Generic Allegra (Fexofenadine) Detailed Reviews

Singulair, an allergy and asthma medication, may be the right choice for you, especially if you suffer from sneezing and watery eyes, caused by allergies. It works by blocking leukotrienes, which are chemicals produced by the body in response to allergens or other problems, and prevents constriction of the air passages which is a good thing if you have sinusitis, allergies or asthma.

Watery eyes and sneezing became symptoms of the past throughout the spring and most of summer after I began taking Singulair in May. I was giving the medication fairly high marks until we reached late summer, heading into fall, because it worked effectively to stop many of my allergy symptoms.

Singulair is one of several medications listed as leukotriene inhibitors. These inhibitor drugs keep the bronchial tubes from constricting. Some researchers have found this type of medicine to be almost as good as steroids without the serious side effects.

Fall is when my allergy medication is really put to the test as this is the season of my worst symptoms. The medication continues to reduce my sneezing and watery eyes but stuffy nose and post-nasal drip are in full bloom with no relief provided by Singulair.

My health-care provider suggested I add a second allergy medication, such as Allegra or Claritin, to my arsenal for several weeks just until I get past the worst of the season. The idea is to get the best of both worlds. One medication would dry up the mucus membranes and the other will stop sneezing and watery eyes. I held off trying her suggestion until I got really miserable because I hate taking medication but the two together really worked.

I still find it hard to believe I ever started taking Singulair. Flash back about a year ago. That’s about the time the drug was getting bad press for a possible link between its use and increased risk of depression, mood changes and suicidal behavior. Those side effects are listed as rare serious side effects and are still under investigation by the Food and Drug Administration. I remember seeing the news reports and saying to myself, “You’d never catch me using that stuff.”

I guess this proves that you never say “never.” My health-care provider recommended it to me because she said it wouldn’t dry out and constrict my nasal passages like the other medication (a prescription antihistamine) that I was using. I was suffering from a difficult to eradicate sinus infection and I didn’t need my nasal membranes dried out. Now that fall has arrived, that’s just what I need.

I have never suffered any side effects since I began taking Sinulair. That’s not to say there are no side effects with Singulair. It has many of the same ones listed for other allergy medications.

The arrival of the fall season has definitely altered my view of Singulair. If you have a lot of seasonal nasal congestion, it may not be up to the task. However, if your symptoms are mainly sneezing and watery eyes, it will have you covered.

U.S. officials hope to have 160 million doses of injectable swine flu vaccine on hand by October, with more doses coming in the form of a nasal spray.

Since immunization is expected to depend on each person getting two doses spread a month apart, the amount of vaccine will still only cover a fraction of the population, but more is expected to arrive in the following months, the Associated Press reported Thursday.

Earlier in the day, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration convened a meeting with the world’s five leading flu vaccine makers to assess how many doses might be available. Jerry Weir, an FDA official charged with overseeing vaccine production, told the AP that the H1N1 swine flu vaccine is proving more difficult to grow in the standard way (using chicken eggs) than typical seasonal flu vaccines. In fact, the yield is just 30 percent of normal.

The Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for buying up and distributing new vaccine stocks. Robin Robinson, who helps direct the HHS effort, told the AP that his team is keeping the production slowdown in mind as HHS buys and distributes new vaccine stocks.

But there was brighter news, as well. Maryland-based MedImmune Inc. told U.S. officials on Thursday that it expects to have 14 million doses of a swine flu version of its FluMist nasal spray vaccine ready to distribute across the United States by October, and would have even more available if it could fill its spray devices any faster. Tens of millions more doses will be ready to be bottled, the company said, and it’s possible that a sprayer wont even be necessary — it may be enough to administer droplets of the vaccine into the nose.

“A dropper instead of a sprayer works well,” MedImmune vice-president Dr. Ben Machielse told the AP. MedImmune said it plans to begin trials in August to make sure the H1N1 version of the nasal vaccine has no more side effects than the vaccine for the seasonal flu.

Also on Thursday, experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that the virus has not yet mutated to become more dangerous, although they continue to follow its progress globally, the AP reported. Dr. Nancy Cox, chief of CDC’s influenza division, called the lack of genetic variation in the H1N1 strain “quite surprising” given the pathogen’s quick spread.

In the meantime, the United States is readying its first human trials of an experimental vaccine to protect against the H1N1 swine flu virus, officials announced Wednesday.

Two potential vaccines will be tested at eight institutions around the country under the auspices of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), officials said.

The purpose of the trials, said NIAID Director Dr. Anthony S. Fauci in a prepared statement, is to “determine whether the vaccines are safe and to assess their ability to induce protective immune responses. These data will be factored into the decision about how and if to implement a 2009 H1N1 flu immunization program this fall.”

The announcement followed Tuesday’s revelation that two Australian biotechnology companies have started inoculating adult volunteers in the world’s first H1N1 swine flu vaccine trials. Experts hope those trials, as well as the trials planned in the United States, will produce an effective shot against the virus that has so far killed more than 700 people worldwide.

In the United States, several trials will be conducted concurrently, officials said.

“I think the speed with which they [federal officials] got this going is impressive,” said one expert, Dr. John J. Treanor, professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. “They have a really well-organized clinical trials infrastructure that is uniquely posed to do these kinds of studies when there’s an emergency situation like there is now.”

One of the NIAID studies will try to determine if one or two 15-microgram doses of the candidate H1N1 vaccine are sufficient to provoke an immune response in healthy adults aged 18 to 64 and in people aged 65 and older. Studies will also look at whether one or two doses of 30 micrograms is more effective.

The two-dose regimens will be given three weeks apart. Two manufacturers, Sanofi Pasteur and CSL Biotherapies, produced the vaccines.

