Redux

Redux (pronounced ri-duhks)

Brought back; resurgent.

1650-1660: From the Classical Latin redux (that leads or brings back; led or brought back (as from war or exile)) a noun derivative (with passive sense) of redūcere (to bring back) from redūcō (to bring back).  Modern use tends to be post-positive, especially of an artistic work, presented in either a novel or different way.  It has been used in the titles of books and other literary works since at least 1662 since John Dryden’s (1631-1700) Astraea Redux (A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Second Majesty Charles II (1660)).

The literary use of redux as a post-positive adjective meaning "brought back, restored" began with John Dryden’s (1631-1700) Astraea Redux (A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Second Majesty Charles II (1660)) and other notable examples include Anthony Trollope's (1815-1882) Phineas Redux (1873), the sequel to Phineas Finn (1867); and John Updike's (1932-2009) Rabbit Redux (1970), the second in his sequence of novels about the character Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.  Perhaps rather cynically, it was adopted too by film producers who noted the unused footage of many commercially many successful products (the industry phrase being “left on the cutting room floor”) and worked out it’d be a cheap exercise to create “director’s cuts”, marketed as a “new interpretation” of an existing work.

Dexfenfluramine, a serotonergic anorectic drug, was an appetite suppressant marketed as dexfenfluramine hydrochloride under the name Redux.  It worked by increasing extracellular serotonin in the brain and was structurally similar to an amphetamine but without the psychologically stimulating effects.  In September 1997, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asked the manufacturer voluntarily to withdraw dexfenfluramine (Redux) and fenfluramine (Pondimin) from the market.  It was an unusual request and one necessitated because of a high incidence of cardiac valvular abnormalities found in patients who were taking the drugs.  Dexfenfluramine had been approved by the FDA in 1996 and had been widely used for the treatment of obesity while Fenfluramine had been available for 20 years but gained wide notoriety only when it was coupled with phentermine in the "fen-phen" combination.  Phentermine was not implicated in the heart valve abnormalities and is still available.  Dexfenfluramine and fenfluramine produced a distal axotomy of brain serotonin neurons in experimental animals, a toxicity which resulted in reduced brain serotonin axonal markers that persisted for months and, in one primate study, as long as one year after discontinuing the drug.  The doses of drug that produce this effect are similar to those used in humans although this effect has never been demonstrated in humans.  The demise of Redux thus ended the "fen-phen" era in diet pills but was soon replaced with a new fad combining fluoxetine (Prozac) with phentermine.