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American Morning

Botox Approved For Cosmetic Use

Aired April 16, 2002 - 08:40   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: We have some new medical news to share with you this morning, and they both focused on treatments that may be of special interest to you who are over the age of 40, and your eyesight might not be what it used to be. Of course a lot of us won't admit to that.

We are joined now by medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen.

Good morning.

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Paula.

Well, my eyesight hasn't been what it used to be for about 15 years now, but this new treatment actually wouldn't be for someone like me. It's a treatment called CK. We've all heard of lasik, which is a laser approach to reshaping the eye. This uses radiowaves, and it's for people who are farsighted. Farsighted means they have a tough time reading close-up. It's ideal for someone -- or the best patient for this, the ideal patient would be someone who is over 40. And they tried it out in 233 patients in clinical trials in the U.S., and the FDA just approved it. And they said -- the company that did the trials said that everyone had better vision afterwards, and that there were no safety problems.

Now let's look at how this works, because it's very interesting. When people are far-sighted, they have flat corneas. You see the cornea in the front of the eye and it's flat. That's not a good thing; that's why you get far-sighted vision. So what doctors do is they take your eyeball, and they make drawings on it, which I know sounds bizarre, but that's ink that will go away, and they draw targets that they want the radiowaves to hit. They then take the radiowaves and they reshape that cornea, so in the end you have a cornea that is no longer flat. Instead of being flat, you can see it has that nice point to it. And that's how you get better vision.

So this is a three-minute procedure that your doctor would do in his office. And doctors -- the company that does it says, you know what, you probably have to have this redone every five to seven years. It is not a permanent procedure -- Paula.

ZAHN: Three minutes invested of time is no big deal either. I think a lot of us would be willing to put up with that. But I'm still a little confused on this lasik surgery. When lasik surgery was first introduced, that was to correct near-sightedness, correct? COHEN: Right, near-sightedness and not a stigmatism. But then later, they added a stigmatism and farsightedness. We said, you know what, we didn't think it would work for those, but now it appears it actually does work for those.

ZAHN: So why would you choose this procedure over lasik surgery?

COHEN: That's an excellent question. Lasik's been out there forever, not forever, for many years now. So why would you choose this relatively new procedure? Well, the folks who make this -- who make the apparatus that does this new procedure say, you know what? There's a bunch of people over age 40 what can't do lasik because of various reasons. For example, their eyes might be too dry, and they would make them ineligible to do lasik, or they might be on certain medications for certain medical conditions, so that they can't do lasik.

So there's a chunk of people, apparently, who can't do lasik, could do this other one.

ZAHN: You know what, my recommendation is for the in-between stage, just have lots of lights in the room. That's when you have problems reading, when the room is dark.

COHEN: That's a low-risk...

ZAHN: Botox is back in the news today. The FDA now approving it for cosmetic use. And to put that into perspective, they were using Botox for years for other things, right?

COHEN: That's right, they've been using it for 12 years for problems like eye muscles that don't work, or muscle problems in your neck or your shoulders, and so now the FDA is basically giving it its blessing, and says, guess what, you can now use it to get rid of those two little wrinkles between your eyes, or however many wrinkles you have between your eyes.

People have been doing it for years. This is just the FDA saying, well, now it's OK to do it. Doctors can take a medicine that's on the market for something else and use it for pretty much whatever they want. That's a perfectly legitimate thing to do. So in many ways, this doesn't change much. The only thing that it really does change is that now the company that makes Botox can actually advertise it. They can do big campaigns on television. They can train sort of legions of doctors to do this procedure.

So it may make it more widely available, it may make it less expensive, but it does mean the customers need to be very careful. You want to go to someone who has do this before, not to some newly trained person who hasn't done it very many times.

ZAHN: Right, because It is not without side effects.

COHEN: It is not without side effect. I mean, it can give you droopy eyes that last for a couple of month. It can give you the flu. It can do bad things. The bad things seem to be temporary. The bad things seem to be pretty unusual, but it's not something to take lightly.

ZAHN: All right, thanks so much, Elizabeth.

COHEN: Thank you.

ZAHN: Thanks for covering so much territory.

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