Reformulating children's medicine

Excerpts from the Globe's blog on the Boston-area medical community.

A Cambridge nonprofit is introducing a new program today to develop safer pediatric medicines, naming Dr. Stephen Spielberg (at left), the former dean of Dartmouth Medical School, to lead the initiative.

The effort by the Institute for Pediatric Innovation builds on the growing recognition that children are not just a smaller version of adults. Children metabolize drugs differently, so extrapolating by size and weight runs the risk of delivering doses that are so high they are dangerous or so low they are ineffective. Many drugs are not tested separately in children because of the ethics of clinical trials.

"Children deserve the same kind of information on safe, effective use of medications as do adults," said Spielberg.

ELIZABETH COONEY

A new analysis suggests that surgery to clear clogged sinuses appears to substantially improve patients' energy levels.

Senior author Dr. Neil Bhattacharyya of Brigham and Women's Hospital (at left), along with colleagues from several other hospitals looked at 28 studies of 3,427 patients who had sinus surgery to remove blockages. All the studies showed that patients who reported fatigue before surgery said their energy had returned to normal levels one year later, according to the analysis published in Laryngoscope.

"Finally we have good, scientifically consistent evidence that fatigue will very often improve significantly after surgery," Bhattacharyya said.

ELIZABETH COONEY

A Harvard rheumatologist is among the scientific authors named by Texas researchers who report finding 200,000 instances of duplication in papers published by scientific journals, the Dallas Morning News reports.

A paper by Dr. Lee Simon of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center published in 2004 in Best Practices and Research: Clinical Rheumatology was flagged by software programmed to spot duplication. According to the results, the article reviewing the medical literature on drug treatments for rheumatoid arthritis contained about 55 percent of the text in a previously published paper by UT researcher Roy Fleischmann.

Simon said he had no comment on the Dallas newspaper story, adding "I am leaving this to a discussion between the two journals."

The journal's publisher said it would look into the allegations.

ELIZABETH COONEY

Genetic scientists unveiled an ambitious project to sequence the genomes of at least 1,000 people. The international effort will be co-chaired by Dr. David Altshuler(at left), of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute, and partially funded by the federal government.

The project underscores how quickly genome-sequencing technology is advancing. In 2006, it was big news when one person's genome was sequenced. Last year, Harvard's George Church announced plans to sequence the genomes of 10 people.

Now, the thousand-genome project aims to turn up medically useful genetic information by providing the most detailed and comprehensive look yet at the genetic variations among humans.

CAREY GOLDBERG