Heart awareness month – that’s this month – started out with a bang. Heart-health was all over the web and we were reminded that obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and triglycerides (symptoms that typically accompany type 2 diabetes, also known as metabolic syndrome are markers for heart disease and put...

New York City mayor, Michael Bloomberg, has proposed a tax of 12 cents per can of soda (a penny per ounce). During his weekly radio address, Bloomberg said the soda tax would discourage consumers from buying sugar-laden drinks. According to the NYT, Bloomberg noted research suggesting that such a tax would reduce consumption of the...

If you are taking Avandia or Actos and you have been reading about heart disease you may be concerned and you should be. As a class, these drugs increase your risk of heart disease and recent studies are confirming what we already suspected: Avandia is a bit worse on the heart than Actos. However, there is something you can do to protect...

Birthday cake I follow your words inside me first to my heart birthday cake lub dash dub it says iambic perhaps and in that rhythm in the gap the dash you say birthday cake and I hear lub mutual celebration the thing thinging together a culture human and humanity (one) I am not alone we are eating love and birthday cake.   Or two...

I was reading the other day about the amount of Federal Stimulus grant money still remaining. Given the large amount of money allocated in the past year for grants, it is not entirely surprising that a large amount remains up for grabs for enterprising grant applicants. The most interesting segment to me is the money still available via...

The storm continues to rage. Congress has issued an angry report on Avandia in which neither GlaxoSmithKline nor the FDA was spared. The results of these clinical trials were not surprising. Numerous clinicians have been discussing cardiac events for all of the thiazolidinediones (TZD) as a drug class for at least a decade. Rosiglitizone...

In the previous post we looked at some possible mechanisms which could contribute to Avandia’s issues with cardiac events. Here I would like to look more closely at the actual data so that we can come to our own conclusions about Avandia. The most recent is the re-analysis of the results of the RECORD (Rosiglitazone Evaluated for Cardiac...

First, an update to my previous post, which was supposed to be about anti-CD3 monoclonal antibodies but was rudely interrupted when I dropped my pump in the toilet: this was a bad idea. Despite the fact that the pump had spent approximately .3 of a second dipped into the tank, it decided it had a “button error” and stopped...

The New York Times (NYT) has just reported that the popular diabetes drug, Avandia, causes heart attacks. The information came from an internal FDA study in which the fate of Avandia has been argued for months. Is this a media scare or is this real? First of all, one of the major complications of diabetes is heart disease. The tissues...

I don’t even remember anymore when it started.  I was young, impressionable and you were sly and oh so enticing.  You knew you had me at my first bagel.  You seduced  and never abandoned me, no matter how much I tried.  I can almost see you laughing at my clumsy attempts at portion control.  I feel your snarky finger-pointing...