Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:
Lift OTC Age Restrictions on Morning-After Pill: Company
A request to make the Plan B One-Step morning after birth control pill available to women of all ages without a prescription has been filed with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Currently, women 17 and older can buy the drug over-the-counter, but those younger than 17 require a prescription for the high-dose hormone pill that needs to be taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex, ABC News reported.
Drug maker Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. says Plan B One-Step meets FDA scientific criteria for OTC products.
“Lable comprehension and safety data show that all women are able to safely and effectively take this product. It is not typical for any women’s health product to have age restrictions,” said Denise Bradley, senior director of corporate communications at Teva Pharmaceuticals, ABC News reported.
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Transplant Patient Now Has Two Hearts
An American man with two beating hearts — a transplanted one and his own — is expected to be released from hospital Friday and should be able to resume normal activities within a few months, according to his doctors.
Tyson Smith, 36, underwent the “piggyback transplant” Feb. 13 at the University of California San Diego Center for Transplantation. The new heart helps his damaged heart keep beating, FoxNews.com reported.
“This is a very rare procedure, but one worth having in the tool kit of options in cardiac replacement. It’s a safe operation with an average survival of 10 years,” Dr. Jack Copeland, a professor of surgery and director of cardiac transplantation and mechanical circulatory support at UC San Diego Health System, said in a news release.
Smith’s heart was enlarged to more than three times its normal size and he had just two options, FoxNews.com reported.
The choices were a “mechanical left ventricular assist device (LVAD), which would replace the function of his left heart and allow him to then go on to a standard heart transplant in a few months; or the so called piggyback transplant, which replaces the patient’s left heart and allows the patient’s right heart to continue the right-sided pumping through the lungs,” Copeland said. “This way, Mr. Smith needed only one operation rather than two, which saves the patient time, inconvenience, and pain, and reduces medical costs.”
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Kidney Transplant Changes Could Favor Younger Patients
Changes that would direct the best kidneys to younger healthier people instead of giving priority to patients who have been on the waiting list longest are being considered by U.S. organ transplant network officials.
The new guidelines would put more emphasis on matching recipients and organs based on factors such as age and health in order to maximize the number of years that a transplanted kidney would last.
“It’s an effort to get the most out of a scarce resource,” Kenneth Andreoni, an associate professor of surgery at Ohio State University, told the Washington Post. He chairs the committee that is reviewing the kidney donation system for the United Network for Organ Sharing.
Some experts worry that the changes could unfairly penalize middle-aged and elderly patients.
“The best kidneys are from young adults under age 35 years. Nobody over the age of 50 will ever see one of those,” Lainie Friedman Ross, a University of Chicago bioethicist and physician, told the Post. “There are a lot of people in their 50s and 60s who, with a properly functioning kidney, could have 20 or more years of life. We’re making it harder for them to get a kidney that will function for that length of time. It’s age discrimination.”
More than 87,000 Americans are on the waiting list for a kidney, but only 17,000 get kidneys each year. More than 4,600 die because they did not get a kidney in time.
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Toyota Announces Expanded Recall
About 2.1 million more Toyota and Lexus vehicles in the United States are included in an expanded recall of floor mats that can jam against cause accelerator pedals and cause unintended acceleration, Toyota announced Thursday.
The company claims the recalls are voluntary, but U.S. regulators say they requested them, USA Today reported.
The vehicles in the expanded recall include: Toyota RAV4, Lexus LX, Toyota 4Runner, Toyota Highlander, Lexus RX, and Lexu GS.
Last year, Toyota recalled hundreds of thousands of vehicles to replace floor mats that can jam against accelerator pedals or to replace pedal mechanisms that can stick, USA Today reported.
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Blocking Enzyme Prevents Breast Cancer Spread: Study
U.K. researchers have found a way to prevent breast cancer from spreading to other organs in mice.
They achieved this by blocking an enzyme called LOXL2 and said their findings offer a “fantastic” target for the development of new drugs to prevent breast cancer metastasis in women, BBC News reported.
The study appears in the journal Cancer Research.
The “results are very exciting, as although currently we can treat breast cancer that has spread, we cannot cure it,” Arlene Wilkie, director of research and policy at Breast Cancer Campaign in the U.K., told BBC News.
The campaign helped fund the study.
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