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Injected contraceptives are given once every 3 months. Most injectables are progestin-only. In the United States, depo-medroxyprogesterone acetate (Depo-Provera) is the only approved injected contraceptive. Depo-Provera (also called Depo, or DMPA) uses a progestin called medroxyprogesterone. Like other progestin contraceptives, Depo-Provera prevents pregnancy by halting ovulation, thickening the cervical mucus, and stopping the implantation of fertilized eggs in the uterine lining.

Depo-Provera is very effective in preventing pregnancies. About 3 in 100 women who use it become pregnant. However, Depo also carries the risk for many mild and serious side effects. The most serious side effect is loss of bone density (see “Disadvantages”). Because of this complication, Depo-Provera should not be used for more than 2 years.

Administering Injections:

• A physical examination is necessary before beginning the injections.
• Depo is injected into a muscle in the patient’s arm or buttock. During months between injections, the hormone slowly diffuses out of the muscle into the bloodstream.
• Depo requires an injection by the doctor once every 3 months.
• If more than 2 weeks pass beyond the regular injection schedules, the woman should have a pregnancy test before receiving the next injection.

Candidacy

Because Depo-Provera does not contain estrogen, it is safe for many women who are not candidates for combination oral contraceptives, such as women smokers over age 35.

Depo-Provera should not be given to women who have a history of:

• Current or past breast cancer
• Stroke or blood clots
• Liver disease
• Epilepsy, migraine, asthma, heart failure, or kidney disease (due to the fact that the drug causes fluid retention)
• Unexplained vaginal bleeding
• Risk for osteoporosis

Because of the long lag time between ending treatments and restoration of fertility, Depo-Provera is not recommended for women who are thinking of becoming pregnant within 2 years.

Advantages of Depo-Provera

• Provides highly effective reversible protection against pregnancy without placing heavy demands on the user’s time or memory.
• Does not increase risk for breast, ovarian, or cervical cancer. May protect against endometrial cancer.
• May be useful for women with painful periods, heavy bleeding (including heavy bleeding caused by fibroids), premenstrual syndrome, and endometriosis.

Disadvantages and Complications of Depo-Provera

• Weight gain. Most women gain an average of 5 - 8 pounds.
• Other common side effects include menstrual irregularities (bleeding or cessation of periods), abdominal pain and discomfort, dizziness, headache, fatigue, nervousness.
• Most users of Depo-Provera stop menstruating altogether after a year. Depo can cause persistent infertility for up to 22 months after the last injection, although the average is 10 months.
• Long-term (more than 2 years) use of Depo-Provera can cause loss of bone density. In November 2004, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) added a “black box” warning to the Depo-Provera label advising of this risk. The warning notes that the decline in bone density increases with duration of use and may not be completely reversible even after the drug is discontinued. Based on this information, the FDA recommends that Depo-Provera should not be used for longer than 2 years unless other birth control methods are inadequate. A 2005 study of young women (age 14 - 18 years) found that adolescents who stop taking Depo-Provera do regain bone density.
• The injections do not provide protection against sexually transmitted diseases. According to a 2004 study, women who take Depo-Provera have three times the risk of acquiring chlamydia and gonorrhea as women who do not use a hormonal contraceptive. The reason for this increased risk is unclear. The same study found that oral contraceptive use, in comparison to non-hormonal contraceptives, was not associated with increased risk

The lung cancer pill Iressa has shown surprising results for patients with advanced disease where it has been at least as effective as a standard chemotherapy treatment, researchers have reported.

Patients who got the once-a-day pill made by AstraZeneca lived as long as those given the chemotherapy treatment Sanofi-Aventis’ Taxotere or docetaxel, the international team of researchers found.

This is second-line treatment, traditionally offered after a course of combined chemotherapies that can last months, and is still considered the best approach to lung cancer.

“The study is the first time in lung cancer that an oral biological agent has been tested head-to-head against chemotherapy,” Dr Edward Kim of the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston and colleagues wrote in the Lancet medical journal.

How the study was done
Kim’s team tested 1 466 patients in 24 countries who had completed a first course of standard chemotherapy. Half got Iressa as second-line treatment and half got docetaxel. Both sets of patients lived about as long - eight months on average.

