When is an immune work-up warranted?
Why is my child sick so often?" As primary care pediatricians, you hear that question a lot, especially from parents with a first child in day care. Of course, chances are good that the child simply has an immature immune system, and the problem of multiple infections will resolve...

Modern Hygiene's Dirty Tricks.
The clean life may throw off a delicate balance in the immune system Sweeping along 14th-century trade routes, an infectious agent left a trail of incomparable devastation throughout Asia and Europe. In China, this plague slashed the population from 125 million to 90 million by the century's...

Sick and down: to fight off an infection or illness, the body shifts into a slow-down mode that mirrors some symptoms of depression. In fact, scientists now think the immune response itself may even cause the mood disorder.
When one of psychiatrist Andrew Miller's patients asked about receiving the best drug available for treating hepatitis C, Miller said: "No way." The patient--in his early 20s and accompanied by his morn to the appointment--had no job, few friends and a history of depression. While Miller knows that hepatitis...

SIGNIFICANT PHASE III CIMZIA RESULTS IN RHEUMATOID ARTHRITIS.
UCB, Atlanta, has announced key results of a Phase III study (RAPID 1) involving nearly 1,000 patients on CIMZIA(TM) (certolizumab pegol), the first PEGylated, Fc-free anti-TNF, intended for the treatment of moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis (RA). RAPID 1's radiographic data showed that CIMZIA(TM) in combination with methotrexate prevented...

FDA Allows Resumption of Lupus Trials with Epratuzumab.
MORRIS PLAINS, N.J., Nov. 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Immunomedics, Inc. , a biopharmaceutical company focused on developing therapeutic monoclonal antibodies, today announced that their partner, UCB (Euronext Brussels: UCB), has received notification from FDA that the clinical hold on existing trials with epratuzumab in patients with lupus has been lifted....

Management of Mucositis in Bone Marrow Transplant Patients.
Introduction The production of stem cells that give rise to blood and elements of the immune system can be disturbed by disorders such as leukemia, aplastic anemia, and severe combined immunodeficiency disorder.[1-3] Bone-marrow transplantation (BMT) has become the treatment of choice for disorders that affect bone marrow...

Miscarriage Blues.
Byline: IPSITA BASU Women often go through severe trauma after miscarriage. Medical experts advise caution and steps to avoid this; and the ways to deal with miscarriage blues. Sumana Rao (name changed) was 30 years old and a mother-to-be last year. Now she is depressed...

Quality of life in hematologic cancer patients: A randomized clinical trial of low dose naltrexone versus placebo.
INTRODUCTION Naltrexone is a main drug for treatment of addiction and acts by blocking opioid receptors in brain. The drug can inhibit secretion of opioids in both brain and adrenal glands (beta endorphins and enkefalins). Many tissues including almost all the immune cells have receptors for endorphins...

Deriving new drugs from thalidomide.
Thalidomide, a nausea-fighting sedative synthesized during the 1950s but never approved for use in the United States because of its fetus-harming effects, is spawning a new generation of drugs that can treat inflammation and immune system disorders (SN: 12/24&31/94, p.424). George W. Muller and David I. Stirling, chemists at...

Boosting cell numbers in AIDS.
Boosting cell numbers in AIDS A growth hormone that stimulates certain cells in the bone marrow can increase the number of white blood cells circulating in the blood, and perhaps give AIDS patients more "ammunition' with which to fight infection, scientists reported last week. Using 16...