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An Ohio church is offering a drive-through Ash Wednesday blessing for parishioners pressed for time or reluctant to come inside the church for the Lenten observance. The Rev. Patricia Anderson Cook of Mount Healthy United Methodist Church in suburban Cincinnati offered the ashes Wednesday evening for people of all faiths beginning about 5 p.m. in the church parking lot.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the Christian season of Lent, which concludes after 40 days with the celebration of Easter, and the faithful traditionally have a smudged cross drawn on their forehead.

Bridget Spitler, the church’s secretary and building manager, said the church had received a lot of positive feedback for offering the drive-through ashes.

“Some people may not be too comfortable coming in for a serious service,” she said, adding that people with severe arthritis or other ailments that make attending the service uncomfortable also appreciate the drive-through opportunity.

The pastor will provide a church brochure and a Lenten booklet, and the church offers a traditional Ash Wednesday service inside at 7 p.m.

It’s a first at her church, but some other churches have also taken more-informal approaches to the ashes. There’s even a Web site called Ashes to Go.

The Rev. Teresa K.M. Danieley of St. John’s Episcopal Church in St. Louis said the ecumenical effort began in 2007, with ashes given to some 100 passers-by outside a coffeehouse. The practice has spread, with clergy members offering ashes outside commuter trains, at bus stops and on street corners around the country.

“Ashes to Go can be a powerful way for people to encounter Christ where they are, in the midst of their lives,” she says on the website.

Cincinnati Archdiocese spokesman Dan Andriacco said for the Cincinnati region’s many Roman Catholics, getting ashes still calls for attending a service.

Some Cincinnati area Catholics might be taking part in another Lenten tradition: McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwiches were pioneered in Cincinnati in the early 1960s by a franchisee, the late Lou Groen, who was trying to offset business being lost when Catholics abstained from eating meat on Fridays.

Dan Sewell of The Associated Press wrote this report.

A panel of medical experts voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to endorse the controversial weight-loss drug Qnexa, clearing the way for the Food and Drug Administration to approve a new prescription obesity medication for the first time since 1999.

The FDA will issue a final ruling later this year, but the agency typically follows the recommendations of its advisory committees.

The 20-2 vote in favor of Qnexa was a surprising reversal from 2010, when the same advisory committee decided that the drug’s risks of heart problems and birth defects outweighed its weight-loss benefits.

In a clinical trial involving 4,323 people, Qnexa — a combination of the anticonvulsant drug topiramate and the appetite suppressant phentermine — led to an average loss of about 10% of total body weight in the first year of use. Many users also saw improvements in blood pressure.

But the trials also found that that the drug caused a slight increase in heart rate, which can boost the odds of a heart attack or stroke. In addition, researchers detected an increased risk of birth defects — typically cleft lip — in women who became pregnant while taking the drug.

Vivus Inc., the drug’s manufacturer, addressed those concerns by proposing a tightly controlled system for prescribing Qnexa. To prevent birth defects, patients who take the drug will have to undergo monthly pregnancy testing and healthcare providers will get special training on the medication’s risks and benefits. Vivus will also restrict distribution of the drug to registered pharmacies, among other measures.

“We will know who the prescribers are. We will know who has been trained,” Dr. Barbara Troupin, Vivus’ senior director of global medical affairs, told the advisory committee. “We are confident the Qnexa [risk management program] balances the safeguards while allowing access for appropriate patients.”

According to the clinical trial data and previous studies, the risk of having a baby with a cleft lip is two to five times greater in women who took topiramate.

“The simple reality is, if you’re pregnant or planning on getting pregnant, it’s not the right drug for you,” said Joe Nadglowski, chief executive of the Obesity Action Coalition, a patient advocacy group based in Tampa, Fla., that supports approval of Qnexa.

Vivus, based in Mountain View, Calif., proposed a similar program to monitor heart risks in patients. Several panel members strongly encouraged the company to conduct a post-marketing study to help identify the potential cardiovascular risks.

At the panel’s daylong meeting Wednesday in Silver Spring, Md., several members of the Endocrinologic and Metabolic Drugs Advisory Committee said they worried about Qnexa’s side effects but believed the benefits outweighed the risks.

More than 35% of American adults are obese, including about 5% who are morbidly obese, and an additional 33% are overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Those extra pounds are more than just a cosmetic issue; they also increase one’s risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, osteoarthritis, certain types of cancers and possibly dementia.

“The most encouraging thing is that just about every member really heard the message about the need to treat obesity,” said Ted Kyle, the advocacy committee chairman of the Obesity Society. “Obesity is not a trivial disease.”

Only one prescription diet drug is available in the United States. That drug, orlistat, blocks absorption of fat and is sold under the trade name Xenical. Qnexa appears to work by suppressing appetite and increasing feelings of fullness.

It’s not clear why the medication raises heart rate, but such an increase is typically viewed as a marker of cardiovascular risk, said Dr. Michael S. Lauer, director of the division of cardiovascular sciences at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and a member of the advisory panel.

Lauer cast one of the two votes against approval, saying that the FDA should first ask Vivus to complete a study that provided detailed cardiovascular risk data. Otherwise, he said, FDA approval “would be a decision based on hopes, surrogates and suppositions.”

