The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has given Abbott Laboratories approval to sell a stent and filter system that reduces stroke risk in people with narrowed neck arteries, The New York Times reported.
This system includes a metal mesh stent that props open the neck artery and a filter that traps loose bits of fat or blood clots before they can reach the small blood vessels in the brain. If those small blood vessels are blocked by fat or blood clots, circulation can be cut off and lead to a stroke.
A neck stent and filter system developed by Guidant Corp. received FDA approval last year, The Times reported.
These devices -- called carotid stents and embolic filters -- cost more than $3,000 per kit. Currently, the worldwide market for these devices is estimated to be about $130 million a year. However, some experts predict that the devices will eventually account for $500 million to $1 billion of the worldwide stent market, The Times reported.
To learn more, visit the Abbott Labs Web site.
Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:
New Orleans Health System Shattered by Katrina
The vice president of the national hospital accreditation organization said Sunday that the hospitals in New Orleans might never make a full recovery from the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina.
Despite the fact that New Orleans has a dozen hospitals, none have resumed normal operations, Joe Cappiello told the Associated Press after completing a three-day mission to the devastated city.
"Essentially, the health-care infrastructure of New Orleans is gone -- it no longer exists," Cappiello said. He added that several hospitals were probably damaged beyond repair, while others may try to resume full operations before it is safe to do so.
Officials at Children's Hospital, which Mayor Ray Nagin had hoped would be ready for residents of the Uptown neighborhood when they are allowed to return this week, have said they need more time, according to the AP.
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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.
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Cleveland Clinic Doctor to Attempt First Face Transplant
A Cleveland Clinic doctor will soon try a radical surgery that has never been performed before when she attempts a face transplant, the Associated Press reported Saturday.
Seven women and five men will travel to the Cleveland Clinic in the coming weeks to be examined by Dr. Maria Siemionow, according to the AP. The surgeon will study their facial features and ask them what they hope to gain by such a drastic procedure. They will be warned about the dangers and requirements: At worst, the transplant could be rejected and their new face could literally slough off; even in the best instance, they will have to take powerful immunosuppressant drugs for their rest of their lives, which could damage their kidneys and leave them susceptible to cancer.
Dr. Siemionow told the AP she hopes to one day be able to give people disfigured by burns or accidents a chance at a new life. Even the best current treatments still leave scar tissue that doesn't look or move like skin, according to the AP.
The planned procedure is not without controversy; concerns over the risks recently led hospitals in England and France to scrap plans for face transplants, the AP reported, and it took Dr. Siemionow's transplant team more than a year to secure the blessing of the clinic's institutional review board.
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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.
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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.
