A combination of two new diabetes drugs has proved a powerful means of controlling hard-to-treat cases of the disease. The drugs are troglitazone, approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year, and metformin, approved two years ago. Both are for adult onset diabetes, a disease of high blood sugar that afflicts millions of Americans. Most such patients will eventually need insulin shots, but that treatment often does not work well because the patients' bodies have become resistant to the hormone.

Troglitazone and metformin have previously been shown to be especially useful in these patients--troglitazone by making muscles more sensitive to insulin, metformin by reducing the blood sugar produced by the liver. In a study in the March 26 New England Journal of Medicine, Yale University researchers found that the drugs work even better in combination than they do alone. Taken individually, metformin and troglitazone each reduced the patients' after-meal blood-sugar levels by an average of 25%. Taken together, the drugs yielded a 41% drop.

Doctors at the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA have begun using a hand-held digital camera to screen the eyes of premature babies for a potentially blinding disease. The Retcam 120 screens for retinopathy of prematurity, which usually strikes and blinds babies who weigh less than 4 pounds at birth with a gestational age of less than 32 weeks.