Dr Michael Cullen of University Hospital Birmingham in Britain, who wrote a commentary on the findings, noted that Iressa is far less toxic than chemotherapy, including Taxotere, and is very convenient to take.

“I think there will be patients for whom it will be favoured,” he said. But he added that tests supposed to show who would do better on so-called targeted therapies like Iressa failed to predict who would benefit from them.

Iressa was once viewed as a likely blockbuster for the Anglo-Swedish group which makes it, but its failure in a clinical trial in 2004 dealt a major blow for the product and it is now seen by analysts as a niche medicine.

Non-smokers and women responded best
Lung cancer kills 1.2 million people a year and is the top cause of cancer death globally. Many drugs are used to treat it but almost always stop working eventually, in part because most patients are not diagnosed until tumours have spread.

Chemotherapy, infused over a period of several hours, targets rapidly growing cells and thus often has severe side effects such as nausea, diarrhoea and hair loss.

Iressa, known generically as gefitinib, is a monoclonal antibody, a genetically engineered immune system molecule that targets a molecule called epidermal growth factor receptor or EGFR. Tumours use EGFR to grow themselves blood supplies. Such targeted therapies have far fewer side effects.

AstraZeneca stopped selling Iressa in the United States after tests showed it only helped about 10% of patients. But it continued trials, including this one, in part because there was tantalising evidence that some people - notably non-smokers, Asians and women - did better on Iressa.

And companies such as Genzyme Corp. now market tests that show whether cancer patients have the EGFR mutation and others targeted by Iressa and similar drugs such as Genentech’s Tarceva.

Cullen noted that only a small proportion of the patients benefited from being given the second-line treatment drugs. but said some lived a long time. He described one of his patients who survived a year on Iressa before dying of a stroke. – (Reuters Health, November 2008)

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Vitamin C or E pills do not help prevent cancer in men, concludes the same big study that last week found these supplements ineffective for warding off heart disease.

The public has been hit by good and bad news about vitamins, much of it from test-tube or animal studies and hyped manufacturer claims. Even when researchers compare people’s diets and find that a vitamin seems to help, the benefit may not translate when that nutrient is obtained a different way, such as a pill.

Antioxidants, which include vitamin C and vitamin E, have been shown as a group to have potential benefit,” but have not been tested individually for a long enough time to know, said Howard Sesso of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

The Physicians Health Study, which he helped lead, was designed to do that. It involved 14 641 male doctors, 50 or older, including 1 274 who had cancer when or before the study started in 1997. They were included so scientists could see whether the vitamins could prevent a second cancer.

Vit E had no affect on cancer outcome
Participants were put into four groups and given vitamin E, vitamin C, both, or dummy pills. The dose of E was 400 international units every other day; C was 500 milligrams daily.

After an average of eight years, there were 1 929 cases of cancer, including 1 013 cases of prostate cancer, which many had hoped vitamin E would prevent.

However, rates of prostate cancer and of total cancer were similar among all four groups.

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and several vitamin makers. Results were being reported Sunday at an American Association for Cancer Research conference in Washington.

“Well-conducted clinical trials such as this are rapidly closing the door on the hope that common vitamin supplements may protect against cancer,” said Marji McCullough, nutrition chief at the American Cancer Society. “It’s still possible that some benefit exists for subgroups that couldn’t be measured, but the overall results are certainly discouraging.

Cancer Society recommends healthy diet
“The American Cancer Society recommends getting these and other nutrients by eating a mostly plant-based diet with a variety of vegetables, fruits and whole grains. A bonus is that this type of diet helps to prevent obesity, which increases the risk of several cancers.”

About 12% of Americans take supplements of C and E. The new study does not mean these vitamins have no value, just that they didn’t prevent cancer in this group of doctors, who may be healthier than the general population, said Dr Peter Shields, deputy director of Georgetown University’s Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Centre.

The best bet, he said, is to do things that are known to prevent the disease - eat right, maintain a healthy weight, and exercise. – (Sapa)

squidgy cancer cells Cancer cells, like ripe fruit, are much softer than healthy cells, scientists say in a finding that could help doctors diagnose tumours and figure out which might be the deadliest.

The researchers used a nanotechnology device called an atomic force microscope that allowed them to give a little poke to healthy cells and cancerous cells that had spread from the original site of a range of tumours.

