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The Search for Factors in Young Blood that Might be Used to Treat Aging
A fair number of research groups and a few startup companies are engaged in the search for factors in young blood that might explain the effects of parabiosis. Heterochronic parabiosis is a procedure in which the circulatory systems of a young and an old mouse are linked. The young mouse begins to show some early signs of aging, and the old mouse shows a reversal of some measures of aging. The evidence to date is conflicted on the topic of whether or not this effect is due to beneficial components of young blood: it is clearly the case that some signals present in young blood can be delivered on their own to old animals in...
Source: Fight Aging! - October 8, 2019 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs

23andMe Moving into Clinical Trial Recruitment, a Potential Source of New Income
I have been blogging about23andMe for about six years (see:Update on 23andMe; Time for a Review of FDA Definition of Medical Devices). During that time, I have seen the company evolve from the first major consumer genomics enterprise to a clinical laboratory authorized by the FDA to perform testing for ten diseases or conditions. These are the first direct-to-consumer (DTC) tests authorized by the FDA that provide information about an individual ’s genetic predisposition to certain medical diseases or conditions (see:FDA allows marketing of first direct-to-consumer tests that provide genetic risk information for ce...
Source: Lab Soft News - September 27, 2019 Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Bruce Friedman Tags: Food and Drug Administration Genomic Testing Healthcare Information Technology Healthcare Innovations Lab Industry Trends Lab Regulation Lab Standards Medical Consumerism Medical Research Pharmaceutical Industry Source Type: blogs

How Are Hospitals Supposed to Reduce Readmissions? | Part I
By KIP SULLIVAN The notion that hospital readmission rates are a “quality” measure reached the status of conventional wisdom by the late 2000s. In their 2007 and 2008 reports to Congress, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) recommended that Congress authorize a program that would punish hospitals for “excess readmissions” of Medicare fee-for-service (FFS) enrollees. In 2010, Congress accepted MedPAC’s recommendation and, in Section 3025 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) (p. 328), ordered the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to start the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP...
Source: The Health Care Blog - September 24, 2019 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: Health Policy Medicare ACA Affordable Care Act hospital readmissions Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program HRRP Kip Sullivan Medicaid MedPAC Source Type: blogs

This Summer ’s Biggest Hits: See What You Missed on Leader Live
Summer is officially over, but you can still enjoy the season’s most popular posts here on Leader Live. See what articles with insights and practical tips for audiologists and speech-language pathologists were read and shared the most. The communication sciences and disorders (CSD) professions featured prominently in the news and social media this summer. A major blockbuster movie featured a character with a cochlear implant, while a major news outlet declared noisy restaurants discriminate against patrons with hearing loss. A father-son viral video demonstrated several clever communication strategies, and Congress intro...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - September 23, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Shelley D. Hutchins Tags: Academia & Research Audiology Health Care Private Practice Schools Slider Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: blogs

Anti-Radiation Poison Pill Also Effective at Eliminating GBCAs from the Body
The chelator pill, a medication that was developed to rid the body of radioactive elements, has a 96 percent efficacy rate at preventinggadolinium from depositing in bodies of patients who have just undergone MRI, according to researchers from theU.S. Department of Energy ' s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Gadolinium-based contrast agents (GBCA) are used in around a third of all MRI procedures. They ’ve been a controversial topic in recent years, and traces of the agent can remain in the brain for years after screenings. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has requiredhealthcare providers to issue a GBCA Med...
Source: radRounds - September 22, 2019 Category: Radiology Authors: Julie Morse Source Type: blogs

We Can Stop America ’ s Surge in Opioid-Dependent Babies
By STUART H. SMITH Imagine a massive public health crisis in the United States that affects tens of thousands of people. Now imagine that the government had a simple tool at its disposal that could prevent this kind of physical and psychological trauma. You might think that I’m writing about America’s deadly outbreak of gun violence, which has made headlines this summer from Dayton to El Paso. But actually I’m talking about a different crisis that affects even more people – all of them children — and which could be sharply reduced with one simple step that lacks the bitter political animus of the gun debate...
Source: The Health Care Blog - September 18, 2019 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: Health Policy Patients Big pharma NAS syndrome Opioid Justice Team Opioid-Dependent Babies Opioids public health Stuart Smith Source Type: blogs

Wearable Device Offering " Cuff-less " Blood Pressure Monitoring Approved by FDA
Health wearables and other mobile measuring and monitoring devices are emerging as key elements in the consumer-oriented first tier of healthcare (see:Defining and Delineating the Changing First Tier of Healthcare). In the emerging scenario, smartphones will serve as mini-computers to integrate and communicate health data generated at home (see:Smartphones Provide a Key Element in Our Personal Health Management Systems). When relevant and necessary, such data will be communicated to the cloud for access by healthcare professionals for further action. Given this backdrop, I pay particular attention to announcements about ne...
Source: Lab Soft News - September 12, 2019 Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Bruce Friedman Tags: Diagnostics Electronic Health Record (EHR) Health Wearable Healthcare Information Technology Healthcare Innovations Medical Consumerism Medical Research Point-of-Care Testing Population Health Public Health Test Kits and Home Testing Source Type: blogs

