On this day in 1899, the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin registers Aspirin, the brand name for acetylsalicylic acid, on behalf of the German pharmaceutical company Friedrich Bayer & Co.

Now the most common drug in household medicine cabinets, acetylsalicylic acid was originally made from a chemical found in the bark of willow trees. In its primitive form, the active ingredient, salicin, was used for centuries in folk medicine, beginning in ancient Greece when Hippocrates used it to relieve pain and fever. Known to doctors since the mid-19thcentury, it was used sparingly due to its unpleasant taste and tendency to damage the stomach.

In 1897, Bayer employee Felix Hoffman found a way to create a stable form of the drug that was easier and more pleasant to take. (Some evidence shows that Hoffman’s work was really done by a Jewish chemist, Arthur Eichengrun, whose contributions were covered up during the Nazi era.) After obtaining the patent rights, Bayer began distributing aspirin in powder form to physicians to give to their patients one gram at a time. The brand name came from “a” for acetyl, “spir” from the spirea plant (a source of salicin) and the suffix “in,” commonly used for medications. It quickly became the number-one drug worldwide.

Aspirin was made available in tablet form and without a prescription in 1915. Two years later, when Bayer’s patent expired during the First World War, the company lost the trademark rights to aspirin in various countries. After the United States entered the war against Germany in April 1917, the Alien Property Custodian, a government agency that administers foreign property, seized Bayer’s U.S. assets. Two years later, the Bayer company name and trademarks for the United States and Canada were auctioned off and purchased by Sterling Products Company, later Sterling Winthrop, for $5.3 million.

Bayer became part of IG Farben, the conglomerate of German chemical industries that formed the financial heart of the Nazi regime. After World War II, the Allies split apart IG Farben, and Bayer again emerged as an individual company. Its purchase of Miles Laboratories in 1978 gave it a product line including Alka-Seltzer and Flintstones and One-A-Day Vitamins. In 1994, Bayer bought Sterling Winthrop’s over-the-counter business, gaining back rights to the Bayer name and logo and allowing the company once again to profit from American sales of its most famous product.

Received & published by Henry Sapiecha

Popular painkillers linked to heart and stroke risk

Feelin’ lucky? Then go ahead – pop that painkiller.

But you’d better hope that today’s not the day your luck finally runs out, because some of the most commonly used pain meds carry a major death risk.

The drugs are those nonsteroidal anti-inflammatories used by millions for everything from arthritis to headaches to back pain. And now, researchers say they can double, triple, and even quadruple your odds of heart attack, stroke, and an early death.

Swiss researchers looked at data from 31 “gold-standard” trials that included 116,429 patients, and found that ibuprofen – a med probably in your own home right now – can triple the risk of stroke.

And diclofenac, a widely used generic prescription NSAID, can quadruple the risk of death from heart attack and stroke.

These problems aren’t rare by any stretch. In fact, the researchers say that for every 25 to 50 patients who take NSAIDs for a year, there will be one extra heart attack or stroke.

That’s overall.

But they also believe that patients who already have heart problems could face a much higher risk when they pop those pills – like the millions of seniors who battle both heart disease and arthritis.

The researchers found naproxen (aka Aleve) to be the “safest” of the NSAIDs, but don’t kid yourself – “safest” doesn’t mean “safe.” All painkillers carry risk – and regular use of any NSAID can lead to bleeding problems, ulcers, and more.

And that means you need to be careful with how – and how often – you use these things, no matter how old you are or what risks you face.

If you need one from time to time, you need one – and I won’t stand in your way.

But if you’re taking one of these things regularly, there’s clearly something else going on – and you and your doc need to get to the bottom of it.