Cancer cells taken from people with pancreatic, breast and lung tumours were more than 70% softer than benign cells, the scientists write in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“The bottom line is now we can feel the cancer cells with this technology, in addition to looking at them and analysing them in a molecular way,” says Associate Professor Jianyu Rao of the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), one of the researchers.

“We think it may be diagnostically helpful.”

The different types of cancer cells examined in the study exhibited similar levels of softness, allowing the healthy and diseased ones to be clearly identified.

The technique may represent a new method for detecting cancer, particularly in cells from body cavity fluids for which diagnosis with current techniques can be difficult, the researchers say.

Conventional diagnostic methods miss about 30% of cases in which cancer cells are present in this fluid, the researchers say.

The microscope used in the study has a small tip on a spring to push against a cell’s surface and determine its level of softness or firmness.

“You look at two tomatoes in the supermarket and both are red. One is rotten, but it looks normal,” says UCLA chemistry professor James Gimzewski, another of the researchers.

“If you pick up the tomatoes and feel them, it’s easy to figure out which one is rotten. We’re doing the same thing. We’re poking and quantitatively measuring the softness of the cells.”

Spreading cancer

When cancer is spreading from its original site, for example the pancreas, into other parts of the body in a process called metastasis, tumour cells can cause fluid to build up in cavities such as the chest and abdomen.

If this fluid could be swiftly and accurately tested for the presence of cancer cells, doctors could make better decisions about how aggressively a patient should be treated or if any treatment is appropriate at all, the researchers say.

Rao says he hopes measuring the softness of cells might in the future help determine which tumours are more likely to be deadly.

Rao says that, particularly in diseases like prostate cancer, it can be difficult to distinguish a tumour that might kill a patient from one that might pose little threat.

“More broadly, what we really had in mind is basically hoping some day that when we look at the primary tumours that we can predict which one is more aggressive,” Rao says

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Many human infections are caused by either bacteria or viruses. Bacteria are tiny single-celled organisms, thought by some researchers to be related to plants. They are among the most successful life forms on the planet, and range in habitat from ice slopes to deserts.

Bacteria can be beneficial – for instance, gut bacteria help us to digest food – but some are responsible for a range of infections. These disease-causing varieties are called pathogenic bacteria. Many bacterial infections can be treated successfully with appropriate antibiotics, although antibiotic-resistant strains are beginning to emerge. Immunisation is available to prevent many important bacterial diseases.

A virus is an even smaller micro-organism that can only reproduce inside a host’s living cell. It is very difficult to kill a virus. That’s why some of the most serious communicable diseases known to medical science are viral in origin.

How bacteria and viruses enter the body
To cause disease, pathogenic bacteria must gain access into the body. The range of access routes for bacteria includes:

• Cuts
• Contaminated food or water
• Close contact with an infected person
• Contact with the faeces of an infected person
• Breathing in the exhaled droplets when an infected person coughs or sneezes
• Indirectly, by touching contaminated surfaces – such as taps, toilet handles, toys and nappies.

Viruses are spread from one person to another by:

• Coughs
• Sneezes
• Vomits
• Bites from infected animals or insects
• Exposure to infected bodily fluids through activities such as sexual intercourse or sharing hypodermic needles.

Forgetting to wash your hands after handling pets and animals is another way for germs to be taken in by mouth.

Bacteria types
Bacteria that cause disease are broadly classified according to their shape. The four main groups include:

• Bacilli – shaped like a rod with a length of around 0.03mm. Illnesses such as typhoid and cystitis are caused by bacilli strains.
• Cocci – shaped like a sphere with a diameter of around 0.001mm. Depending on the sort, cocci bacteria group themselves in a range of ways, such as in pairs, long lines or tight clusters. Examples include Staphylococci (which cause a host of infections including boils) and Gonococci (which cause the sexually transmissible infection gonorrhoea).
• Spirochaetes – as the name suggests, these bacteria are shaped like tiny spirals. Spirochaetes bacteria are responsible for a range of diseases, including the sexually transmissible infection syphilis.
• Vibrio – shaped like a comma. The tropical disease cholera, characterised by severe diarrhoea and dehydration, is caused by the vibrio bacteria.