Response to Another "Epidemic" Is Likely to Generate Harmful Unintended Consequences--As Usual
Jeffrey A. SingerAfter addressing the “meth epidemic” with the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 (don’t look now, but meth-related deaths are at historic highs, eclipsing those solely from prescription opioids), and after addressing the opioid epidemic by depriving patients of pain medication while driving nonmedical users to more dangerous drugs, it appears politicians, assisted by an eager press, are setting their sights on fixing the newest “epidemic:” the “growing epidemic of e-cigarette use in our children.”Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar announced today that the Food and...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - September 11, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs

Where Does Diabetes Technology Stand In 2019?
Diabetes management went through a radical transformation in the last years due to technology: the diabetes patient community found a strong voice online, continuous glucose monitors are taking the place of finger pricks, digital patches and insulin pumps make the dosage of insulin more predictable, and connected devices promise the era of artificial pancreas real soon. We looked around where diabetes technology stands today and what could we expect in the next 5-10 years? The diabetes community and digital health tech companies pushing for change Diabetes continues to affect the lives of millions around the globe. A...
Source: The Medical Futurist - August 27, 2019 Category: Information Technology Authors: nora Tags: Future of Medicine artificial artificial pancreas blood blood sugar community diabetes diabetes management diabetic digital digital health health management insulin patient technology Source Type: blogs

Fight Aging! Newsletter, August 26th 2019
Fight Aging! publishes news and commentary relevant to the goal of ending all age-related disease, to be achieved by bringing the mechanisms of aging under the control of modern medicine. This weekly newsletter is sent to thousands of interested subscribers. To subscribe or unsubscribe from the newsletter, please visit: https://www.fightaging.org/newsletter/ Longevity Industry Consulting Services Reason, the founder of Fight Aging! and Repair Biotechnologies, offers strategic consulting services to investors, entrepreneurs, and others interested in the longevity industry and its complexities. To find out m...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 25, 2019 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Newsletters Source Type: blogs

FDA Approves Cochlear Implants for Single-Sided Deafness, Asymmetric Hearing Loss
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved MED-EL USA’s cochlear implant system for single-sided deafness and asymmetric hearing loss. This is the first time cochlear implants have been green-lighted for these indications in the United States. MED-EL Cochlear Implant Systems, including SYNCHRONY and the recently FDA-approved SYNCHRONY 2, are now approved for people 5 years and older with single-sided deafness who have profound sensorineural hearing loss in one ear and normal hearing or mild sensorineural hearing loss in the other ear. They’re also approved for people 5 years and older with asymmetric h...
Source: American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Press Releases - August 23, 2019 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Jillian Kornak Tags: Audiology News Slider Hearing Assistive Technology hearing loss hearing loss treatment Source Type: blogs

Popular Science Publications Struggle to Grasp the State of Aging Research
As a rule, the journalistic community struggles to correctly represent any complex situation, community, or state of affairs. It is outsiders writing on a topic they generally know little of, under a deadline, and with few to no consequences attending mistakes and misrepresentations. To a journalist, any field looks like a confusing bristle of self-promoters and high-profile figures, all of them contradicting one another on points that require a good amount of technical knowledge to understand. It is the blind men and the elephant wherein some of the blind men have book deals to promote, or companies to talk up, and most o...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 20, 2019 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs

Protecting Health Data Outside of HIPAA: Will the Protecting Personal Health Data Act Tame the Wild West ?
Vince Kuraitis Deven McGraw By DEVEN McGRAW and VINCE KURAITIS This post is part of the series “The Health Data Goldilocks Dilemma: Privacy? Sharing? Both?” Introduction In our previous post, we described the “Wild West of Unprotected Health Data.” Will the cavalry arrive to protect the vast quantities of your personal health data that are broadly unprotected from sharing and use by third parties? Congress is seriously considering legislation to better protect the privacy of consumers’ personal data, given the patchwork of existing privacy protections. For the most part, the bills,...
Source: The Health Care Blog - August 19, 2019 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: Data Health Policy The Health Data Goldilocks Dilemma: Sharing? Privacy? Both? Deven McGraw HIPAA personal health data Protecting Personal Health Data Act Vince Kuraitis Source Type: blogs

The March Toward a Pre-Modern Approach to the Treatment of Pain Continues, Undeterred by Science
It seems that no amount of data-driven information can get policymakers to reconsider the hysteria-driven pain prescription policies they continue to put in place.I can understand lay politicians and members of the press misconstruing addiction and dependency, but there is no excuse when doctors make that error. Yet National Public Radio reports that surgeons in 18 Upstate New York hospitals have agreed on an initiative to limit the amount of pain medicine they will prescribe to postoperative patients discharged from the hospital. The reporter says that researchers “now know” that patients prescribed opioids for pos...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - August 12, 2019 Category: American Health Authors: Jeffrey A. Singer Source Type: blogs

Virtual Bodies For Real Drugs: In Silico Clinical Trials Are The Future
Traditional clinical trials are equivalent of billions of dollars and years of hard work with no guarantee for the new drug to be approved by regulatory bodies, not to speak about the dangers of testing medication on animals and/or humans. What if we could take a radical turn? What if we conducted clinical trials on virtual bodies that could perfectly mimic human physiology? With the help of artificial intelligence, enhanced computer simulations, and advances in personalized medicine, in silico trials might be a reality in the coming years. The magic expression is in silico As technologies transform every aspect of h...
Source: The Medical Futurist - August 10, 2019 Category: Information Technology Authors: nora Tags: Future of Medicine Future of Pharma Personalized Medicine AI artificial intelligence clinical clinical trial clinical trials digital drug drugs in silico in silico trials Innovation medication simulation virtual Source Type: blogs