Antismoking pill may help curb drinking
Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:51:40 GMTBy ANDREW BRIDGES, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - A single pill appears to hold promise in curbing the urges to both smoke and drink, according to researchers trying to help people overcome addiction by targeting a pleasure center in the brain.
The drug, called varenicline, already is sold to help smokers kick the habit. New but preliminary research suggests it could gain a second use in helping heavy drinkers quit, too.
Much further down the line, the tablets might be considered as a treatment for addictions to everything from gambling to painkillers, researchers said.
Several experts not involved in the study cautioned that there is no such thing as a magic cure-all for addiction and that varenicline and similar drugs may find more immediate use in treating diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Pfizer Inc. developed the drug specifically as a stop-smoking aid and has sold it in the United States since August under the brand name Chantix. Varenicline works by latching onto the same receptors in the brain that nicotine binds to when inhaled in cigarette smoke, an action that leads to the release of dopamine in the brain's pleasure centers. Taking the drug blocks any inhaled nicotine from reinforcing that effect.
A study published Monday suggests not just nicotine but alcohol also acts on the same locations in the brain. That means a drug like varenicline, which makes smoking less rewarding, could do the same for drinking. Preliminary work, done in rats, suggests that is the case.
"The biggest thrill is that this drug, which has already proved safe for people trying to stop smoking, is now a potential drug to fight alcohol dependence," said Selena Bartlett, a neuroscientist with the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco who led the study. Details appear this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Pfizer provided the drug for the study, but was not otherwise involved in the research.
More often than not, smoking and drinking go together — an observation pub-goers have made for hundreds of years. That a single drug could work to curb both addictions isn't a given — nor is it surprising, said Christopher de Fiebre, an associate professor of pharmacology and neuroscience at the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth.
"This is an extremely important paper and hopefully it will convince the major funding agencies that they need to examine the interactions between nicotine and alcohol to a greater extent than they have done to date," said de Fiebre, who was not connected with the study.
In fact, the California researchers, together with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, are now planning the first studies in humans of the drug's effectiveness in curbing alcohol cravings and dependence, Bartlett said. That the drug is already Food and Drug Administration-approved should speed things along.
"This is a drug that people are actually using. That's not trivial — not at all," said Mark Egli, co-leader of the medications development program at the NIAAA, part of the National Institutes of Health. "There is plenty of animal research that looks pretty cool but there is no way those drugs are ever going to be used by human beings."
In the new study, researchers trained rats to drink alcohol and measured the effect of varenicline once the animals became the laboratory equivalent of heavy drinkers. They found the drug curbed their drinking. Even when stopped, the animals resumed drinking but didn't binge.
Just as varenicline doesn't work for all smokers, it's highly unlikely it would for all drinkers.
"Is this going to be a cure-all? No, not for smoking or alcoholism because both diseases are more complicated than a single target or single genetic issue," said Allan Collins, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Colorado who was not connected to the study.
Still, Collins, who's worked on the topic for decades, called the drug's potential use in treating alcoholism a "no-brainer." And Egli said it supports the emerging view that there is a common biological basis for addictions to both alcohol and tobacco.
As for Pfizer, the New York company has yet to decide whether to seek broader FDA approval for the drug, a spokesman said.
"Without having considerable more data on this it would be very difficult for us to say we might pursue it or not. It's almost a wait-and-see," said Pfizer's Stephen Lederer.
China executes exfood and drug chief
Tue, 10 Jul 2007 19:05:07 GMTBy ANITA CHANG, Associated Press Writer
BEIJING - China executed a former director of its food and drug agency Tuesday for approving fake medicine in exchange for cash, illustrating how serious Beijing is about tackling product safety, while officials announced steps to safeguard food at next summer's Olympic Games.
The measures include ensuring athletes' food is free of substances that could trigger a positive result in tests for banned performance-enhancing drugs. Many of China's recent food woes have been tied to the purity of ingredients, flavoring, artificial colors and other additives.
During Zheng Xiaoyu's tenure as head of the State Food and Drug Administration from 1997 to 2006, the agency approved six untested drugs that turned out to be fake, and some drug-makers used falsified documents to apply for approvals, according to state media reports. One antibiotic caused the deaths of at least 10 people.
"The few corrupt officials of the SFDA are the shame of the whole system and their scandals have revealed some very serious problems," agency spokeswoman Yan Jiangying said at a news conference Tuesday highlighting efforts to improve China's track record on food and drug safety.
Next year's Beijing Olympics, a great source of pride for China, also has been targeted in the crackdown on unsafe food. Sun Wenxu, an official with the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, told reporters that athletes, coaches, officials and others can be assured of safe meals.
"All the procedures involving Olympic food, including production, processing, packaging, storing and transporting will be closely monitored," Sun said.
Food and drug agency spokeswoman Yan acknowledged the agency's supervision remains unsatisfactory and that it has been slow to tackle the problem.
"China is a developing country and our supervision of food and drugs started quite late and our foundation for this work is weak, so we are not optimistic about the current food and drug safety situation," she said.
Fears abroad over Chinese-made drugs were sparked last year by the deaths of dozens of people in Panama who took medicine contaminated with diethylene glycol — a thickening agent used in antifreeze — imported from China. It was passed off as harmless glycerin.
Chinese-made toothpaste containing diethylene glycol has been banned in North and South America and Asia, though there have been no reports of health problems stemming from the product. And two brands of toothpaste sold in Spain were pulled from the shelves after the substance was found, the European Union said Tuesday.
China has no guideline banning the chemical in toothpaste, and the government says it is harmless in small amounts.