Characteristics of the bacterium
Most bacteria, apart from the cocci variety, move around with the aid of small lashing tails (flagella) or by whipping their bodies from side to side. Under the right conditions, a bacterium reproduces by dividing in two. Each ‘daughter’ cell then divides in two and so on, so that a single bacterium can bloom into a population of some 500,000 or more within just eight hours.

If the environmental conditions don’t suit the bacteria, some varieties morph into a dormant state. They develop a tough outer coating and await the appropriate change of conditions. These hibernating bacteria are called spores. Spores are harder to kill than active bacteria because of their outer coating.

Curing a bacterial infection
The body reacts to disease-causing bacteria by increasing local blood flow (inflammation) and sending in cells from the immune system to attack and destroy the bacteria. Antibodies produced by the immune system attach to the bacteria and help in their destruction. They may also inactivate toxins produced by particular pathogens, for example tetanus and diphtheria.

Serious infections can be treated with antibiotics, which work by disrupting the bacterium’s metabolic processes, although antibiotic-resistant strains are starting to emerge. Immunisation is available to prevent many important bacterial diseases such as Hemophilus influenza Type b (Hib), tetanus and whooping cough..

Virus types
A virus is a miniscule pocket of protein that contains genetic material. If you placed a virus next to a bacterium, the virus would be dwarfed. For example, the polio virus is around 50 times smaller than a Streptococci bacterium, which itself is only 0.003mm long. Viruses can be described as either RNA or DNA viruses, according to which type of nucleic acid forms their core.

The four main types of virus include:

• Icosahedral – the outer shell (capsid) is made from 20 flat sides, which gives a spherical shape. Most viruses are icosahedral.
• Helical – the capsid is shaped like a rod.
• Enveloped – the capsid is encased in a baggy membrane, which can change shape but often appears spherical.
• Complex – the genetic material is coated, but without a capsid.

The body’s response to viral infection
Viruses pose a considerable challenge to the body’s immune system because they hide inside cells. This makes it difficult for antibodies to reach them. Some special immune system cells, called T-lymphocytes, can recognise and kill cells containing viruses, since the surface of infected cells is changed when the virus begins to multiply. Many viruses, when released from infected cells, will be effectively knocked out by antibodies that have been produced in response to infection or previous immunisation.

Curing a viral infection
Antibiotics are useless against viral infections. This is because viruses are so simple that they use their host cells to perform their activities for them. So antiviral drugs work differently to antibiotics, by interfering with the viral enzymes instead.

Antiviral drugs are currently only effective against a few viral diseases, such as influenza, herpes, hepatitis B and C and HIV – but research is ongoing. A naturally occurring protein, called interferon (which the body produces to help fight viral infections), can now be produced in the laboratory and is used to treat hepatitis C infections.

Immunisation against viral infection is not always possible
It is possible to vaccinate against many serious viral infections such as measles, mumps, hepatitis A and hepatitis B. An aggressive worldwide vaccination campaign, headed by the World Health Organization (WHO), managed to wipe out smallpox. However, some viruses – such as those that cause the common cold – are capable of mutating from one person to the next. This is how an infection with essentially the same virus can keep dodging the immune system. Vaccination for these kinds of viruses is difficult, because the viruses have already changed their format by the time vaccines are developed.

Where to get help

• Your doctor
• Your pharmacist

Things to remember

• Many human illnesses are caused by infection with either bacteria or viruses.
• Most bacterial diseases can be treated with antibiotics, although antibiotic-resistant strains are starting to emerge.
• Viruses pose a challenge to the body’s immune system because they hide inside cells.
• It is possible to be vaccinated against some of the major disease-causing viruses (such as measles and polio), as well as bacterial diseases such as Hemophilus influenza Type b (Hib), tetanus and whooping cough

An experimental drug worked many times faster than a standard treatment in helping surgery patients recover from anaesthesia, according to a just-published study funded by its developer, Schering-Plough Corp The drug, known chemically as sugammadex, reverses the effects of muscle-relaxing drugs given along with anaesthetics to prevent patients from moving, making operations safer for them and easier for the surgeon. This would be the first new treatment for reversing muscle relaxers since the 1960s and would significantly improve patient safety, Dr John Dombrowski, a member of the Board of Directors at the American Society of Anaesthesiologists, said Tuesday.

