Month: April 2014

To get all the health benefits of low glycemic foods, Americans would have to … But claims that the diet helps with weight loss remain largely unproven.

Former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, who has been mulling a Senate run in New Hampshire for the past few months, plans formally to announce his campaign on Thursday, the Republican said in a letter to supporters on Monday. National Republican supporters have moved quickly to buy ads supporting Brown’s potential run against incumbent Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, seeing the race as an opportunity to shrink Democrats’ 55-43 majority in the upper chamber. Brown, who has focused much of his recent public statements on his opposition to President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform law, said in an e-mail to supporters that his weeks of canvassing the state convinced him that “you want a health care system that works for New Hampshire.” “Together, we can do all this, but it starts by changing leadership in Washington,” said Brown, who was a little-known Massachusetts state senator before he stunned the state’s Democratic party to win the U.S. Senate seat previously held by Edward M. Kennedy in 2010.

Just as bracelets such as Fitbit are beginning to catch on, researchers have developed an even more discreet wearable health monitoring device. A new skin patch is able to track various health indicators and send data wirelessly to a PC or smartphone. This next-generation health tracking device was developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Northwestern University under the direction of John A. Rogers and Yonggang Huang. Designed to keep tabs on the wearer's health at all times, the patch has various applications, from tracking muscular activity to monitoring symptoms related to an illness.

(Reuters) – A mid-stage trial of Puma Biotechnology’s experimental drug neratinib showed that it was more effective, given before surgery, than Herceptin, the Roche drug commonly used in women with a type of breast cancer fueled by a protein called HER2. About 39 percent of HER2 patients given a combination of neratinib and chemotherapy achieved a “pathologic complete response,” compared with 23 percent of women treated with chemo and Herceptin. The trial also found that the experimental drug resulted in a higher rate of pCR, 45 percent, than standard care, 29 percent, in women with tumors for which genetic testing indicated a high probability that their cancer would return. Alan Auerbach, Puma’s chief executive officer, said the company is in the process of designing Phase 3 trials of neratinib in both HER2-positive patients and in patients with a high risk of breast cancer recurrence.

Blood tests have shown that a 12-year-old girl in Ghana who died of viral fever with bleeding did not have Ebola, Health Minister Sherry Ayittey said on Monday. The girl was the first suspected case in Ghana of Ebola, which has killed more than 90 people in Guinea and Liberia. Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres has warned of an unprecedented epidemic in an impoverished region with weak health services. Samples from the girl, who has not been identified, were brought to the capital Accra from the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, Ghana’s second-largest city.

But healthy eating needs to be a daily endeavor in order to have an … Losing weight is a matter of assessing your portion choices, eating foods that …

(Reuters) – MannKind Corp said the U.S. Food and Drug Administration extended the review date of its inhaled insulin treatment by three months, sending the company's shares down as much as 22 percent before the bell. The news comes less than a week after an advisory panel to the FDA recommended approving the treatment, Afrezza, but said longer-term studies would be required to gauge the risk of lung cancer and other potential side-effects. MannKind said on Monday the new review date of July 15 was set to give the FDA time to fully review information it had submitted. Analysts had expected the FDA to delay its decision given the concerns about Afrezza's safety and efficacy.

By John Irish PARIS (Reuters) – Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika has recovered strongly enough from a stroke to govern and will push economic reforms, including loosening restrictions on foreign investors if re-elected this month, campaign spokesman Amara Benyounes said. Benyounes, who is also Industry and Investment Minister, was campaigning in Paris on Sunday to win support among Algeria's largest disapora ahead of April 17 presidential polls. Speaking to Reuters Benyounes dismissed suggestions 77-year-old Bouteflika, who has remained mostly out of the public eye since returning from France after suffering a stroke, would not be fit to rule the country. "He will manage the country with his head not his feet and his head is working very well," Benyounes said.

By Chang-Ran Kim and Zeba Siddiqui TOKYO/MUMBAI (Reuters) – India's Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd has agreed to buy generic drugmaker Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd for $3.2 billion, betting it can fix factory quality glitches that plagued the current owner, Japan's Daiichi Sankyo Co , and got Ranbaxy India-made drugs barred from the United States. For Daiichi Sankyo, Japan's fourth-biggest drugmaker by revenue, the deal marks a significant retreat and highlights the lingering quality problems facing India's drug industry. The value of the Japanese firm's investments in the country has been halved since it bought control of Ranbaxy in 2008. The deal comes against the backdrop of a slew of sanctions against Ranbaxy by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) due to concerns about manufacturing processes at its India plants.

India’s Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd Managing Director Dilip Shanghvi said he expects Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd to become profitable in the short term. Sun said it will buy Ranbaxy in a $3.2 billion all-share deal, creating the world’s fifth-largest generic drug maker from two firms struggling with quality issues in the lucrative United States market. Sun plans to focus on remediation of compliance issues that have resulted in bans at multiple Ranbaxy plants, Shanghvi told analysts on a conference call. Ranbaxy’s underlying business has “robust growth,” and profitability potential, based on which the price Sun is paying for the deal is “justified,” Shanghvi said.