Shaping medicinal product information: a before and after study exploring physicians' perspectives on the summary of product characteristics.

Objective: To establish, in the context of the revised European Pharmacovigilance Directive and based on physicians' perspectives, how Summaries of Product Characteristics (SmPCs) could be more user friendly and better support physicians' interactions with patients, thereby improving patients' own understanding of their medicines.

Design: Qualitative focus group discussions (step 1), development of an alternative SmPC (step 2) and an online quantitative survey (step 3) comparing the alternative SmPC to the currently approved version.

Setting: Office-based physicians (n=218) from all federal states of Germany.

Desialylation of low density lipoprotein--metabolic function versus oxidative damage?

Low density lipoproteins are generally considered to play a major role in the development of atherosclerotic vascular diseases. There is growing interest in LDL subspecies, especially in their density, carbohydrate content and oxidizability, which is supposed to enhance atherogenicity. We investigated the influence of desialylation on the resistance of the lipoprotein particles towards Cu(II) prooxidative activity.

Homocysteine-induced oxidative damage: mechanisms and possible roles in neurodegenerative and atherogenic processes.

Increased blood plasma concentrations of the sulphur amino acid homocysteine ("homocysteinemia") have been brought into context with neurodegenerative and arteriosclerotic symptoms and diseases. We recently reported on biochemical model reactions on the prooxidative activity of homocysteine including the desactivation of Na+/K(+)-ATPases and hemolysis of erythrocytes (Preibisch et al., 1993).