In the United States and Canada, pet food containing Chinese wheat gluten tainted with the chemical melamine has been blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats. Since then, U.S. authorities have turned away or recalled toxic fish, juice containing unsafe color additives and popular toy trains decorated with lead paint.
The list of food scares within China over the past year includes drug-tainted fish, industrial dye used to color egg yolks red and pork tainted with a banned feed additive.
Zheng's death sentence was unusually severe even for China, which is believed to carry out more court-ordered executions than all other nations combined, and indicates the communist leadership's determination to confront the country's dire product safety record.
Zheng, 63, was convicted of taking cash and gifts worth $832,000 when he was in charge of the food and drug agency.
He was sentenced to death on May 29 and his appeal was rejected on June 12 by the Higher People's Court of Beijing. China's Supreme Court approved the sentence, saying Zheng "committed vile crimes and caused extreme harm to society."
"Although he confessed to some of the crimes of bribe-taking and returned some of the illegal income, it was not enough for leniency," the court said.
Zheng's execution Tuesday morning was confirmed by state television and the official Xinhua News Agency.
"We should seriously reflect and learn lessons from these cases. We should step up our efforts to ensure food and drug safety, which is what we are doing now and what we will do in the future," Yan said.
Cao Wenzhuang, a former director of the food and drug agency's drug registration department, was sentenced to death last week for accepting bribes and dereliction of duty. He was given a two-year reprieve, which usually means he can get life in prison if deemed to have reformed.
Yan said the food and drug agency was working to tighten its safety procedures and create a more transparent operating environment. The administration has announced a series of measures to tighten safety controls and closed factories where illegal chemicals or other problems were found.
The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine posted on its Web site Monday the names of 13 companies that have been banned from exporting after their products were found to be substandard.
The products included rice cakes, cooked mushrooms, preserved pears and several kinds of seafood bound for Europe, Japan and North America. Problems included evasion of inspection and quarantine, as well as excessive bacteria and sulfur dioxide in the food or the presence of banned drugs.
Meanwhile, authorities promised to investigate water purity after a newspaper reported that more than half of the water coolers in Beijing use counterfeit branded water.
The Beijing Times reported that water jugs are filled with either tap water or purified water from small suppliers and sealed with bogus quality standard marks.
The report said the practice is widespread because water from major suppliers can cost twice as much as water from other sources.
Wu Jianping, an official with the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, noted that a May inspection of Beijing's drinking water products found more than 96 percent were safe.
"Problems found with some individual cases cannot be interpreted to mean that the entire water industry has problems," Wu said.
Obese survive heart attacks better
Mon, 09 Jul 2007 21:33:43 GMTBy MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer
LONDON - While being fat increases your chances of a heart attack, some studies suggest a puzzling paradox: Obese people seem to have a better chance of surviving one. Scientists are stumped over why that seems to be the case and pose several theories.
There may be physiological differences in the hearts of obese and normal-weight people. Or perhaps it depends on where the fat is on their bodies.
However, experts warn, the results should not be used as an excuse for the overweight to indulge.
"We really don't want people to think that they should put on a bit of weight to have a better chance with their bypass surgery," said Dr. Gerald Fletcher, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Florida and a spokesman for the American Heart Association.
"These results do not mean it's OK to be fat. Being fat is still dangerous to your health for lots of other reasons," Fletcher said.
A 2005 study published in the American Journal of Medicine by scientists at Duke University examined nearly 16,000 people in 37 countries. The authors found that one year after a heart attack, the death rate for normal-weight patients was 4.3 percent. For obese patients, it was just 2.2 percent.
Several other studies have confirmed those findings, including a paper last month in the European Heart Journal. German and Swiss doctors tracked more than 1,600 patients for three years after their heart attacks, and concluded that only 3.6 percent of fat patients had died, against nearly 10 percent of normal-weight patients.
"We don't have a good explanation for the biological phenomenon that's causing this," said Dr. Eric Eisenstein, leader of the Duke study. "We need to understand scientifically what's happening in these folks before we can develop new therapies."
There is a higher prevalence of smoking among thin patients, one possible explanation. But even after statistically adjusting for that, fat patients still had a distinct advantage, researchers found.
Some experts suggest it depends on where the fat is located, noting that fat around the abdomen is the biggest risk. Other doctors think there may be physiological differences in the heart.
"It could be that the hearts of obese people are 'pre-conditioned' because they're under more stress in the first place," said Dr. Andrew Newby, a professor of vascular biology at Bristol Heart Institute and spokesman for the European Society of Cardiology. Newby said that fat people who had heart attacks might be better able to withstand the initial shock to the system.
Dr. Rob Califf of Duke University said the survival rate difference between fat and thin "is not a big enough factor" to make changes in patient care. Other signs such as the magnitude of the heart attack and whether patients have kidney problems are more important in predicting survival, he said.
But experts say it is important to better understand the fat-thin paradox so doctors can provide better treatment.
Some suggested that fat people who have heart attacks can markedly improve their survival odds if they make some major lifestyle changes, an option that normal-weight patients may not have.
"Even moderate weight loss can have a big impact," said Dr. Heinz Buettner of the Heart Centre in Bad Krozingen in Germany. "Obese patients have a better chance to correct their situation compared to thin patients who may just have bad genes."
Because obesity can lead to other dangers — including high blood pressure, diabetes, and cancer — the apparent survival advantage fat people have after a heart attack might be erased by something worse down the line.
"Obese patients may get lucky after one heart attack, but they are still high-risk patients," said Fletcher. "If they stay fat after their surgery, they could end up back in the hospital soon and more bad things could happen."
