My Clinical Trials Diary

As Member Secretary of CLINICOM, I am so thrilled to post this information here: ''Dynamic Indian of the millenium" award conferred   Coimbatore, Jul 4 (PTI) City-based K G Foundation today conferred the 'Dynamic Indian of the Millennium' award on Arun Madhavan , a former member of Prime Minister's special committee for model village development programme under the 20-point programme. The award, carrying a citation, was given for his 'distinguished achievements and contribution to society over the years', the foundation chairman G Bhakthavatsalam, said at a function got up as part of the celebrations of World Doctors' Day, here. Besides being conferred a global recognition for his 'project gateway' for promoting India as an investment destination, Arun had delivered a speech at the United Nationas, Geneva, on 'A New dimension to healthcare,' in 1996, he said. The first recipient of this award was the former president, A P ...

A new website will help people decide which therapies are safe and effective. By Sandy Kleffman, Contra Costa Times Leading scientists are warning people to beware of costly, unproven stem cell therapies that have little or no benefit and may be dangerous. Many with devastating illnesses are mortgaging their homes and borrowing huge sums of money for treatments, which are often performed outside the United States to avoid its safety regulations. Scientists worry that such therapies could harm people by leading to cancers and other complications. "It's really the 21st century version of snake oil," said Dr. Arnold Kriegstein, director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at UC San Francisco. "As soon as you scratch the surface, you realize that what they're claiming in their literature or what they tell you about, doesn't make sense," he said. "There's this notion that stem cells are in so...

  Two new studies suggest there's a connection between parents who smoke and kids who are heavier or misbehave more than other children. The researchers haven't definitively proven that lighting up puts kids at risk for bad behaviour and extra pounds. In fact, it may be impossible to ever prove a cause-and-effect because it's considered unethical to assign some parents to smoke and then see what happens. Still, the findings "tighten the link" between parents who smoke and physical and mental health problems in their kids, said Dr Jonathan Winickoff, an associate professor of pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital, who co-wrote a commentary accompanying the research. For decades, doctors have advised pregnant women to avoid smoking for fear that they would harm their unborn children; research has linked smoking in mothers to physical problems in offspring such as low birth weight. If the mother smokes during the first trimester, the effect...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Two reports today in two separate journals -- a meta-analysis and a large retrospective study -- provide more evidence linking the thiazolidinedione rosiglitazone to an increased risk of myocardial infarction (MI). The retrospective study also ties rosiglitazone therapy to an increased risk of stroke, heart failure, and death from any cause in patients aged 65 and older. In an e-mail to Reuters Health, Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at The Cleveland Clinic and a long-time vocal critic of rosiglitazone, said the two manuscripts "provide overwhelming evidence of the hazards" of the drug. "Taken together," he wrote, "the two studies demonstrate that this drug has an adverse benefit risk relationship and should be removed from the market. I would advise physicians who are still using rosiglitazone to stop and begin switching their patients to safer alternatives, including pioglit...