Vercammen said. Potential explanations for the recent steep decline in intake include the impact of beverage taxes imposed…  read on >

The new rapid COVID-19 test approved last week is probably not the most reliable option for determining whether someone is infected. But it’s cheap and it’s fast, and if used correctly, it could be the basis of a screening strategy to keep Americans safe as they return to school and work, infectious disease experts say. The BinaxNOW COVID-19 Ag Card produced by Abbott Laboratories is an antigen test, a type of scan that looks for specific structural proteins of the coronavirus that form during infection. The test will produce results within 15 minutes and cost $5, Abbott says. Antigen tests are notorious for producing many false positives, indicating that people are infected when they really aren’t, said Dr. Gary Procop, medical director and co-chair of the Enterprise Laboratory Stewardship Committee at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. And he said that’s absolutely fine if the test is used appropriately, as a screening tool to make sure folks infected with SARS-CoV-2 don’t make it into a crowded school or a basketball court or an assembly line. “Whenever you do screening tests, you actually want a lot of false positives because you want to capture everybody with disease,” Procop said. The key is to make the antigen test the first in a two-step screening process, he said. Everyone who tests positive should then receive a confirmatory PCR test…  read on >