“We have seen many cases in medicine where we thought we understood the pathology of disease … and we turned out to be wrong,” Lauer said. “With an epidemic as serious as obesity, we need to do this right.”

If approved by the FDA, Qnexa would be targeted for people with a body mass index of 30 or above, or a BMI of 27 or above for people who also have weight-related health problems, such as diabetes or sleep apnea. A BMI of 25 to 29 indicates a person is overweight, and 30 or greater is considered obese.

The vote sent Vivus shares soaring to more than $21 in after-hours trading, double the official closing price of $10.55.

shari.roan@latimes.com

An advisory committee’s hearty 20-to-2 vote to recommend approval of the obesity drug Qnexa on Wednesday means it’s highly likely the FDA will allow the medication to be marketed when the agency issues its final report later this year. If approved, Qnexa will be the first new prescription weight-loss medication in 13 years.

But people looking for a quick way to lose five or 10 pounds may find Qnexa too troublesome to bother with. According to the manufacturer of the medication, Vivus Inc., and FDA officials, Qnexa should be carefully prescribed and patients should be closely monitored while on the drug.

Qnexa, a combination of the anticonvulsant topiramate and the appetite suppressant phentermine, produces an average 10% loss in body weight after one year. Many people with hypertension also see improvement in blood pressure. But the drug increases the risk of cleft lip in babies whose mothers became pregnant while taking it. Studies also show Qnexa increases heart rate, which can result in cardiovascular problems.

If approved, Qnexa users would likely have to order the drug through mail-order pharmacies, a strategy to limit easy access, such as by online purchasing. Women of childbearing age would likely be required to take a monthly pregnancy test. Moreover, the drug is expected to be labeled for people with a body mass index of 30 or above or a BMI of 27 or above for people who also have weight-related health problems, such as diabetes. A BMI of 25 to 29 indicates being overweight and 30 or greater is considered being obese.

Dr. Elaine H. Morrato, assistant professor of health systems, management and policy at the University of Colorado, Denver, said she voted against approval of Qnexa in 2010 but decided to recommend approval this time because of the safeguards that will be put in place to monitor appropriate use and prevent problems.

“I believe the FDA and the sponsor are striving to find the right balance between access to effective anti-obesity medications and the corresponding risks,” she said.

People who don’t lose weight after three months on the drug would be encouraged to discontinue use because of its potential risks, experts said Wednesday. It’s likely that the first doctors to prescribe the medication would be those who specialize in obesity.

Qnexa should not be viewed as a quick fix for a trivial problem, said Joe Nadglowski, president of Obesity Action Coalition, a patient advocacy group.

“In the right hands, in the right patients, obesity drugs are an important part of the formula,” he said.

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Pictures of Elizabeth Smart’s wedding celebration are being published in People Magazine and the National Enquirer.

She was planning on the former; the latter comes as a rather unpleasant surprise.

According to Smart family spokesman Chris Thomas, Elizabeth “decided that it would be in her best interest and her family’s best interest to cooperate with somebody to tell the story in a way that she wanted it to be told.” People reporters and photographers were at the wedding; National Enquirer photographers were hiding nearby with long-lens cameras.

“It came as quite a surprise that the Enquirer had images and the story,” Thomas said. “In light of that, it looks like it was a good decision [to cooperate with People] because, otherwise, the National Enquirer would be the one telling her wedding story.”

People is celebrating the wedding of Smart and Matthew Gilmour in the edition that hits stands on Friday — even putting the blushing bride before New York Knicks sensation Jeremy Lin.

Smart gets most of the cover; Lin gets a much-smaller photo in the upper-left corner.

Attired in her wedding dress, a flower in her hair and a bouquet in her hands, Smart smiles broadly while the magazine proclaims “Dream Wedding!” and “Happy at Last! The kidnap survivor shares all the details of her big day in Hawaii.”

Details of any financial arrangement with the magazine were not revealed.

Story continues below

According to Thomas, Smart decided to put the wedding together quickly — it was planned and pulled off in less than two weeks — and invite People along because she was taken aback by the media firestorm ignited when she announced her engagement.

“She knew it would be a story, but didn’t anticipate it being as big a story as it was,” Thomas said. “I had 200-plus media calls that day, and it became quite intrusive. There were media that contacted practically every member of her family and extended family and his family and even resorted to some questionable tactics to tell the story.

“And once the dust cleared from that, she recognized that was going to be very difficult if not impossible to have a wedding here without distraction. And as she thought about it more, she determined that the only way to have what every woman wants — which is a wedding with close family and friends — was to get out of Dodge.”

The story of Smart’s 2002 kidnapping, when she was just 14, and her return nine months later made international headlines. She testified against her kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, at his 2010 trial — he was convicted and sentenced to two life sentences — and has become an advocate for missing children and a contributor to ABC News.

While “everything came together without a hitch” for the wedding, it was a complicated process. Thomas said vendors had to sign nondisclosure agreements, and credited “terrific partners” in the Polynesian Cultural Center and Turtle Bay Resorts for making the wedding — originally scheduled for this summer — come together so quickly.

The couple married in the Laie Hawaii Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on the morning of Saturday, Feb. 18, followed by an afternoon reception and an evening luau at the Polynesian Cultural Center.

“At the end of the night, Elizabeth was beaming and said that it couldn’t have gone better,” Thomas said. “It was something that she hoped for and it came true.”

spierce@sltrib.com