Word: liverance
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These days kava users aren't feeling quite so calm. Reports of liver damage have been piling up in Europe and the U.S.--including the case of a previously healthy 45-year-old American woman who took kava and suddenly needed a liver transplant. Last week the Food and Drug Administration finally issued a kava alert. Sales of the herb had already been halted in France and Switzerland and suspended in Britain. German authorities are in the process of reclassifying it as a prescription drug...
...last fall, evidence against kava was starting to pile up. Health authorities in Switzerland and Germany had gathered records of close to 30 incidents--"adverse-event reports," in the clinical jargon--in which kava users suffered severe liver damage. A few patients required transplants, and at least one died. The response in Europe has been swift and decisive. In the U.S., however, the FDA's hands are tied until researchers can establish a definite causal link between kava and liver disease. That could take years...
...that they will necessarily find a link. A four-week study carried out at the Duke University Medical Center this fall concluded that kava, used responsibly, poses no significant health hazard. "We didn't observe any abnormalities in liver function or any other significant side effects," says Dr. Kathryn Connor, one of the authors of the study. She points out that some of the cases reported in Europe were complicated by extraneous factors; some patients had been taking extremely high doses of kava over long periods of time, or using it with alcohol, or taking...
...have a higher ratio of fat to water, so alcohol is less diluted when it enters the bloodstream. They also have lower levels of an enzyme that helps break down alcohol. Emerging research shows that liquor also corrodes women's bodies more quickly. As adults, women tend to develop liver disease 10 to 15 years earlier than men, even if women consume only a fraction of the daily alcohol that...
AILING. PAMELA ANDERSON, 34, TV actress; with hepatitis C, a potentially fatal but often treatable virus that attacks the liver; in Los Angeles. The former Baywatch star said she contracted it by sharing a tattoo needle with her rocker ex-husband Tommy Lee, whom she is battling for custody of their children. Lee's publicist denied he had the virus, saying Anderson was trying "to hurt Tommy and their two boys...