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Prescribing heroin to addicts who can't kick their habit helps them stay off street drugs, British researchers said Friday. So far, doctors have had little hope of treating the 10 percent or more of heroin users who don't respond to methadone, the standard anti-addiction medication. Fueled by drug cravings, those users often spiral downward into crime and diseases spread by dirty needles and unhea...

People with HIV reduced the risk of handing on the AIDS virus by an astonishing 92 percent while they were taking antiretroviral drugs, according to a trial reported on Thursday. The research provides the strongest evidence to date that drugs which treat the human immunodeficiency virus could also be incorporated into strategies for fighting HIV's spread. In a paper published by the British journa...

THURSDAY, May 27 -- People who are HIV-positive can lower their risk for transmitting the virus to their partners by 90 percent by taking antiretroviral drugs, new research has found. Antiretroviral drug therapy helps reduce HIV levels in the infected person's blood, which in turn makes the person less infectious to others. The drugs are commonly taken in the United States by people with HIV,...

Weight-loss drugs from GlaxoSmithKline PLC and Roche Holding AG will carry new warnings about rare reports of liver injury, U.S. health officials said on Wednesday. The Food and Drug Administration said it had not determined that Roche's prescription drug Xenical or Glaxo's over-the-counter pill Alli caused liver damage, but felt the public should be alerted because the condition is serious. Patie...

Relying on so-called biomarkers is confusing the entire process of drug development, the public and doctors alike, they said. The FDA also needs to use the same strict standards for assessing health claims of food and supplements as it does for drugs, said the panel appointed by the Institute of Medicine, which advises the federal government. The committee recommended a new framework the ...

Bisphosphonates include blockbuster drugs such as alendronate (Fosamax), risedronate (Actonel) and ibandronate (Boniva). The conclusions, appearing as a letter-to-the-editor in the May 13 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, do little to settle an ongoing debate about whether or not these drugs cause this type of rare fracture. A pharmaceutical-company sponsored study publis...

The finding stems from an animal study that indicated that leading erectile dysfunction medications sildenafil (Viagra) and vardenafil (Levitra) can enable the chemotherapy drug Herceptin to more easily penetrate the so-called blood-brain barrier that must be breached in order to successfully target cancer that has spread to the brain. Although the blood-brain barrier is a naturally occu...

In a new study that included 3,090 patients being treated for Parkinson’s at 46 movement disorder centers in the United States and Canada, the researchers found that 13.6 percent of the patients had impulse control disorders. These impulse disorders included gambling (5 percent), compulsive sexual behavior (3.5 percent), compulsive shopping (5.7 percent) and binge eating (4.3 percent), an...

The study of more than 3,000 people with Parkinson’s disease confirms that so-called dopamine agonists, such as GlaxoSmithKline’s Requip or ropinirole or Boehringer Ingelheim’s Mirapex or pramipexole, can cause impulse control problems. And it may mean doctors who prescribe the drugs for other conditions like restless legs syndrome should watch for these symptoms in patients, they said...

Five studies and an editorial in the May issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine explore the side effects associated with proton pump inhibitors, including bone fractures among older women and Clostridium difficile infections that can cause life-threatening diarrhea and gastrointestinal upset in older people. Overall, proton pump inhibitors are safe, experts stressed. Even so, eviden...