Health Headlines - September 18

Medicare Premiums Raised Again

Seniors face yet another increase in their health-care costs, thanks to the federal government.

The New York Times reported Saturday that basic Medicare premiums will go up again; this time the hike will be 13 percent, to $88.50 a month. Increased use of doctor's services is behind the latest increase, the Times reported.

Many beneficiaries will have to pay an additional premium for the much-touted new prescription drug benefit program, set to start Jan. 1, which should average $32 a month. The combined premiums will now average $120 a month, the Times reported.

Medicare premiums are typically deducted from monthly Social Security checks, which currently average $955 a month for retirees, the Times said. Medicare provides medical coverage to 42 million people who are older or disabled.

The basic Medicare premium has gone up by nearly $30 a month, or 51 percent, from 2003 to 2006, Kirsten A. Sloan, a health policy analyst at AARP, told the Times.

New Orleans Sludge Still Contaminated With Bacteria, Oil

Initial tests conducted on sediments taken after floodwaters receded in New Orleans show high amounts of E. coli bacteria and oil runoff from fuel and chemical plants, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Friday.

E. coli indicates there is fecal bacteria in the water and exposed sediment, and contact with both should be avoided, Marcus Peacock, the EPA's deputy administrator, told reporters Friday at a news conference, the agency's second this week. He said 18 sediment samples taken on Sept. 10 represented the start of "extensive" testing, the Bloomberg news service reported.

And flooded parts of New Orleans, which was 80 percent under water after Hurricane Katrina, include more than 60 chemical plants, oil refineries, and petroleum storage facilities, Bloomberg said.

The Coast Guard said Thursday that Hurricane Katrina may have spilled more than 7 million gallons of oil, about two-thirds of what was released in the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989, according to the Associated Press.

Contact with fuel oils can lead to skin and eye irritation, increased blood pressure, and headache, Bloomberg said.

Officials told Bloomberg that the full extent of the contamination probably won't be known until the city is completely pumped out, which they say could take until mid-October.

Defibrillator Problems on the Rise: FDA Study

Malfunctions in implanted heart devices called defibrillators were increasing even before a huge recall this summer by Guidant Corp., according to a joint study released Friday by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and Harvard University.

Defibrillators shock awkwardly beating hearts back into a normal rhythm. About 20 of every 1,000 devices malfunction, the researchers found. Those defects led to 31 deaths between 1990 and 2002, although that was a fraction of the more than 400,000 devices implanted during the span, the Associated Press reported.

Nonetheless, the study "points out the need for our agency to improve the way it regulates these products, and we're doing just that," Dr. Daniel Schultz, chief of the FDA's medical devices unit, told the AP.

The research was presented Friday at a daylong meeting of the Heart Rhythm Society in Washington, D.C., to discuss recent safety problems with defibrillators and other implanted cardiac devices, including pacemakers.

The study's leader, Dr. William Maisel of Harvard, found that from 1990 to 2002, 2.25 million pacemakers and 416,000 cardiac defibrillators were implanted in the United States. More than 17,000 of the devices had to be removed later due to malfunctions, the AP reported.

Equally troubling, 50 percent of the defibrillator malfunctions between 1990 and 2002 occurred within the last three years of that time period, the researchers said.

Guidant, and two other makers -- Medtronic and St. Jude Medical -- have recalled or issued warnings about more than 200,000 defibrillators since January, the wire service said. Guidant recently conceded that it waited three years before telling doctors and patients about an electrical defect in one of its models. The defect has been linked to two deaths, the AP reported.

Aspirin at Night May Lower Blood Pressure

Not only may daily aspirin prevent a heart attack, it could also lower blood pressure -- especially if taken at night, researchers have found.

Scientists from Spain, writing in the Sept. 20 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, said they randomly divided patients with mild hypertension into three groups: those who took aspirin in the morning, those who took it before bed, and those who didn't take aspirin at all.

After three months, blood pressure rose slightly among those who took aspirin in the morning, but fell in the group that took it at night. The group that didn't take aspirin at all saw only a very slight decline in blood pressure that wasn't statistically significant, the researchers at the University of Vigo said.

The authors and other experts said the results would have to be confirmed in future studies.

"Given the widespread use of aspirin, the prevalence of hypertension, and the ease in altering the time of aspirin administration, these results should be widely disseminated," Dr. Joseph Messer, from Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said in a prepared statement from the American College of Cardiology. Messer wasn't directly connected to the research, the statement said.

Lipitor, Celebrex Lead Price Increases, U.S. Reports

The cholesterol-lowering medicine Lipitor and the pain drug Celebrex had the most impact on a 25 percent overall increase in U.S. retail drug prices from 2000 to 2004, says a federal government report.

The Government Accountability Office report said that the price of a 30-day supply of 96 drugs used by older people increased by 24.5 percent from January 2000 to December 2004, the Kansas City Star reported.

The study found that 20 of the 96 drugs accounted for nearly two-thirds of that increase. Of those 20 drugs, 19 were name-brand drugs and one was a generic drug.

"The drug with the largest effect on the price index was Lipitor 10 mg, which accounted for 6.6 percent of the total increase," the report noted. Celebrex had the second greatest impact on drug prices. Both are made by Pfizer Inc.

The other drugs in the top five were: blood thinner Plavix, made by Sanofi-Aventis SA and Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.'; the ulcer drug Prevacid, made by Abbott Laboratories and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd.; and Pfizer's Lipitor 20 mg.

Science Finds Key to Autumn's Splendor

Autumn's joyous pageant of red, yellow and gold relies on a single protein, new research reveals.

The protein -- with the less-than-poetic name of FtsH6 -- degrades a second compound that spends most of the year holding tight to the green chlorophyll in leaves. As this compound (called LHCII) slips away, hidden pigments of red and yellow are revealed, explain researchers at Umea Plant Science Center in Sweden.

While LCHII is incredibly small, it is also one of the most abundant plant membrane proteins on earth, and each leaf or blade of grass is so full of the compound that the planet's forests appear as swaths of green from space.

But in temperate climes, deciduous leaves lose that green as the days turn shorter.

The Swedish researchers, in conjunction with a Polish scientist, sought to identify exactly which type of protein-degrading protease molecule breaks down LHCII and causes plants to turn color in autumn.

Reporting in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers started on the assumption the molecule belonged to the family of so-called FtsH proteases. They then used genetically modified plants in which various FtsH proteases had already been removed to conduct their study.

One plant variation lacking a key protease, FtsH6, was largely unable to break down LCHII. That suggests FtsH6 is crucial to seasonal chlorophyll removal, the researchers say.

All is not lost in this seasonal cycle, however: Proteins in dying leaves contain important amino acids that trees and other plants recycle, the researchers say. These amino acids are stored all winter in the tree's trunk, branches, roots and stems until next year -- when they are used to help grow new leaves in the spring.