The two long-standard drugs can take more than an hour to work – a period when the patient is vulnerable to life-threatening breathing complications - compared to three minutes or less for sugammadex. Already, it is being launched under the brand name Bridion in Europe, where it was approved in July. But US regulators unexpectedly rejected it in August, citing concerns about allergic reactions in a couple of patients, even though an advisory panel had unanimously recommended it.

“This is a tragedy that this didn’t get approved,” said Dombrowski, an anaesthesiologist at the Washington Pain Centre in Washington, D.C., who does not have industry ties. Kenilworth, New Jersey-based Schering-Plough now is planning to meet with officials at the Food and Drug Administration “to get a better understanding of their issues” and work through them to win approval, company spokesman Robert Cansalvo said.

Patients recovered 17 times faster on sugammadex
“We’re committed to bringing the drug to the US market,” he said. In the 88-patient study, published in the November issue of the journal Anaesthesiology and now available online, about half of the participants were injected with sugammadex at the end of surgery and the rest were injected with a standard treatments called neostigmine.

Patients getting sugammadex recovered from the muscle relaxers about 17 times faster, on average, than those getting neostigmine. The median recovery time - the point where half fall above and half fall below - was 2.7 minutes for the sugammadex patients versus 49 minutes for the neostigmine patients.

A nerve stimulator attached to one hand was used to monitor how quickly the patient recovered the use of muscles and could breathe well enough to be removed from a ventilator, as is routinely done in surgery.

With the older drugs, Dombrowski said, muscle control can wane unpredictably right after surgery, forcing doctors or nurses to reinsert a breathing tube, inject more antidote to the muscle relaxer or take other life-saving measures. That happens several times a month in the typical busy hospital, he said, and patients also can be endangered if they are given pre-surgery muscle relaxers and then the doctor can’t insert a breathing tube.

Sugammadex more pricey, but more effective
None of the patients in the study had an allergic reaction, and side effects were similar for the two groups. About one-third fewer patients on sugammadex had nausea, however, a common problem that can lengthen hospital stays and boost costs. The study was one of several submitted to the FDA before its August 1 decision on sugammadex.

Analyst Steve Brozak of WBB Securities said he expects the FDA, which has become very cautious since the high-profile withdrawals of several drugs with life-threatening side effects, to eventually approve sugammadex. He said he expects initial US sales to range in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year and then climb.

Dombrowski said that while sugammadex would be more expensive than the older, generic drugs, they have complications that can keep people hospitalised longer after surgery, from nausea and vomiting to reduced heart rate and coughing spasms. – (Sapa, October 2008)

A high-fat diet may increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, suggests a Canadian study with mice genetically engineered to produce two proteins - tau and amyloid beta - found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. The University of Laval team fed a diet rich in animal fat and poor in omega-3 to one group of mice, and a diet that contained seven times less fat to a control group of mice. The mice on the high-fat diet (in which fat accounted for 60% of consumed calories) had 8.7 times more amyloid beta and 1.5 times more tau than the control mice, United Press International reported.

Mice on the high-fat diet also had lower levels of drebin protein in their brains, another characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. “Metabolic changes induced by such a diet could affect the inflammatory response in the brain,” said study co-author Carl Julien, UPI reported.

The study was published online in the journal Neurobiology of Aging. – (HealthDay News, October 2008)

Having an “apple-shaped,” rather than a “pear-shaped” body at middle-age appears to increase the later-life risk of dementia, California researchers report.

Moreover, the link between abdominal obesity and increased dementia risk appears to be independent of overall body weight and the presence of diabetes or cardiovascular disease, report Dr Rachel A. Whitmer, from Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, in Oakland, and colleagues

These findings, published in the medical journal Neurology, add to increasing evidence of the dangers of abdominal obesity. Previous research implicated large abdominal girth, as a risk factor for type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke, Whitmer and colleagues note.

The investigators assessed weight, waist measurements, and other factors, in 6 583 men and women, who were members of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Programme of Northern California, who entered the study between 1964 and 1973.

Over 36 years of follow-up, 1 049 men and women developed dementia.

3-fold increased risk
The researchers found that, compared with subjects with the least amount of body fat, those with the highest levels of abdominal obesity had nearly a 3-fold increased risk of dementia in analyses that factored in the effect of age, gender, race, education, marital status, diabetes, high blood lipids (fats), high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease.

