Getting (to the Value) of Value In Health Care
By SUSAN DENTZER
How would you judge the value of your health care? A longstanding definition of treatment holds that value is the health outcomes achieved for the dollars spent. Yet behind that seemingly simple formula lies much complexity.
Think about it: Calculating outcomes and costs for treating a short-term acute condition, such as a child’s strep throat, may be easy. But it’s far harder to pinpoint value in a long-term serious illness such as advanced cancer, in which both both the outcomes and costs of treating a given individual—let alone a population with a particular cancer—may be unknown for years. And ...
Source: The Health Care Blog - September 11, 2015 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: THCB PCORI Physicians Robert Wood Johnson Theranos Value value-based care Source Type: blogs
FDA Approves Sandoz's Zarxio, The First Biosimilar Approved in the U.S.
Today, the Food and Drug Administration approved Zarxio (filgrastim-sndz), the first biosimilar product approved in the U.S. Sandoz, Inc.’s Zarxio is biosimilar to Amgen Inc.’s Neupogen (filgrastim), which was originally licensed in 1991. The approval comes two months after an FDA advisory committee recommended Zarxio as biosimilar to Neupogen for all five of the intended indications.
A biosimilar product is a biological product that is approved based on a showing that it is highly similar to an already-approved biological product, known as a reference product--in this case Neupogen. The biosimilar a...
Source: Policy and Medicine - March 6, 2015 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas Sullivan Source Type: blogs
The Progression of Leukemia: Most Old People Have Some of the Necessary Mutations in Blood Cells
Here is an interesting look at the progression and prevalence of DNA damage leading to leukemia, cancers of bone marrow and white blood cells. Cancer is an age-related disease because its proximate cause is DNA damage and we accumulate ever more of this damage as time goes on. DNA repair systems in our cells and destruction of precancerous cells by the immune system are highly efficient but not perfect, and falter with age due to other forms of accumulating damage. The development of a robust suite of effective cancer treatments is an essential part of progress towards effective treatments for degenerative aging, and perha...
Source: Fight Aging! - February 27, 2015 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
The FDA Approves a New HPV Vaccine Containing Over Twice as Much Aluminum As its Predecessor
According to recent reports, the FDA has approved yet another HPV vaccine, despite documented safety issues and the new vaccine containing an exceptionally high level of aluminum, a known neurotoxin.
Until now, only two vaccines have been manufactured to protect men and women against human papillomavirus (HPV), a virus believed to be the leading cause of cervical cancer: Cervarix, which is believed to protect against strains 16 and 18 of the virus, and Gardasil, which is believed to protect against strains 6, 11, 16 and 18.
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A Third HPV Vaccine Hits the Market
In December 2014, Gardasil 9 vaccine, manu...
Source: vactruth.com - February 1, 2015 Category: Allergy & Immunology Authors: Christina England Tags: Christina England Physical Top Stories aluminum hydroxide Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Gardasil 9 HPV Vaccine Merck Sharp and Dohme Source Type: blogs
Another Promising Example of Adoptive T Cell Therapy
Adoptive T cell therapies are one of the most promising methodologies for immunotherapy at the present time. This small trial is for pediatric cancer, and one might argue that you'd expect better results from immunotherapy in children, however. The aged immune system is much less effective at all of its jobs. As is the case for stem cell therapies and their issues in treating the old, we can hope that the challenge of immune aging will simply be an incentive for the research community to develop means to overcome it so that cancer immunotherapies can work at peak effectiveness. After all, cancer in children is rare in comp...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 16, 2014 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
A View of Stochastic DNA Damage in Aging
Cancer is thought to be a disease of aging because we accumulate randomly distributed damage to nuclear DNA as we age. The older you are the more of this damage you have. Sooner or later the right combination of mutations occur in a cell that slips past the monitoring of the immune system and other defensive systems, which themselves decline with age due to other forms of damage, and it runs amok to grow a cancer. It remains an open question as to whether this nuclear DNA damage in aging is significant in any other way besides cancer over the present length of a human life span, though it is the default assumption in the r...
Source: Fight Aging! - December 10, 2014 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
Top stories in health and medicine, December 5, 2014
From MedPage Today:
Duplication Error May Make Giants. A duplication in a short stretch of the X chromosome may be responsible for a specific type of gigantism seen in children.
Lab Work Moves More Quickly to Clinical Setting. A second investigational drug in the isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) inhibitor class has demonstrated activity in acute myeloid leukemia (AML).
ICH Outcome Better with Early Rehab. Starting rehabilitation within 48 hours of an intracerebral hemorrhage was associated with improved survival and functional outcomes at 6 months.
Unnecessary Chest X-Rays on Kids Common. Too many pediatric chest X-rays ar...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - December 5, 2014 Category: Journals (General) Authors: MedPage Today Tags: News Endocrinology Neurology Pediatrics Radiology Source Type: blogs
Your Odds Of Surviving Cancer Depend Very Much On Where You Live
[NPR] In the United States, 9 out of 10 kids diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia will live. In Jordan, the survival rate is 16 percent. And while cervical cancer patients have a five-year survival rate of over 70 percent in countries like Mauritius and Norway, the rate in Libya is under 40 percent. That’s the […] (Source: blog.bioethics.net)
Source: blog.bioethics.net - December 2, 2014 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Hannah Pearl Berchenko Tags: Health Care syndicated World News - Home Source Type: blogs
What does a good death mean to you?