If you go looking for that answer at the bottom of a painkiller jar, you could find yourself at the bottom of a grave.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Migraine headaches may do much more damage than cause a throbbing pain. A new study confirms that individuals who suffer from migraines are about twice as likely to have a stroke caused by a blood clot, compared to those who don’t get the painful headaches. According to Reuters, researchers analyzed the results of 21 previous studies conducted between 1975 and 2007, and involving more than 622,000 adults with and without migraines. More »

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Mangrove bark dulls the pain

Wednesday, 23 June 2004 Judy Skatssoon
ABC

The bark of the freshwater mangrove, which is found in monsoonal areas, is used as a painkiller in Aboriginal medicine (Image: Len Webb Collection, Griffith University)

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Queensland researchers are working to develop a new pain-killing drug from a native Australian plant traditionally used by Aboriginal people.

Professor of chemistry at Griffith University Ron Quinn is identifying and testing compounds from the freshwater mangrove Barringtonia acutangula for their analgesic properties.

The mangrove, which is also known as the Indian Oak or Kandu almond, grows by creeks and lagoons and is distributed throughout east Asia, south-east Asia, eastern Africa, the south-west Pacific and northern Australia.

Quinn said he first learned of the plant’s analgesic potential after hearing about an Aboriginal man in the Kimberley region of north-western Australia whose finger had been bitten off by a crocodile.

“He used the bark of the tree, chewed it around in his mouth and then put it on the wound,” Quinn said.

It was unclear whether the benefit came from chewing the plant or using it as a poultice on the wound.

Quinn said researchers had isolated several compounds from the plant’s bark and tested them on rats.

One compound showed signs of being effective when administered orally.

“We started out looking at the crude extract and we’ve isolated some components of it and we’ve now tested a couple of these and found one of them is actually active in the animal model,” he said.

He said a A$174,500 (US$119,000) grant from the latest round of National Health and Medical Research Council development funding, announced earlier this month, would enable more detailed testing of the plant and help assess its commercial potential.

A large-scale extraction and isolation process would obtain the compounds in large enough quantities to allow them to be pharmacologically evaluated as potential analgesic drugs.

“There’s an unmet need in management of pain so there’s a potential market opportunity,” he said.

“It will depend a bit on the precise mechanism and precise biology that we see.”

Quinn said the active compound appeared to be novel and structurally unrelated to opiate painkillers.

Quinn said Griffith University held a provisional patent on several compounds extracted from the plant and hoped to develop a drug under a joint agreement with the local Aboriginal people, who would receive 50% of any returns once the product was brought to market.

Human trials remain some years away.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Study Suggests

Science (July 28, 2010) — Current research suggests that taking morphine can block new blood vessel and tumor growth. The related report by Koodie et al, “Morphine suppresses tumor angiogenesis through a HIF1?/p38MAPK pathway,” appears in the August 2010 issue of the American Journal of Pathology.

Morphine is currently the gold standard of analgesics used to relieve severe pain and suffering. Angiogenesis, or new blood vessel growth, is critical for tumor progression from dormant to malignant. Morphine is commonly used to treat cancer pain, but the effects of morphine use on new blood vessel and tumor growth remain controversial.

Using a clinically relevant morphine dose in a mouse model of Lewis lung carcinoma, researchers led by Dr. Sabita Roy of the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis, MN examined the effect of morphine use on new blood vessel growth in tumors. They found that chronic morphine use decreased levels of tumor angiogenesis in a manner dependent on the opioid receptor. This effect was mediated by suppression of signaling induced by low oxygen concentrations, leading to a reduction in the levels of pro-angiogenic factors. Therefore, morphine may not only serve as an analgesic for cancer patients, but may also inhibit tumor angiogenesis and growth.

Koodie et al conclude that “morphine is a potential inhibitor of tumor growth, through the suppression of tumor cell-induced angiogenesis and hypoxia-induced p38 MAPK activation of HIF-1. In addition to its analgesic potential, morphine can be exploited for its anti-angiogenic potential in cancer pain management; these findings support the use of morphine for cancer pain management.”

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Pain Relief
Is As Easy
As Pie!

Did you realize…

Cherries are 10 times more powerful than aspirin for stopping joint pain? Scientists at Michigan State University proved it.

