Health in brief

Study: Aspirin as effective as drug

CHICAGO - An expensive drug approved during the 1990s works no better than aspirin at preventing recurring strokes in black people, a study found.

In fact, there were hints that aspirin might do a better job than ticlopidine at preventing deaths and other serious episodes, leading the researchers to recommend the old standby for black people who have had a stroke.

"What this shows is that it's hard to beat aspirin," said lead researcher Dr. Philip Gorelick of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago.

Whether the findings would apply to whites and other non-blacks is unclear, since none were studied. The findings appear in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

More than 100,000 Americans are believed to use ticlopidine to prevent strokes, the researchers said. While a month's supply of aspirin can cost under $10, the equivalent amount of ticlopidine can run more than $100.

The research involved 1,809 men and women who took aspirin or ticlopidine for up to two years.

WASHINGTON - Children's lives improved on a host of measures through the 1990s: They were less likely to die in infancy, less likely to drop out of high school and less likely to live in poverty, good news that was seen across most states, according to an annual tally of childhood well-being.

The Kids Count report, being released today, records marked improvements in each of the past several years. While its national data lag behind other reports, Kids Count provides an easy-to-use comparison of states with one another and with the nation as a whole in 10 categories.

Nationally, between 1990 and 2000, improvements were reported in eight of the 10 indicators the report uses to measure success.

Forty-three states improved on at least six measures, O'Hare added. Still, he cautioned, the data cover years when the economy was strong. In some cases over the last couple years things have gotten worse; for example, the percentage of children living in poverty has risen slightly.

WASHINGTON - Claims that a calcium supplement made from dead marine coral can cure everything from heart disease to cancer are too good to be true, federal fraud fighters said Tuesday, announcing legal actions against marketers of the product.

The Federal Trade Commission is asking a federal court in Chicago to shut down an operation that sells Coral Calcium Supreme, a product advertised with one of the most widely run infomercials on cable television. A hearing is scheduled for Friday.

The FTC and the Food and Drug Administration also are sending warning letters to retail and Internet marketers of coral calcium products, ordering them to remove deceptive advertising.

One of the cruel ironies of getting HIV is that, for most patients, the process of infection seems to suppress blood cholesterol levels.

But when the patients start taking drug combinations of highly active antiretroviral therapy, or HAART, cholesterol levels climbed back up, a development some researchers had interpreted as an unwanted side effect.

New research, published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, for the first time reviewed the cholesterol profiles of a group of men both before and after they were infected with HIV. The study concludes that drug therapy basically restored cholesterol back to the levels expected if the subjects didn't have the AIDS-causing virus.

"Yes, total cholesterol does increase with HAART, but in most cases, it increases back to or near the preinfection level, and in that sense it represents a return to normal," said Dr. Sharon Riddler, an assistant professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and lead author of the study.

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