News in brief - Oct. 6, 2003

FDA approves first drug in new class of antibiotics - Stressful life events, infections worsen MS symptoms - Posttreatment ulcer-prevention therapy may not be necessary

FDA approves first drug in new class of antibiotics

The Food and Drug Administration in September approved daptomycin, the first antibiotic of its kind.

The drug is indicated for complicated skin infections that tend to occur in hospitalized patients and is the first cyclic lipopeptide antibacterial agent.

The drug will be marketed under the name Cubicin by Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc., based in Lexington, Mass.

Infectious disease experts and others who worry about increasing drug resistance have long expressed concern that patients may be running out of options, particularly because there seemed to be few new antibiotics in the pipeline.

"There has been a frightening increase in [methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus] infections over the past decade," said Robert A. Weinstein, MD, chair of the division of infectious diseases at Stroger Hospital in Chicago and an adviser to Cubist. "And the tools currently available to combat this problem have become less effective."

Most recently, the Infectious Diseases Society of America wrote to the General Accounting Office asking for an investigation regarding why more novel antibiotics were not in development. According to the society, only seven new antibacterials have been approved since 1998, and only four more are known to be in the works.

Stressful life events, infections worsen MS symptoms

Incidents on the job or in home life that induce high levels of stress exacerbate the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, according to a study last month in the British Medical Journal.

Researchers at Erasmus MC, a large teaching hospital in Rotterdam, Netherlands, followed, for about 1½ years, 73 patients with relapsing-remitting MS who were not yet severely disabled by their disease.

Stressful events such as the death of a family member or financial difficulties were associated with a doubling of the risk of a worsening of their disease. Infections were found to triple the risk.

"It will not be easy to tackle these factors in a given patient, because both infections and stressful events cannot simply be eradicated from patients' lives," wrote the researchers. "The knowledge that stressful events are associated with disease activity adds important information to the limited insight that patients and their caregivers have on this unpredictable disease."

Posttreatment ulcer-prevention therapy may not be necessary

Doctors may not need to prescribe therapy to prevent ulcer recurrence in patients who have been successfully treated, according to a study in the September Archives of Internal Medicine.

Researchers at Cathay General Hospital in Taipei randomized 82 patients who had been successfully treated for bleeding peptic ulcers linked to Helicobacter pylori infection. For four months, three groups received different medications to neutralize the acid in their stomachs or reduce the amount of acid produced. A fourth group received placebo.

Researchers followed the patients for as long as five years.

None of the patients had a recurrence, and all patients remained free of H. pylori. "In patients with bleeding peptic ulcers, anti-ulcer maintenance therapy was not necessary to prevent ulcer recurrence after successful H. pylori eradication and ulcer healing," wrote the authors.