Reason? They contain amazing phytonutrients called anthocyanins which block inflammation just like NSAID drugs do. Plus they prevent the oxidative damage that cause cancer, heart disease, and other disease.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 28th May 2010

1899 : Bayer patents aspirin

On this day in 1899, the Imperial Patent Office in Berlin registers Aspirin, the brand name for acetylsalicylic acid, on behalf of the German pharmaceutical company Friedrich Bayer & Co.

Now the most common drug in household medicine cabinets, acetylsalicylic acid was originally made from a chemical found in the bark of willow trees. In its primitive form, the active ingredient, salicin, was used for centuries in folk medicine, beginning in ancient Greece when Hippocrates used it to relieve pain and fever. Known to doctors since the mid-19thcentury, it was used sparingly due to its unpleasant taste and tendency to damage the stomach.

In 1897, Bayer employee Felix Hoffman found a way to create a stable form of the drug that was easier and more pleasant to take. (Some evidence shows that Hoffman’s work was really done by a Jewish chemist, Arthur Eichengrun, whose contributions were covered up during the Nazi era.) After obtaining the patent rights, Bayer began distributing aspirin in powder form to physicians to give to their patients one gram at a time. The brand name came from “a” for acetyl, “spir” from the spirea plant (a source of salicin) and the suffix “in,” commonly used for medications. It quickly became the number-one drug worldwide.

Aspirin was made available in tablet form and without a prescription in 1915. Two years later, when Bayer’s patent expired during the First World War, the company lost the trademark rights to aspirin in various countries. After the United States entered the war against Germany in April 1917, the Alien Property Custodian, a government agency that administers foreign property, seized Bayer’s U.S. assets. Two years later, the Bayer company name and trademarks for the United States and Canada were auctioned off and purchased by Sterling Products Company, later Sterling Winthrop, for $5.3 million.

Bayer became part of IG Farben, the conglomerate of German chemical industries that formed the financial heart of the Nazi regime. After World War II, the Allies split apart IG Farben, and Bayer again emerged as an individual company. Its purchase of Miles Laboratories in 1978 gave it a product line including Alka-Seltzer and Flintstones and One-A-Day Vitamins. In 1994, Bayer bought Sterling Winthrop’s over-the-counter business, gaining back rights to the Bayer name and logo and allowing the company once again to profit from American sales of its most famous product.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha 17th March 2010

Nature’s Best Painkiller
By Michael Roizen, M.D., and Mehmet Oz, M.D.

If creaky knees and back pain aren’t bad enough, the pain pills designed to blunt the hurt can carry nasty side effects and/or require monthly trips to the pharmacy. So try this no-cost way to decrease the pain: Take a deep breath and say “Om.” Or “Chocolate” or “breathe.” Any word that focuses you works.

People who practice Zen meditation have been shown to be far less sensitive to pain than nonmeditators, and they are better at coping with it. Meditating really isn’t that much harder than medicating. The goal isn’t to suppress emotions, but to identify how they arise and how they influence you. In the Zen study, when a “heat source,” was applied to volunteers’ calves, meditators simply noticed what they were feeling and observed it without judging it. They tolerated higher temps and did not find the pain as unpleasant or as intense as nonmeditators did.

Meditation may help in a few ways: It may distract your mind so you react less to that idiot who almost cut you off or other hot buttons. It also may help you tolerate pain by helping you bypass a blame-and-stress cycle in your brain. This bypass helps decrease stress hormones and increase pain-squelching ones.

You don’t have to go to a monastery to get started. Simply close your eyes and help clear your mind by repeating a simple word to yourself. When your mind wanders, focus on the word again. Try to squirrel away 5 minutes to do this every day. The bathroom works well — few people will disturb you there.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 8th Oct 2009

One million Americans suffer heart attacks every year. Quickly getting their arteries propped open with stents saves lives, studies have found. But millions more develop heart symptoms gradually. Usually it comes in the form of angina, a squeezing pain in the chest or arms caused by clogged arteries that starve the heart muscle of oxygen. The pain comes with exercise or stress, and then goes away.

