Over-the-counter cold and cough medicines marketed for very young children are ineffective and might even do harm, doctors told the Food and Drug Administration.
Drugmakers swiftly pulled 14 medicines for children under age 2 - many of them widely used for years - off the shelves, prompting worries from parents about how to control the kids' coughs.
Other setbacks:
Angioplasties are no better than less-invasive drugs for reducing the risk of heart attack and death in patients with stable heart disease. More than one million Americans undergo the surgical procedure each year; experts estimate that the finding applies to well over a third of them.
As many as a third of implanted defibrillators aren't needed. The devices correct heartbeat irregularities. The finding could save $690 million in Medicare alone.
Screening current and former smokers for lung cancer neither saves lives nor prevents advanced disease, and may lead to unnecessary and harmful treatment. (In related bad news, other researchers reported that sky- rocketing use of CT scans, which produce far more radiation than X-rays or MRIs, might turn out to be responsible for up to 2 percent of all cancers a few decades from now.)
- Don Sapatkin