If these trials seem safe, the vaccines will also be tested in children aged 6 months to 17 years, according to the NIAID statement.

“The response to the vaccine may vary in different age groups,” said Dr. Karen Kotloff, a professor of pediatrics and lead investigator at the Vaccine and Treatment Evaluation Unit at the University of Maryland, one of the medical centers chosen for the trials. In a statement released by the university, Kotloff explained that age could make a difference in vaccine response because “young people have not seen a flu virus like this before,” whereas older Americans might have been exposed to H1N1-type strains in the past.

Additional trials will look at concurrent administration of the swine flu vaccine with regular, seasonal vaccine.

“It makes sense to test the combined swine flu and seasonal flu vaccines because there are some populations in whom both vaccines are indicated,” Treanor said. “It would certainly be easier to give them at the same time, but these trials are mostly focused on making sure they don’t interfere with each other in some way and that they still get a good response.”

Besides the University of Maryland School of Medicine, other centers taking part in the trials include the University of Iowa; St. Louis University; Baylor College of Medicine in Houston; Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati; Emory University in Atlanta; Group Health Cooperative, Seattle; and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, officials said.

In Australia, Adelaide-based drug manufacturer Vaxine initiated trials Monday with 300 participants, while Melbourne’s CSL has 240 people in its seven-month study. Australia had 14,703 confirmed cases of swine flu as of Wednesday, and at least 41 deaths, according to the AP. The winter flu season is well under way in the Southern Hemisphere.

Both companies said it would be at least six weeks before results of the initial trials are known.

Right now, flu season is peaking in the Southern Hemisphere. As was the case when the H1N1 swine flu virus first surfaced in Mexico and then the United States in mid-April, infections in the Southern Hemisphere continue to be relatively mild, much like the seasonal flu, and recovery is fairly quick.

As vaccine development continues, the H1N1 swine flu virus continues to sweep around the world.

The CDC reported last Friday — the most recent day that numbers were available — 40,617 confirmed cases of H1N1 infection and 263 deaths in the United States, although officials believe that more than 1 million Americans have been stricken with the swine flu. The reason for the disparity: The virus continues to produce mild symptoms and patients typically recover quickly.

Officials expect to see a new outbreak of H1N1 swine flu in the United States in the fall. It will most likely start earlier than seasonal flu, Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said during a Friday press conference. Seasonal flu typically surfaces in late fall.

Unlike seasonal flu, the H1N1 flu continues to pose more problems for younger people, Schuchat added. “There are higher attack rates and hospitalizations in younger adults and children,” she said.

The appetite-regulating hormone leptin may contribute to osteoarthritis in obese people, according to a new study that suggests that skeletal wear and tear caused by excess weight isn’t the only cause of the painful and debilitating condition.

Duke University researchers found that extremely obese mice didn’t develop osteoarthritis if their bodies didn’t have leptin. In fact, joints in obese mice without leptin appeared healthier than those in normal mice.

The study appears in the Sept. 29 issue of the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism.

This is the first time that leptin has been identified as a “metabolic link” between obesity and altered cartilage metabolism in joints, according to a university news release.

“Although there was some earlier evidence that leptin might be involved in the arthritis disease process, we didn’t think that there would be no arthritis at all” in the obese mice without leptin, said Farshid Guilak, director of orthopedic research in the Duke Department of Surgery, in the news release.

Leptin influences many osteoarthritis-related factors, such as body weight, inflammation and bone metabolism.

“With obesity and osteoarthritis, there are good similarities between humans and mice,” Guilak said. “If we can find a pathway that links a high-fat diet with arthritis, then we can try to identify and block the inflammatory mediators that are linked with the dietary fat.”

That friend who stays thin despite eating anything and everything is not just annoying. She might also wreck your diet, new research suggests.

Researchers found that when they had college students watch a movie and snack with either a skinny or overweight companion, the students typically followed the thin friend’s lead when she overindulged.

In contrast, study participants used more self-control when snacking with a heavier companion who overate.

The findings, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, suggest that seeing a thin friend devour a big meal gives us implicit permission to do the same.

“We think ‘if she can eat like that and stay thin, so can I,’ or ’she is having cake, then I can too,’” explained Dr. Brent McFerran, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, Canada.

“In other words,” he told Reuters Health in an email, “the most dangerous person to eat with is not someone who is obese, but a thin friend with a large appetite.”

For their study, McFerran and his colleagues recruited 210 female college students for what the participants believed was a study on movie viewing; each woman watched a movie with a companion, who was actually a member of the research team.

In some cases, the researcher showed up as her normal 105-pound self, while in others she donned padding that made her appear to be obese.

During the movie, the pairs were offered snacks, with the undercover researcher taking her portion first.

In general, McFerran’s team found, the students ate more when their thin companion took a large portion, versus cases where the “obese” companion took a similarly large portion.

For example, when the skinny researcher ate a lot (30 candies), the participants ate an average of 10 candies. When the researcher was “obese” and ate a lot, the kids ate about 6 candies.

“Eating involves much social pressure,” McFerran said, noting that social influences may, in fact, be the strongest predictor of what we eat.

But the current findings do not mean that we need to cancel all future dinner plans with our overindulgent skinny friends.

“If we think about what we are doing in advance,” McFerran said, “we are less likely to overconsume.”

He suggested that instead of looking at a thin friend who is gorging on dessert and feeling permission to do the same, we should remind ourselves that individuals are different — with different metabolisms and exercise habits, for example.

Focus on your own goal to eat healthfully, McFerran said, rather than automatically mimicking a friend.

He pointed out, however, that there is a “flip side”: Friends who choose smaller portion sizes and healthier foods can encourage us to do so, especially if those friends are thin.