In July 1991, I was beginning my first year of medical school in Rochester, New York. I was filled with excitement and anxiety on beginning a journey in medicine as I started on the road to becoming a doctor.
At that time, Rochester was in the national spotlight because of the actions of one of our faculty members, Timothy Quill. In March of that year, Dr. Quill published a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which he described his relationship with his patient, Diane. She had been diagnosed with acute myelomonocytic leukemia and had decided against chemotherapy. In their discussions, she had relayed to him ...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - November 19, 2014 Category: Journals (General) Authors: Don S. Dizon, MD Tags: Physician Cancer Palliative care Source Type: blogs
Supreme Court of Nova Scotia Tosses Medical Futility Lawsuit
A few days ago, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia granted summary judgment to two defendant physicians in a medical futility lawsuit.
Michael Chan was 25 years old and had acute lymphoblastic leukemia with "extensive metastatic abnormalities." Michael ... (Source: blog.bioethics.net)
Source: blog.bioethics.net - November 3, 2014 Category: Medical Ethics Authors: Thaddeus Mason Pope Tags: Health Care medical futility blog syndicated Source Type: blogs
Healthcare Update Satellite — 09-15-2014
This study should be required reading in every emergency medicine residency in this country. In fact, the concepts in the studies should be tested on the emergency medicine board exams.
Now if the study only compared the type of a patient’s insurance with the likelihood of emergency department recidivism.
How else can the media try to tarnish this guy’s reputation? The doctor who oversaw Joan Rivers’ fatal endoscopy was once *sued* 10 years ago. Gasp.
The former patient’s attorneys are really trying to create their 15 minutes of fame. They alleged that 10 years ago the patient received no informed ...
Source: WhiteCoat's Call Room - September 15, 2014 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: WhiteCoat Tags: Healthcare Update Source Type: blogs
The Berlin patient
Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, an estimated 75 million people have been infected with HIV. Only one person, Timothy Ray Brown, has ever been cured of infection.
Brown was diagnosed with HIV while living in Berlin in 1995, and was treated with anti-retroviral drugs for more than ten years. In 2007 he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. When the disease did not respond to chemotherapy, Brown underwent stem cell transplantation, which involves treatment with cytotoxic drugs and whole-body irradiation to destroy leukemic and immune cells, followed by administration of donor stem cells to restore the immun...
Source: virology blog - September 6, 2014 Category: Virology Authors: Vincent Racaniello Tags: Basic virology Information AIDS antiretroviral antiviral Berlin patient CCR5 HIV leukemia stem cell transplant Timothy Ray Brown virus Source Type: blogs
Rare Diseases Hiding Among Common Diseases
In June, 2014, my book, entitled Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs: Keys to Understanding and Treating the Common Diseases was published by Elsevier. The book builds the argument that our best chance of curing the common diseases will come from studying and curing the rare diseases. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 12:It is easy to find cases wherein a rare disease accounts for a somewhat uncommon clinical presentation of a common disease. 12.1.2 Rule—Uncommon presentations of common diseases are sometimes rare diseases, camouflaged by a common clinical phenotype. Brief Rationale—Common diseases tend to occur with a char...
Source: Specified Life - July 18, 2014 Category: Pathologists Tags: common disease cryptic disease disease genetics genetics of common diseases genetics of complex disease orphan disease orphan drugs rare disease subsets of disease Source Type: blogs
Rare Cancer are Subsets of Common Cancers
In June, 2014, my book, entitled Rare Diseases and Orphan Drugs: Keys to Understanding and Treating the Common Diseases was published by Elsevier. The book builds the argument that our best chance of curing the common diseases will come from studying and curing the rare diseases. One of the key ideas developed in the book is that each common diseases is actually an aggregate of cellular processes that are present, individually, in rare diseases. In the case of the common cancers, we can find specific rare diseases that are subsets of the common diseases. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 8: 8.3.3 Inherited syndromes that...
Source: Specified Life - July 9, 2014 Category: Pathologists Tags: cancer syndromes carcinogenesis common cancers common disease familial cancer syndromes genetic disease orphan disease orphan drugs rare cancers rare disease Source Type: blogs
Sympathy is the missing art in medicine
I still remember when my phone rang with an eerie sound, early in December 2013. The oncologist I had seen a couple of days earlier was on the other end asking me to return to the hospital ASAP because my bone marrow biopsy results was consistent with acute leukemia and I was at risk if bleeding.
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Your patients are rating you online: How to respond. Manage your online reputation: A social media guide. Find out how. (Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog)
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - March 9, 2014 Category: Family Physicians Tags: Physician Cancer Medical school Source Type: blogs
