Pregnant women who were vaccinated against pandemic influenza in 2009 were not at increased risk of experiencing fetal death, though pregnant women who contracted influenza had an increased risk of fetal death. 

During the swine influenza pandemic of that year, there were anecdotal reports of miscarriages and stillbirths occurring shortly after vaccination, so the Norwegian Institute of Public Health initiated a study to investigate if there was an association between pandemic influenza vaccination and the fetal deaths. 

 A new treatment, BETMIGA (mirabegron) has received approval from the European Commission (EC) for the treatment of overactive bladder (OAB) symptoms in adults.

Kareus Therapeutics SA has announced the start of a Phase I clinical study following the Investigational New Drug (IND) approval from the US Food and Drug Administration for the development of KU-046, a first-in-class disease modifying new chemical entity discovered for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease using Kareus' proprietary bioenergetics and KARLECT platforms. 

 The Phase I clinical trial is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled two-part study to assess the safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of single ascending oral doses and of multiple ascending oral doses of KU-046 in 54 healthy young volunteers. The study is being conducted by Quintiles at its Phase I Unit at Overland Park in Kansas. 

Merck Serono, a division of Germany's Merck, announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Rebif(R) Rebidose(R) (interferon beta-1a), a single-use auto-injector for the self-administration of Rebif, a disease-modifying drug used to treat relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis (MS). 

The ability to accurately recall the shapes and spatial relationships of objects has been shown to be reduced by long-term use of anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), according to a recent paper. 

A survey published in Archives of Pediatrics&Adolescent Medicine
 finds that 14.2 percent of teenage children with any mental disorder have been treated with a psychotropic medication in the last 12 months, which researchers suggest challenges concerns about widespread overmedication and misuse of psychotropic medications among young people in the U.S.

Concern has been raised about inappropriate prescribing of psychotropic medications to children and adolescents, but those criticisms were based on anecdotal reports, studies of small unrepresentative clinical samples and secondary analyses of large databases on prescription drug use that lacked clinical information, the authors write in the study background.

A previously invincible mutation in chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) has been thwarted by an investigational drug in a phase I clinical trial.

12 patients in a trial with chronic phase CML and the T315I mutation had a complete hematologic response (absence of CML cells in the blood) after treatment with ponatinib. Eleven had a major reduction in CML cells in the bone marrow and nine achieved a complete cytogenetic response – no cells in the marrow. 
Twelve patients with acute myeloid leukemia also participated in the trial. A separate paper will address those results.

T315I is present in up to 20 percent of patients and blocks the docking station where three other successful CML drugs normally connect to the mutant protein.