The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved a new medical adhesive (a fibrin sealant) called Artiss for use in attaching skin grafts onto burn patients.

Fibrin sealants are tissue adhesives that contain the proteins fibrinogen and thrombin, which are essential in the clotting of blood. Artiss (Fibrin Sealant, VH S/D 4) differs from other fibrin sealants in that it contains a lower concentration of thrombin. This lower concentration allows surgeons more time to position skin grafts over burns before the graft begins to adhere to the skin. Artiss also contains aprotinin, a synthetic protein that delays the break down of blood clots.

"The approval of Artiss can help surgeons using a fibrin sealant to fine tune graft placement on burn sites," said Jesse L. Goodman M.D., M.P.H., director of FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. "The approval also provides an additional choice for health care professionals in providing burn treatment."

The fibrinogen and thrombin proteins in Artiss are derived from human plasma, collected from FDA-licensed plasma centers. Both proteins undergo purification and virus inactivation treatments to reduce the risk of blood-transmissible infections.

During a multicenter clinical trial, investigators evaluated Artiss for its ability to attach skin grafts on two wound sites for 138 patients. At one test site, the skin graft was fixed with Artiss; at the other test site, the graft was fixed with surgical staples. The results showed that Artiss was, within a statistical error, as good as staples to attain complete wound closure.

Frequent adverse events, seen in both treatment groups, included bleeding and fluid collection in the tissues, both of which are common during skin grafting procedures. Artiss is manufactured by Baxter Healthcare Corporation, Deerfield, Ill. - Source FDA Approves New Medical Adhesive to Treat Burn Patients.

An estimated 5.2 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, and it could steal the minds of one out of eight baby boomers, according to a report released on Tuesday by the Alzheimer's Association.

The report found there were 411,000 new cases of Alzheimer's in 2000, a number expected to grow to 454,000 new cases a year by 2010. By 2050, 959,000 people will be diagnosed with the disease every year, the report predicts.

The report, available on the Internet here, says that 14 percent of all people age 71 and over have dementia.

That includes 16 percent of women and 11 percent of men in that age group.

Alzheimer's disease is the most common type of dementia, accounting for 60 to 80 percent of cases. - See More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's: report for the full report.

U.S. health regulators said on Wednesday they have identified a contaminant found in batches of Baxter International Inc's blood-thinner heparin that were linked to serious reactions and deaths.

Food and Drug Administration officials said they are trying to determine whether the chemical -- over-sulfated chondroitin sulfate -- was purposely or inadvertently added during manufacturing in China.

"We don't know whether the contaminant was introduced intentionally or by accident," said Dr. Janet Woodcock, director of the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Chondroitin sulfate is widely sold as a dietary supplement to treat joint pain. The over-sulfated version is not known to occur naturally and therefore likely was chemically modified, Woodcock told reporters on a conference call.

It is still unclear whether the contaminant is the cause of up to 19 deaths and hundreds of serious breathing problems and other reactions reported to the FDA, she said.

The substance mimics the blood-thinning actions of heparin but is not FDA-approved for use in medicines, Woodcock said. In some batches, the contaminant accounted for between 2 percent and 50 percent of the samples, she said. - See FDA pinpoints contaminant in Baxter's heparin for the full report.

A new study found that women who are overweight or obese tend to have more aggressive breast cancers and lower survival rates. The researchers suggest that a person's Body Mass Index (BMI, the ratio of a person's weight to the square of their height) may be an effective tool in the prognosis of certain types of breast cancer.

The study is to be published in the 15th March issue of the journal Clinical Cancer Research and is the work of Dr Massimo Cristofanilli, associate professor of medicine at the Department of Breast Medical Oncology based at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Texas, USA, and colleagues.

In the retrospective study of over 600 women, the researchers found that high BMI women with locally advanced breast cancer (LABC) and inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) had a worse prognosis than women with the same cancers whose BMI was in the healthy range.

"The more obese a patient is, the more aggressive the disease," said Cristofanilli.

"We are learning that the fat tissue may increase inflammation that leads to more aggressive disease," he added. - See Being Overweight Or Obese Linked To More Aggressive Breast Cancer for the full report.

Taking the breast cancer pill Femara can significantly reduce the chances that a woman's cancer will return, even long after she has stopped taking the estrogen blocker tamoxifen, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They said post-menopausal women who took the Novartis AG drug Femara anywhere from one to seven years after finishing a five-year regimen of tamoxifen reduced the risk the cancer would come back by 63 percent.

"What our results have shown for the first time in breast cancer treatment history is that taking an anti-estrogen anywhere along that line appears to have a dramatic reduction in the risk of recurrence," said Dr. Paul Goss of Massachusetts General Hospital, whose study appears in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

The drug, known generically as letrozole, cut the risk of cancer spreading to other areas of the body by 61 percent, and cut the risk that a tumor would develop in the unaffected breast by more than 80 percent.

