Posted on 06/03/2005 12:22:39 AM PDT by neverdem
An experimental vaccine can reduce both the incidence and the severity of shingles by more than half, doctors reported yesterday, in a development that could spare hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans from an extremely painful disease.
The effectiveness of the vaccine was determined in an unusually large clinical trial involving more than 38,500 people over the age of 60, the group most prone to shingles, a skin and nerve infection.
"I think the results are quite clinically significant," said Dr. Michael N. Oxman, the leader of the study, which is being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. "There's a major reduction in the overall burden of illness of shingles."
Merck, the developer of the vaccine, has already applied to the Food and Drug Administration for approval, which it hopes to receive by February. It would be the first new vaccine primarily for older adults in 30 years, according to Merck officials.
Shingles is caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox. That virus, called varicella-zoster, is not eradicated from the body when a person recovers from chickenpox, but instead lies dormant in the nervous system and can be reactivated if the immune system weakens.
The shingles vaccine is a much more potent version of the chickenpox vaccine given to children. The vaccine boosts the immune system to keep the virus from being reactivated. It is not expected to help treat people who already have shingles.
It is estimated that more than one million people develop shingles in the United States each year, with both the prevalence and severity of the disease rising as people age. About half the cases each year are in people over 60, so widespread use of the vaccine in that age group could prevent 250,000 cases a year, said Dr. Oxman...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
New England Journal of Medicine(NEJM) home page The abstract to the Shingles vaccine story, as well as some other interesting articles are freely available. The one that caught my attention was "Influence of Variants of VKORC1 on the Dose of Warfarin". Coumadin is also called warfarin(sodium), i.e. it's another type of salt molecule, which is critical for folks who must have their blood "thinned" for such indications as artificial heart valves, carotid artery stenosis, i.e. narrowing, deep vein thrombosis, etc. White devils were in the middle range for dosing between Asian Americans and African Americans, according to dosing requirements and genetic haplotypes.
Is This Clinical Trial Fully Registered? -- A Statement from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors This is a pdf file, .i.e a portable data file, IIRC. I believe this means URLs with the .pdf suffix requires Adobe software, or similar software, that's usually available for free. To access it I upgraded to Adobe 6.02 in quick time. I saw two prompts while reading the last link. "Need to create PDF documents?" and "Upgrade to latest reader" were prompted by Adobe. Could someone tell me the advantages and disadvantages to my desktop of those actions?
There's a free full text article, Americans as Survivors. I'm curious if the general public can access it directly, or do they have to register with the New England Journal of Medicine?
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Spring is shingles/chickenpox season. That's great news.
Oh, shingles! I thought it cured singles. Never mind.
I was diagnosed with shingles. Took L-lysine, B-Complex, Vitamin C. Shingles dried up and disappeared in 3 days.
That's great. Oh by the way, I heard today that besides being constantly flooded by commercial for ED, we are now going to be bombarded by commercials for PE treatment drugs, not to mention commercials for condoms.
I know a lady who suffers greatly from having shingles. She's now 87, had shingles in her early 80's, and went from a vibrant lady to an invalid due to the pain and the meds controlling the pain.
A year too late. Just my luck.
i prayed to god because our house needed a new roof, god sent my wife shingles...
Could you access all the links in comment# 1 without registering or using bugmenot.com ?
Could you freely access all of the links in comment# 1?
I could get all the links but the print on the last one was too small for me to read.
I remember, over thirty years ago, reading a sign by a hospital elevator, that asked for participants to join a program to develop an anti-shingles vaccine.
I'm glad to hear they may be close to solving the problem.
Hi...I had no problem accessing the links.
Thank's for the feedback!
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