US drug users warned of deadly tainted heroin

Last Updated: 2006-06-21 8:51:58 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA - Heroin users should avoid the drug because some supplies have been tainted with a powerful painkiller blamed for hundreds of deaths nationwide since mid-April, law enforcement officials urged on Tuesday.

Heroin shipments in cities including Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit and St. Louis have been found to contain fentanyl, a prescription narcotic 40 to 100 times more powerful than morphine. Fentanyl is prescribed by physicians for anesthesia and pain control.

Authorities have been reporting fentanyl/heroin-related deaths for some months, but officials said there was a spike in overdoses in recent weeks, sparking the latest warnings.

The tainting of heroin with fentanyl -- whose brand names include Duragesic, Sublimaze, and Actiq -- has resulted in dozens of hospitalizations and deaths, especially in the mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes regions, officials said.

Drug users are attracted to fentanyl-laced heroin or cocaine because of the extra high that it promises them, said Lynne Abraham, Philadelphia District Attorney, at a news conference. "This is just an extra jolt for people who have become accustomed to heroin," she said.

Abraham said officials had considered whether holding the news conference to draw attention to the danger of fentanyl risked encouraging drug users to try tainted heroin, but they decided that the danger to the public justified it.

Use of the tainted drug appears to cut across social classes and locations, Abraham said. "It's urban and suburban, it's high-class, and it's quite mystifying," she said.

Along with the new high comes the danger of death, warned Patrick Meehan, U.S. Attorney for eastern Pennsylvania. "The push of a syringe is like pulling a trigger," he said.

Meehan said fentanyl-laced heroin was responsible for about 70 deaths in the Philadelphia area since April.

In Camden County, New Jersey, last weekend, there were 45 fentanyl-related overdoses, four of which were fatal, said Mike Cantor of the Camden County Prosecutors Office.

Drug users are especially at risk because the tainted drug has no street name, unlike "cheese" -- a mix of heroin and the over-the-counter analgesic Tylenol P.M. -- and so people who buy it may not know what they are getting, Abraham said.

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.

Nose spray lowers stress during spats

Last Updated: 2006-06-21 8:55:28 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Maggie Fox

WASHINGTON - A little squirt of a hormone that relaxes women during childbirth and breastfeeding helped lower stress in both men and women who were quarreling, a researcher reported on Tuesday.

Levels of a stress hormone called cortisol dropped significantly in the men and women given oxytocin, Beate Ditzen, a psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the International Congress of Neuroendocrinology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

While they are nowhere close to developing a marital harmony drug, the researchers believe they may be on the trail of a way to help battle stress and, possibly, reduce conflict.

"I think it really could reduce stress," Ditzen said in a telephone interview.

Ditzen, then at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, and colleagues at the University of Fribourg tested 50 heterosexual couples, asking them to discuss a subject that they often disagreed about.

Half the couples first got a nasal spray of a medical preparation of oxytocin, used to help induce labor contractions in women, and half got a dummy spray.

Then they were encouraged to hash it out, on videotape.

This fits in with studies done in rodents, as well as in primates such as monkeys, Ditzen said. Several studies have shown that oxytocin affects sexual relationships among animals.

"It might be interesting to study how this is endogenously stimulated," Ditzen said. Such a treatment might be safer and would be preferable to giving someone drugs that can have side effects.

Ditzen even tried some oxytocin herself.

"I tried to have a fight exactly like I told my subjects in the studies to do -- I asked my boyfriend and he took it as well, and we fought a bit," she said.

Fighting in laboratory conditions is probably artificial, Ditzen acknowledged, but she said the changes in cortisol levels were worth following up in further studies.

Ditzen does not believe oxytocin could or should be used as a medical marital aid.

"I think conflict in general is not a medical condition that should be treated," she said.

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world.

Prostate cancer survivors have positive outlook

Last Updated: 2006-06-21 10:33:59 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Prostate cancer survivors are generally "happy, hopeful and positive," and are actually less depressed on average than men their age who never had the disease, a new study shows.

"Most people who have cancer have a long and active life in front of them," Dr. Thomas O. Blank of the University of Connecticut in Storrs, the study's co-author and himself a prostate cancer survivor, told Reuters Health. "In fact, most people who have cancer feel as many beneficial and positive things from the experience as they do negatives."

There are currently about 10 million cancer survivors living in the US, Blank noted, and as many as 2 million of them may be prostate cancer survivors. Given that men usually live for years after a prostate cancer diagnosis, he and his colleague Dr. Keith M. Bellizzi of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland note in their report in the journal Cancer, it is important to understand how treatment options, personality and coping strategies will affect their long-term sense of well-being.

While there has been extensive research on health-related quality of life one or two years after prostate cancer treatment, they add, there is less information on psychological quality of life issues or longer-term outcomes.

To investigate, Blank and Bellizzi surveyed 490 one- to eight-year prostate cancer survivors.

Just under 91 percent of the men reported being somewhat or very happy, while their scores on measures of depression were lower than national averages for men of similar ages. The men also showed no long-term traumatic effects of having the disease. There was no association between the type of treatment a man had and his long-term psychological well-being.

The men who were more depressed tended to be those who continued to feel they were affected by the disease, and thus used coping strategies to deal with these feelings.

Men with generally positive outlooks tended to fare better, the researchers found. But this should not be interpreted as meaning that people without such overall positive attitudes will fare worse, Blank said.

"It isn't a kind of Pollyanna-ish, everything always works out fine, the glass is always two-thirds full or something like this -- it's more an 'I can deal with this' kind of optimism," he said.

"Everybody in their lives has been able to be resilient in some circumstances, even if they're generally pessimistic people," Blank added. This is where, he noted, that support groups, counseling and other types of support can be helpful.

SOURCE: Cancer, May 15, 2006.

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