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About 3,000 Medicare patients who’ve been getting care at a Mayo Clinic facility in Arizona will have to pay out of their own pocket or find another doctor.

We’ve been writing for a while now about the risk of cancer associated with CT scans, an issue doctors have begun to pay more attention to as the use of CT scans has soared.

A few papers published this afternoon in the Archives of Internal Medicine add a bit to the discussion; one estimated that the roughly 72 million CT scans performed in the U.S. in 2007 will ultimately cause some 29,000 cases of cancer.

The FDA just approved a new, extended-release version of Eli Lilly’s antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. If a classic pharma strategy holds true, the drug may also extend Lilly’s ability to make money from its Zyprexa franchise.

The company is likely to face generic competition on regular-selling Zyprexa in 2011. But a key patent on the extended release version of the drug is valid until 2018, a Lilly spokeswoman told the Health Blog.

Dendreon’s vaccine to treat prostate cancer has already been rejected once by the FDA. But the company recently re-applied for FDA approval, and it’s acting pretty confident while it waits to hear back from the agency.

Earlier this week, Dendreon said it would sell 15 million new shares of stock and use a chunk of the proceeds to speed up construction of new manufacturing facilities. The sale will increase shares outstanding by at least 13%, Dow Jones Newswires said.

The FDA today approved the use of two antipsychotic drugs — Eli Lilly’s Zyprexa and AstraZeneca’s Seroquel — in teenagers. But the agency also said it wants to know more about the risk of weight gain and diabetes in kids who take those and other antipsychotic drugs.

The business of operating retail health clinics in pharmacies, supermarkets and big-box discount stores has gone through fits and starts in the last couple of years, as we have recounted here, here and here.

Today, a new report from the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions says more challenges await, “including labor shortages, compensation inflation, price pressures from new entrants and regulatory pressures from state governments — all of which may slow growth or impede retail clinics from opening.”

So Omnicare, a big pharmacy that specializes in providing drugs to nursing-home patients, will pay $98 million to settle allegations that the company “solicited or paid a variety of kickbacks,” according to this statement from the feds.

The WSJ story gets into all the details, but one wrinkle in particular caught our eye: Omnicare was accused of soliciting and receiving kickbacks from J&J in exchange for recommending the company’s antipsychotic drug Risperdal.

Kids taking the latest generation of antipsychotic meds gain significant amounts of weight–as much as 19 pounds on average in just 11 weeks for kids taking Zyprexa, according to a study published today in JAMA. Abilify, Risperdal and Seroquel were all linked to weight gain as well. Here’s the WSJ story.

Comparison shoppers nationwide soon will be able to dig into a new mountain of patient-care cost numbers from the health insurance industry, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said today.

Sanofi-Aventis has spent some $9 billion on acquisitions this year, but there’s “more shopping on the horizon,” CEO Chris Viehbacher tells Bloomberg News.

Among other things, Viehbacher is interested in deals that would expand Sanofi’s vaccine business — a popular trend among big pharma companies (including Merck, Abbott and J&J) these days.