People often assume they need a stent to get that artery opened up right away–or else. But new results from two big trials are unambiguous: The high-tech procedures don’t save lives or prevent heart attacks for most patients with stable symptoms. “It doesn’t do anything to lower risk of subsequent death or heart attack,” says William Boden, a cardiologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo who led one of the trials. Drug treatment alone is just as effective.

The reason for this counterintuitive result is that most heart attacks don’t occur at the locations that appear most clogged on an angiogram. Instead, heart attacks happen when lesser narrowings become inflamed and suddenly rupture, spewing a clot into the bloodstream. The blockage that bursts isn’t necessarily the one that causes symptoms. People think heart disease “is just a plumbing issue, that clogged pipes mean an impending heart attack,” says James Stein of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “A stent is just a local therapy for a systemic problem.”

Stents are installed during angioplasty, in which a balloon is used to unclog an artery. They are necessary if drugs cannot produce enough pain relief, say cardiologists. One of the two trials found that 66 out of 100 patients who received a stent were angina free after a year versus 58 out of 100 who received only drugs; that difference faded after five years.

Another study published in June comparing stents to drugs in diabetic heart patients found no difference in the risk of death or heart attacks, and only a little over 40% of those assigned drugs later got a stent. A more clogged-up group received either drugs or cardiac bypass surgery, in which veins are used to bypass blocked arteries. The bypass patients didn’t live longer but did have fewer nonfatal heart attacks. “I think physicians will be more likely to consider bypass for their diabetic patients and steer away from angioplasty,” says study author Sheryl Kelsey of the University of Pittsburgh.

One diabetic patient who did well without a stent is Earl Anderson of Old Bridge, N.J. The 62-year-old retired FBI agent first felt chest pains while rushing to catch a plane in 2002. An angiogram revealed a narrowing in one artery, and doctors gave him drugs. His angina soon went away and hasn’t come back. Now his cholesterol and blood sugar are down; he plays tennis weekly with his 14-year-old son

• A User’s Guide to Your Heart

• The Mystery of Sudden Cardiac Arrest

• Fighting Heart Failure

• Soothing Angina

• Your Heart: An Interactive Graphic

• Heart Disorder Afflicts Millions

• Thousands Of Children Suffer Cardiac Death

Cardiologists who install stents say that these relieve pain better than drugs and that most patients have more symptoms than Anderson. “Patients with a lot of symptoms don’t do well with drug therapy,” says Gregg Stone of New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

One reason so many stents are implanted is money. “Hospitals are paid handsomely if the patient has bypass surgery or has a stent. But they are not paid [so much] if a patient has drugs,” says cardiologist David Hillis of the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio. While generally safe, stent procedures can cause heart attacks, bleeding or even death.

Another misconception is that getting a procedure will obviate the need for drugs. “People have this impression that ‘If I get a stent, then I am not going to have to take medicine,’ and that is wrong,” says Mayo Clinic cardiologist Raymond Gibbons. “Everybody is going to get medicines. The real question: Is stenting or surgery going to bring enough benefit in addition?” Patients who get drug-coated stents often must take more drugs; they need to stay on the blood thinner Plavix for at least a year to prevent rare cases of clots forming in the stent.

One key test that is often skipped: stress tests to determine if your heart is getting enough oxygen during exercise. The problem, says Scripps Research Institute cardiologist Eric Topol: Without stress tests, doctors don’t know whether narrowings seen on an angiogram are causing problems.

Heart patients with stable symptoms have choices–and time to consider their decisions. For many of them drug therapy alone, drug therapy and stents, or drug therapy with angioplasty are all reasonable options. If you are not sure which you want, you can ask the doctor doing your angiogram to hold off on the stent if nothing alarming is found. This will give you time to discuss the result with your primary care doctor or referring cardiologist.

Prevention
Eat a healthy diet and exercise to prevent the buildup of artery plaque.

Take statins and blood pressure drugs if your doctor dictates.

Treatment
For most patients, drug therapy can reduce the risk of heart attack and treat chest pain.

A stent/angioplasty procedure can reduce chest pain but has no proved impact on survival in those with stable symptoms.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 28th June 2009