Overweight and obesity combined with high levels of abdominal fat, increased risk of dementia by 2.3-fold and 3.6-fold, respectively, whereas overweight and obesity combined with low abdominal fat carried about a 1.8-fold increased risk of dementia - a risk level slightly lower than that identified among participants of normal weight and high abdominal fat.

These findings imply the harmful effects of central obesity impact both normal and overweight individuals, and if replicated, suggest that central obesity may contribute to cognitive ageing, the investigators conclude.

SOURCE: Neurology, September 30, 2008

Source: (HealthDay News)

Even a little stress and anxiety can greatly worsen and extend a person’s reaction to common allergens, a new study says.

The finding is important, as allergies are extremely common: it’s estimated that up to 30% of South Africans suffer from hay fever alone.

Allergies are not minor problems,” researcher Jan Kiecolt-Glaser, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Ohio State, said in a news release issued by the university. “A huge number of people suffer from allergies and, while hay fever, for example, is generally not life-threatening, allergy sufferers often also have asthma, which can be deadly.”

The study looked at 28 volunteers with a history of hay fever and seasonal allergies. Researchers gave standard allergy prick tests to the volunteers, then measured the raised “wheals” that formed on the arms of the participants before and after they were subjected to stressful situations, such as given a speech and answering a series of math questions. They were tested again the next day as well.

Major effects recorded
“The wheals on a person who was moderately anxious because of the experiment were 75 percent larger after the experiment, compared to that same person’s response on the day when they were not stressed,” Kiecolt-Glaser said, signifying a stronger reaction.

“But people who were highly anxious had wheals that were twice as big after they were stressed compared to their response when they were not stressed. Moreover, these same people were four times more likely to have a stronger reaction to the skin test one day later, after the stress,” she said.

This second-day “late-phase reaction” signals an ongoing and strengthening response to the allergens, the researchers said. It suggests that sufferers may react strongly to other stimuli that previously hadn’t caused them to develop an allergic reaction.

Co-investigator Gailen Marshall, a professor of medicine and paediatrics at the University of Mississippi, said late-phase reactions typically do not respond to common allergy treatment, such as antihistamines.

Study findings important for treatment
“Late-phase reactions also occur in allergic asthma and can, in the proper settings, be potentially life-threatening. The results of this study should alert practitioners and patients alike to the adverse effects of stress on allergic reactions in the nose, chest, skin and other organs that may seemingly resolve within a few minutes to hours after starting, but may reappear the next day when least expected,” he said.

Therefore, people may be setting themselves up to have more persistent allergy issues by being stressed and anxious when allergy attacks begin, Kiecolt-Glaser said. - (HealthDay News)

SOURCE: Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, July 2008.

For people who are strongly allergic to bee venom, desensitization using sublingual (i.e., under-the-tongue) immunotherapy may be safer than injection immunotherapy, according to a proof-of-concept clinical trial conducted in Italy

“Our research opens a new possible application of sublingual immunotherapy, which was never proposed for hymenoptera allergy,” Dr. Giovanni Passalacqua told Reuters Health.

Risk of severe reactions
The standard way to desensitize patients with bee sting allergy is to administer small, increasing doses of venom by subcutaneous injections.

However, there is a “particular risk of systemic/severe reactions” with this approach, the research team notes in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.

On the other hand, they say, “systemic side effects are rare, severe adverse events are exceptional, and the common local side effects are mild and self-limiting” with sublingual immunotherapy, or SLIT.

How the trial was done
To evaluate SLIT’s suitability for hymenoptera allergy, Passalacqua, at the University of Genoa, and his associates conducted a trial involving patients who had experienced large local reactions - swellings of 10 centimeters or more lasting more than 24 hours to bee stings.

Venom extract was administered under the tongue daily, starting with a tiny amount and building to bigger doses over 6 months. The trial was completed by 14 patients randomly assigned to SLIT and 12 assigned to placebo.

The maximum diameter of the local reaction when participants were deliberately exposed to a “challenge” sting was significantly reduced only in the active treatment group, the investigators report.

SLIT with honeybee venom was well tolerated, the report indicates, with no adverse events or discomfort reported by the subjects.

“Other studies are currently ongoing to better define the mechanisms of action of SLIT, and to assess its safety when multiple allergens are used in the same patient,” Passalacqua noted. (Karla Gale/Reuters Health)