If Red Bull gives you wings, as the energy drink’s advertising suggests, what happens when you mix the popular beverage with alcohol? Broken wings, all too often, says a study from Wake Forest University. Researchers there found that college students who down cocktails of booze and energy drinks, such as Red Bull, run a significantly [...]

  The results are out for Eli Lilly’s head-to-head test of its experimental blood thinner prasugrel versus Plavix. And prasugrel, as many had suspected, turns out to be more potent than Plavix in preventing deaths from blood clots, non-fatal heart attacks and non-fatal strokes in patients receiving stents. The group of nearly 7,000 patients taking prasugrel [...]

  What brought a federal search warrant and hundreds of state and federal agents to WellCare Health Plans last week? Allegations that the company defrauded Florida’s Medicaid program of at least $35 million over five years, an unnamed “person familiar with details of the investigation” told the WSJ.The company may have inflated how much it spent [...]

  Drug data will be raining from the Florida skies this weekend as cardiologists and the drug makers who sell to them converge on Orlando for the American Heart Association’s annual scientific extravaganza.The big kahuna of the conference will be prasugrel, the experimental Lilly blood thinner that the company hopes will be the next Plavix. [...]

  Don’t expect that glowing moth in U.S. TV ads for Sepracor’s Lunesta sleeping pill to fly across the Atlantic anytime soon.Direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs was spared substantial restrictions in U.S. legislation. But consumer ads remain verboten in Europe and probably will be for the foreseeable future, due to cultural attitudes and the prevalence of [...]

  Cross the FDA and wear the Shirt of Shame. A man convicted of selling a catheter that hadn’t been approved by the FDA will have to wear a yellow shirt proclaiming his guilt, the Birmingham News reports.James K. Lee, the CEO of Advanced Medical Systems, pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors for violating the federal Food [...]

  In China, doctors are operating on mentally ill patients using surgical techniques that are “all but blacklisted for mental illness in the developed world,” the WSJ reports. The surgeries are emblematic of problems in the Chinese health system, where doctors and hospitals are looking for new sources of revenue as public funding declines, the article [...]

  A big insurer released strong earnings this morning, and analysts gave kudos to an anti-insurer.First, the insurer: Cigna said this morning that its third-quarter net income rose 22% over the year-earlier period. As the WSJ notes, the company’s coming out of a tough period that saw years of membership declines and $1 billion in charges [...]

  Congress has been feeling its way toward a compromise with the White House on expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, but it looks as though any deal will take a while longer.Yesterday, the Senate voted 64-30 to pass a version of the bill that the House has already passed and that the president has [...]

  New treatments for hepatitis C have been getting a fair bit of attention lately (click on the image at left for the WSJ’s recent look). But until now nobody’s been paying attention to Alinia, a drug approved to treat diarrhea, that’s being tried for infections with hepatitis C virus. Yet a mid-stage study being presented [...]