Letrozole belongs to a new class of breast cancer drugs known as aromatase inhibitors, which block the production of estrogen that can lead to cancer. It is recommended for use in women past menopause. - See Femara cuts cancer recurrence even if started late for the full report.

If both your parents have Alzheimer's disease, you probably are more much likely than other people to get it, researchers said on Monday.

Their study focused on 111 families in which both parents were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia among the elderly, and assessed the risk for developing it among the offspring.

The parents had 297 children who lived into adulthood. Of the 98 men and women who were at least 70 years old, 41 of them -- about 42 percent -- developed Alzheimer's disease, researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle found.

"That's greater than you would expect in the general population in that age group," Dr. Thomas Bird, one of the researchers, said in a telephone interview.

In the general population, risk for the disease begins to rise at about age 65, with the number of people developing the disease doubling every five years beyond that, experts say.

But about two-thirds of the adult offspring in the study still had not reached age 70. Counting all 297 of these adult offspring regardless of age, 23 percent already had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, with the disease diagnosed on average at age 66, the researchers found.

Bird said that compares to the roughly one in 10 chance that the average person will develop the disease. - See If both parents have Alzheimer's, your risk soars for the full report.

New guidelines for colorectal cancer screening have been released. The first joint consensus recommendations of its kind have been accepted by several medical organizations, including the American Cancer Society, the American College of Radiology, and the U.S. Multi-Society Task Force on Colorectal Cancer, which includes members from the American College of Gastroenterology, American Gastroenterological Association, and American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy.

The new guidelines are based on the most recent scientific evidence and expert opinion. Particularly important is the introduction of two new tests for early detection of precancerous and cancerous lesions in the colon. Stool DNA (sDNA) and CT colonography (CTC), also referred to as virtual colonoscopy. The new recommendations also stress the importance of screening for precancerous polyps.

Tests for detection of adenomatous polyps and cancer - New Screening Guidelines for Colorectal Cancer for the full report.

Influenza viruses coat themselves in fatty material that hardens and protects them in colder temperatures -- a finding that could explain why winter is the flu season, U.S. researchers reported on Sunday.

This butter-like coating melts in the respiratory tract, allowing the virus to infect cells, the team at the National Institutes of Health found.

"Like an M&M in your mouth, the protective covering melts when it enters the respiratory tract," said Joshua Zimmerberg of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), who led the study.

The NICHD is one of the National Institutes of Health.

"It's only in this liquid phase that the virus is capable of entering a cell to infect it."

Experts have long pondered why flu and other respiratory viruses spread more in winter. No one explanation, such as people staying indoors more, or the destructive effect of the sun's radiation in summer, has fully explained it. - See U.S. study shows why winter is flu season for the complete report.

Flat growths on the colon wall are more common in Americans than previously thought and more likely to be cancerous than the more familiar knobby masses known as polyps, a new study finds.

New techniques can locate and remove the flat growths, but many doctors aren't aware of their cancer risk and may not know how to look for them. The findings are likely to change the practice of colonoscopy, experts said, and may explain some colon cancers that arise between colonoscopies.

"I think it is very important. It's going to intensify the need for quality screening," said Dr. Stephen Hanauer, gastroenterology chief at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the study. "You're not going to be able to do seven-minute colonoscopies."

The growths tend to be smaller when they are cancerous _ the size of a nickel instead of a quarter _ and are level with the colon wall or depressed like a pothole. They blend in with the surrounding tissue and are difficult to spot.

"They look like a pancake just lying on the floor," said the study's lead author, Dr. Roy Soetikno of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in California. - See Flat Growths May Be Worse Than Polyps for the full report.

There are no good drugs to treat dementia and doctors just need to try them in a hit-or-miss fashion to try to help patients, according to new guidelines released on Monday.

Experts who tried to set up treatment guidelines were disappointed to find no good options for patients with dementia, and no way to determine which drug might be best for certain cases.

"There is no cure for dementia and many of the drugs ... are being prescribed without evidence," Dr. Amir Qaseem of the American College of Physicians, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

"The benefits of therapy may be very modest."

Qaseem and colleagues at the American Academy of Family Physicians reviewed the results of 96 different studies of five different drugs approved for treating dementia.

Four are in a class of drugs called cholinesterase inhibitors -- Pfizer and Eisai Co Inc's Aricept; galantamine, sold generically and under the brand names Razadyne, Reminyl and Nivalin; rivastigmine, sold by Novartis AG under the brand name Exelone; and tacrine, marketed to combat Alzheimer's disease under the brand name Cognex.

The fifth drug, memantine, is known as a neuropeptide -modifying agent and is sold by Forest Laboratories under the brand name Namenda.

The drugs can sometimes delay progression of the symptoms of dementia, which can take many different forms. - See US review finds no good drugs for dementia for the complete report.