The Parents Zone

Score one for Mylan, but theyll still have to score twice.

The generic drug maker announced today that the FDA has approved its sale of a copycat version of a medicine called Doryx for severe acne.

Doryx is sold in the U.S. by Irish specialty drug maker Warner-Chilcott, which has been trying to delay generic competition for the drug. Its sued Mylan for patent infringement in federal court; Mylan, which is waiting for a resolution before selling generic Doryx, says it expects a decision in March.

Among Warner Chilcotts other moves to delay competition: adding a second line, or score, across the top of Doryx tablets and arguing that generic rivals would also have to dual-score their proposed copies.

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What advice can you give to senior citizens with type 2 diabetes? — W.S.

People with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes have similar goals and are given fairly similar advice. Type 2 diabetes used to be called adult onset diabetes and often can be controlled with oral medicines and diet. Type 1 diabetes used to be called juvenile diabetes, and it requires insulin treatment. Those older designations are misleading. Many type 2 diabetics have to take insulin.

People with diabetes ought to have a meter that provides the blood sugar (plasma glucose) reading. It’s impossible to adjust medicine or diet without such information. T

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We will no longer refer to your protruding, pregnant belly as a “baby bump,” because the phrase has been banished by Michigan’s Lake Superior State University, in its annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness. We were going to start referring to your swelling stomach as the Occupy Womb movement, but the word “occupy” was also included in the list. While we are delighted for your news, we will refrain from calling your condition “amazing,” which is apparently the most overused and annoying word to English speakers. We hope you don’t begin to think of your first trimester morning sickness as your “new normal” because that’s also been banned (also, you’ll feel better in a few weeks). Don

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If you were tested for the breast cancer gene mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that raise the risk of breast, ovarian and other cancers would you tell your children?

Thats the question researchers posed to 253 parents, almost all of them women, who underwent BRCA gene testing and had at least one child under age 25.

There isnt much to do with the information for that age group: kids who learn that a parent carries a BRCA mutation arent advised to have the test themselves until at least age 18, and any additional screening resulting from a positive result wouldnt likely begin until age 25, says Angela Bradbury, lead author of the study and the director of breast and ovarian cancer risk assessment at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.

For those who reported passing along the results to children, researchers also asked them how the kids seemed to receive the news.

Among the 505 offspring of those surveyed, 66% were told about their parents results, most of those within a month.

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