Breakthrough for lupus sufferers
Lupus Foundation: FDA Clears First Lupus Drug Since 1955
Editor’s Choice Main Category: Lupus Also Included In: Regulatory Affairs / Drug Approvals Article Date: 10 Mar 2011 – 7:00 PST
This week, after 56 years, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Benlysta (belimumab), to treat patients who are receiving standard therapy, including corticosteroids, antimalarials, immunosuppressives, and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Lupus is a serious, potentially fatal, autoimmune disease that attacks healthy tissues. It disproportionately affects women, and usually develops between ages 15 and 44.
Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine) and corticosteroids, were approved in 1955. Aspirin was approved to treat lupus in 1948.
An old lady’s poem
When an old lady died in the geriatric ward of a small hospital near Dundee, Scotland, it was wrongly assumed that she had nothing left of any value.
But later, when the nurses were going through her meagre possessions, they found this poem.
Its quality and content so impressed the staff that copies were made and distributed to every nurse in the hospital.
Latest University research on dementia and strokes.
Dementia risk is higher in people with both stroke and irregular heartbeat, reveals latest University research
Edited by Andy Porter > editor@wellbeingnorfolk.co.uk
Stroke patients who also suffer from an irregular heartbeat are at double the risk of developing dementia, according to a new study by the University of East Anglia [UEA].
Published in the journal Neurology, the findings show that stroke survivors with an irregular heartbeat – or atrial fibrillation – are 2.4 times more likely to develop dementia than stroke survivors without the heart condition.
The researchers analysed 15 studies with more than 45,000 participants and an average age of 72. They compared patients with and without atrial fibrillation, and followed–up to determine which developed dementia over time. Around a quarter of patients with both stroke and atrial fibrillation were subsequently found to have developed dementia.
