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Food And Drug Administration Moves Towards Greater Openness
The Food and Drug Administration is taking steps towards greater openness. The Associated Press reports that FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg "announced Tuesday she has created a task force to make recommendations on how the agency can release more information in such areas as drug evaluation and enforcement matters. She wants a report in six months." Deputy Commissioner Joshua Sharfstein will head the task force, which will represent all of the FDA"s major divisions as well as its law enforcement branch. It will hold two public meetings with the first on June 24. "The FDA has long operated under strict confidentiality rules," the AP reports, and in opening up information, one sensitive issue will be what to do with unpublished clinical trial data from drug manufacturers. Despite such concerns, "Hamburg said she believes the need for secrecy may have been taken too far, and is harming the FDA"s credibility within the medical community and among consumers" (Alonso-Zaldivar, 6/2).
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Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust Goes Live With Horizon Enterprise Visibility From Mckesson, UK
Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust has "gone-live" with Horizon Enterprise Visibility; a visual control system designed specifically for hospitals, from healthcare IT solutions and services specialists, McKesson. Via real-time access to patient information, Walsall will be using Horizon Enterprise Visibility to improve re efficiency and bed utilisation to reduce costs and improve the quality of patient care.
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Patients Have 'Mixed Views' On Electronic Health Records
Two-thirds of patients are happy for their medical records to be stored electronically, according to a snapshot survey carried out in a community mental health setting. But many patients still have concerns about security and confidentiality.
Mental Health

Yale Researchers Suggests Gene Inhibition May Help Normalize Type 2 Diabetes

In research that could lead to new approaches for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, a Yale School of Medicine team has found that suppressing a liver enzyme that induces glucose production helped diminish the symptoms of the disease in a rat model - reducing blood glucose concentrations, decreasing rates of glucose production in the liver, and improving insulin sensitivity. Decreasing expression of the gene, Sirtuin 1, also lowered total cholesterol levels. The research appears in the June 15-19 Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Type 2 diabetes is characterized by high blood glucose concentrations and insulin resistance, which play a major factor in causing the disease. In the U.S., rates of type 2 diabetes have doubled since 1990, and the Centers for Disease Control calls the disease an epidemic. Formerly known as "adult-onset diabetes," the disorder is increasingly diagnosed in children. The Yale researchers put the rats on a four-week diet of fructose and high-fat meals to create a metabolic condition that mimics type 2 diabetes. At the same time, they inhibited expression of the Sirtiun 1 gene through injection of an antisense oligonucleotide (short fragments of nucleic acid that inactivate gene expression) specifically targeted to that gene. "Blood glucose levels in the rats came down close to normal, as did their ability to regulate blood glucose levels with insulin," said first author Derek Erion, a graduate student in cellular and molecular physiology at Yale. The authors believe the falling plasma cholesterol levels that also resulted may be attributed to increased cholesterol uptake and export from the liver, due to suppression of key enzymes involved in cholesterol metabolism. Senior author Gerald Shulman, MD, said the results indicate that inhibiting Sirtuin 1 in the liver may be an attractive approach for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. "With this disorder, diet and exercise only get you so far," he said. "Many patients may need drug intervention to avoid suffering the debilitating effects of type 2 diabetes." Shulman is the George R. Cowgill Professor of Physiological Chemistry, Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Physiology at Yale and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Other authors include: Shin Yonemitsu, Yoshio Nagai and Matthew P. Gillum of the Yale School of Medicine and Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Jennifer J. Hsiao, Takanori Iwasaki, Romana Stark, Dirk Weismann, Varman T. Samuel, Tamas. L. Horvath and Qian Gao of Yale School of Medicine; Xing Xian Yu, Susan F. Murray, Sanjay Bhanot and Brett P. Monia of Isis Pharmaceuticals in Carlsbad, CA. The work above was funded in part by the Yale Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) grant from the National Center for Research Res at the National Institutes of Health. Yale University


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