The Buyers Health Care Action Group, a health care purchasing coalition in Minnesota for large employers, on Wednesday announced a pay-for-performance pilot program that will reward physicians who effectively treat depressed patients, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reports. The program will start in 2009 (Forster, St. Paul Pioneer Press, 5/28). The program is modeled (more…)

More than one million Americans currently participate in the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) program. generic levitra online buy While AA participants are reportedly notorious for their coffee drinking and cigarette smoking, very little research has quantified their consumption of these two products. Recent findings confirm that coffee and cigarette use among this population is greater (more…)

University of Florida researchers have identified a drug compound that dramatically lowers blood pressure, improves heart function and - in a remarkable finding - prevents damage to the heart and kidneys in rats with persistent hypertension.
The findings, which appear in the May 1 edition of the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, (more…)

Long-suffering victims of allergies such as asthma and hay fever might enjoy a surprise benefit, according to research led by the University of New South Wales (UNSW).
In a paper presented at an international symposium in Sydney, the researchers show that people with one of these atopic diseases are up to 25 percent less likely to get the most common type of Non-Hodgkin (more…)

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved two single-pill combination medications, Diovan HCT® (valsartan and hydrochlorothiazide) and Exforge® (amlodipine and valsartan), as initial or ‘first-line’ therapies in patients likely to need multiple drugs to achieve their blood (more…)