Prempro

As a woman approaches menopause, her ovaries begin to shrink.

Levels of estrogen and progesterone, the two female hormones produced in the ovaries, begin a corresponding drop.

For about 20 percent of menopausal women, "everything in life goes sour," says physician Mitchell Harman, director of the non-profit Kronos Longevity Research Institute in Phoenix.

"They have trouble with sleep, with memory loss, with libido," he says.

"Some of this goes away if they wait long enough, but the mental disorganization can be especially troubling.

They think they have Alzheimer's disease or are going crazy.

These are real quality-of-life issues." To treat the symptoms, doctors commonly prescribe hormone therapy: estrogen alone or in combination with progesterone or a similar synthetic progestin.

Progestins protect the uterus from cancer; women who have had a hysterectomy can take estrogen alone.

Until recently, the therapy held promise beyond symptom relief for middle-aged women, whose risk for heart disease and osteoporosis rises after menopause.

Many scientists believed that the increased risks were linked to the drop in ovary-produced estrogen.

Replacing the hormone, the...

The national television campaign encourages dialogue between women suffering from disruptive menopausal symptoms and their health care professionals and notes that Premarin is available in five dosage strengths for individualized therapy.

An independent panel meeting in conjunction with last month's Conference on the Management of Menopause-Related Symptoms, convened by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), issued a statement supporting the use of postmenopausal hormone therapy for the management of moderate to severe menopausal symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness.

The NIH state-of-the-science conference provided a forum for researchers and clinicians to discuss the physiological causes of menopausal symptoms and a range of treatment interventions.

The panel agreed that hormone therapy remains the most consistently effective therapy for treating menopausal symptoms and is, by far, the most intensively studied.

ZOSYN(R), a broad-spectrum I.V.

antibiotic proven to help minimize the emergence of antibacterial resistance, had net revenue of $229 million for the first quarter, an increase of 26% compared with the 2004 first quarter.

Since its launch, over 12 million patients have been treated with Zosyn, the second largest selling and fastest growing product in its class ...

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