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  3. Less than a year ago, a new generation of diet pills seemed to offer the long-sought answer to our chronic weight problems. Hund

Less than a year ago, a new generation of diet pills seemed to offer the long-sought answer to our chronic weight problems. Hund

admin2014-05-14  57
问题     Less than a year ago, a new generation of diet pills seemed to offer the long-sought answer to our chronic weight problems. Hundreds of thousands of pound-conscious Americans had discovered that a drug combination known as "fen-phen" could shut off voracious appetites like magic, and the FDA had just approved a new drug, Redux, that did the same with fewer side effects. Redux would attract hundreds of thousands of new pill poppers within a few months.
    But now the diet drug revolution is facing a backlash. Some of the nation’s largest HMOs, including Aetna U. S. Healthcare and Prudential Healthcare, have begun cutting back or eliminating reimbursement for both pills. Diet chains like Jenny Craig and Nutri System are backing away from them too. Several states, meanwhile, have restricted the use of fen-phen. Last week the Florida legislature banned new prescriptions entirely and called on doctors to wean current patients from the drug within 30 days; it also put a 90-day limit on Redux prescriptions. Even New Jersey doctor Sheldon Levine, who touted Redux last year on TV and in his book The Redux Revolution, has stopped giving it to all but his most obese patients.
    The reason for all the retrenchment: potentially lethal side-effects. Over the summer, the FDA revealed that 82 patients had developed defects in their heart valves while on fen-phen, and that seven patients had come down with the same condition on Redux.     As if that weren’t bad enough, physicians reported that a woman who had been taking fen-phen for less than a month died of primary pulmonary hypertension, a sometimes fatal lung condition already associated with Redux. And an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association last month confirmed earlier reports that both fen-phen and Redux can cause brain damage in lab animals.
    These findings led the New England Journal to publish an editorial admonishing doctors to prescribe the drugs only for patients with severe obesity. Meanwhile, FDA asked drug makers to put more explicit warnings on fen-phen and Redux labels. Since mid-July, prescriptions for fen-phen have dropped 56%, and those for Redux 36%, according to IMS America, a pharmaceutical market research firm.
    All that really does, however, is bring the numbers down to where they should have been all along. Manufacturers said from the start that their pills offered a short-term therapy for the obese, not for people looking to fit into a smaller bathing suit. FDA approved Redux with just such a caveat, and when limited to these patients, the drugs may still make sense — despite the risks — because morbid obesity carries its own dangers, including heart disease, diabetes and stroke. Too often, however, Redux and fen-phen were peddled to all comers, almost like candy. The current backlash, says Levine, is a "roller coaster that never should have happened".
The worst case that revealed the fatal dark side of the diet pills is that
选项 A、82 patients on fen-phen and seven on Redux had developed heart defects.
B、a woman patient on fen-phen had died of abnormally high blood pressure.
C、a woman patient on fen-phen had died of a lung disease.
D、both diet pills cause brain damage.
答案C
解析 第四段第一句提到“可好像上边所举的例子还不够糟糕。据医生们说，一位服用fen—phen的妇女不到一个月就死于肺压过高”，由此可知，答案为[C]。本句中的pulmonary hypertension“肺高压病”与[B]中的high blood pressure“高血压”不同，故排除[B]；文中第三段虽然也提到了[A]的内容，但此病例不是最严重的，故排除[A]；[D]曲解了原文的意思。
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