Speaker: Christopher J. Lettieri, MD, Respiratory Care Specialist, Pulmonary and Critical Care Service, Department of Medicine, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, DC. Treatment with gamma-interferon 1b (IFN) (Actimmune®, InterMune) resulted in enhanced functional capacity and improved exercise tolerance in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) when compared with control patients with IPF who were [...]

Speaker: Horst Olschewski, MD, Professor and Chair, Division of Pulmonary Medicine, Medical University Clinic, Medical University, Graz, Austria. In a subset analysis of patients with New York Heart Association (NYHA) class IV pulmonary hypertension (PH), treatment with iloprost (Ventavis®, CoTherix, Inc.), a prostacyclin that offers a noninvasive inhaled dosing approach, resulted in a significant improvement [...]

Speaker: Anthony D. P’Urzo, MD, MSc, Family Physician and Director, Primary Care Asthma Clinic, and Lecturer, Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The combination of AstraZeneca’s budesonide (Pulmicort®) and formoterol (Oxis® [BUD/FORM]) (Symbicort®, Single Inhaler Therapy™, AstraZeneca, Canada), administered for both maintenance and relief in patients with asthma, reduced [...]

Nebulized Levalbuterol in Elderly Patients with Asthma Speaker: Ronald J. Ozminkowski, PhD, Senior Economist, Outcomes Research and Economics, Research and Policy Group, The Medstat Group, Thomson Corporation, Ann Arbor, Michigan. In an exploratory analysis of data collected on the management of elderly Medicaid patients with clinical asthma treatment with nebulized levalbuterol (Xopenex®, Sepracor, Inc.) resulted [...]

Olmesartan/Hydrochlorothiazide (Benicar HCT) versus Amlodipine/Benazepril (Lotrel) Presenter: Henry Punzi, MD, Director, Punzi Medical Center and Hypertension Research Institute, Carrollton, Texas Current hypertension guidelines call for a step approach, beginning first with one drug, then adding others. Advocates of initial combination therapy have long complained that anti-hypertensive monotherapy rarely achieves treatment goals, but they have not [...]

Pegylated Interferon with or without Ribavirin for Hepatitis C Viral Infection Presenter: Mark G. Swain, MD, Professor, Department of Medicine, Gastrointestinal Research Group, University of Calgary, Canada Because clinical relapse is rare in patients with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection who achieve a sustained viro-logical response (SVR) with peginterferon alfa-2a (Pegasys), with or without [...]

In another study conducted by Dr. Donahue, supratherapeu-tic doses of indacaterol (QAB 149, Novartis) among patients with mild-to-moderate COPD were associated with changes of only minimal concern. Indacaterol is entering into large-scale, 2,000-patient pivotal phase 3 trials in 300 sites, 200 of them in the U.S. “Indacaterol is an interesting compound,” he stated. “It’s a [...]