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Health briefs
Compiled from Times wires Study links rheumatoid arthritis, carbohydrateShining a light onto the elusive roots of a painful disease, Harvard researchers announced Wednesday that they may have pinpointed a chief cause of rheumatoid arthritis. The research, reported at the American Chemical Society's national meeting in Boston, begins to lift the shroud of mystery long cloaking rheumatoid arthritis, a condition in which the body fights a molecular war against itself. Although advances of recent years have yielded some effective drug approaches, there is no definitive treatment for the disease, and the 2.1-million afflicted Americans often rely on traditional painkillers for relief. Biological chemist Julia Ying Wang and Dr. Michael H. Roehrl, a Harvard colleague, found that carbohydrates common in human tissue may act like magnets for certain immune cells, concentrating them in the joints and causing painful inflammation and stiffness. "If we ever hope to work toward a cure, we're going to have to find out what causes this disease, and this opens up a whole new way of thinking about it," said Dr. John H. Klippel, medical director of the national Arthritis Foundation. That thinking is already being used by scientists at Harvard and at Brigham and Women's Hospital to search for treatments that could actually reverse the course of rheumatoid arthritis rather than just relieve its symptoms. If that work continues to prove fruitful, it could lead to a medication to stop the disease at an early stage, before it can begin taking its lifelong toll on joints -- an advance especially important today in a nation of aging baby boomers. FDA approves trials of West Nile virus drugWASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration gave the go-ahead this week for the first national trial of a drug to treat the West Nile virus, a mosquito-transmitted disease that has killed 13 people so far this year. The trial, announced by Dr. James Rahal at a news conference Wednesday in New York, will study whether the drug alpha-interferon lessens the symptoms and duration of the illness. The West Nile virus has spread rapidly since 1999, when the first cases in the United States were confirmed in New York. It has been diagnosed as far west as Texas in humans and Wyoming in animals, and experts warn that it is only a matter of time before it appears on the West Coast. This year 269 cases have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Individuals with West Nile may suffer a range of problems from mild flulike symptoms to paralysis, brain swelling and death. The study will examine whether interferon, which has shown promise in treating the similar St. Louis virus, can stop the progression of West Nile. There currently are no approved treatments for either virus. The drug is sold by Schering-Plough Corp. under the trade name Intron A. AIDS drug raises hopesNEW YORK -- A new, experimental drug is raising hopes for AIDS sufferers with strains of the virus that are resistant to existing treatments, but the complex manufacturing process is expected to mean high prices and limited quantities. Dubbed Fuzeon by its developers, Roche Group and Trimeris Inc., the drug won a priority, six-month review from the Food and Drug Administration. The companies plan to file their application by the end of September so it can be approved by March and on the market next spring. The drug is the first in a class known as fusion inhibitors, which are designed to block HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from entering blood cells.
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
