First Generation Pharmaceutical Treatments for Transthyretin Amyloidosis Continue to Make Progress
Perhaps a score of the countless proteins in the human body misfold in large amounts in later life. The misfolded form is insoluble, leading to solid deposits of the protein in and around cells. These problem proteins are known as amyloids, and the accumulation of amyloids is one of the root causes of aging. Amyloidosis conditions arise from the presence of amyloid and the disruptive effect it has on cellular biochemistry. The best known form of amyloid is the amyloid-β thought to cause Alzheimer's disease, but the research community is beginning to appreciate that other forms may be just as big a problem over the course ...
Source: Fight Aging! - August 28, 2018 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs
Ill-informed, Mission-Hostile Health Care Leadership... in the White House and the US Department of Health and Human Services
Introduction - What Has Gone Wrong with the Leadership of Health Care OrganizationsA major focus ofHealth Care Renewal has been problems in leadership and governance of health care organizations, which we believe became major causes of health care dysfunction. For example, we have discussed how leadership is oftenill-informed. More and more people leading non-profit, for-profit and government health care organizations have had no training or experience in actually caring for patients, or in biomedical, clinical or public health research as professional managers largely supplanted health care professionals as le...
Source: Health Care Renewal - August 5, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: conflicts of interest crime DHHS ill-informed management mission-hostile management narcotics White House Source Type: blogs
Big Pharma Wants Your DNA (But What Will They Do With It?)
It's never been a secret that the consumer DNA labs like23andMe have always intended to sell their anonymized data to other parties such as pharmaceutical companies (see: Helix Makes DNA Sequencing Available to Consumers;Where Do We Go From Here?,23andMe Customers: Suckers or Empowered Consumers?).This has always been the rationale for offering DNA testing to consumers at very low prices. After a few years, the details of such deals are beginning to emerge. A recent article spelled out some of them (see:Big Pharma Would Like Your DNA). Below is an excerpt from it:...[T]his week ’s announcement that GlaxoSmithKl...
Source: Lab Soft News - July 31, 2018 Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Bruce Friedman Tags: Clinical Lab Industry News Clinical Lab Testing Electronic Health Record (EHR) Genomic Testing Healthcare Innovations Lab Industry Trends Medical Consumerism Medical Research Pharmaceutical Industry Source Type: blogs
Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 245
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
Just when you thought your brain could unwind on a Friday, you realise that it would rather be challenged with some good old fashioned medical trivia FFFF…introducing Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 245
Readers can subscribe to FFFF RSS or subscribe to the FFFF weekly EMAIL
Question 1
What is a HeLa cell?
+ Reveal the funtabulous answer
expand(document.getElementById('ddet769736162'));expand(document.getElementById('ddetlink769736162'))
HeLa cells are an immor...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - July 20, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Mark Corden Tags: Frivolous Friday Five George Otto Gey Glanzmann's thrombasthaenia Hela cells Henrietta Lacks NEJM new england journal of medicine Sildenafil smallpox viagra Source Type: blogs
Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 245
LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog LITFL • Life in the Fast Lane Medical Blog - Emergency medicine and critical care medical education blog
Just when you thought your brain could unwind on a Friday, you realise that it would rather be challenged with some good old fashioned medical trivia FFFF…introducing Funtabulously Frivolous Friday Five 245
Readers can subscribe to FFFF RSS or subscribe to the FFFF weekly EMAIL
Question 1
What is a HeLa cell?
+ Reveal the funtabulous answer
expand(document.getElementById('ddet1947728686'));expand(document.getElementById('ddetlink1947728686'))
HeLa cells are an imm...
Source: Life in the Fast Lane - July 20, 2018 Category: Emergency Medicine Authors: Mark Corden Tags: Frivolous Friday Five George Otto Gey Glanzmann's thrombasthaenia Hela cells Henrietta Lacks NEJM new england journal of medicine Sildenafil smallpox viagra Source Type: blogs
" Hope in a Bottle " - Components of Purdue Pharma Stealth Marketing Campaign for Oxycontin Revealed by Legal Documents from Tennessee
Introduction: Disinformation and Stealth Marketing CampaignsBack in the distant past the US government made some attempt to hold big health care corporations to account for misleading marketing practices. We learned a lot about these practices from documents revealed in the resulting litigation, and in particular, about stealthy, deceptive systematicmarketing,lobbying, andpolicy advocacy campaigns on behalf of big health care organizations, often pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device companies. For example, in 2012 wefound out about the stealth marketing campaign used by GlaxoSmithKline to sell its a...
Source: Health Care Renewal - July 8, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: deception disinformation narcotics perverse incentives propaganda public relations Purdue Pharma stealth marketing Source Type: blogs
Dander Still Up. Drowning in Great Dismal Swamp. Film at Eleven.
Maybe this is the last in my series of dander-raising essays, as recent national and world events have most definitely left so many of us with a raging case of TDS. (Trump Derangement Syndrome, look it up it ' s a thing).So many damned browser tabs open. So little time.Or maybe not. Who knows. Where are all these suicides coming from?My editor keeps telling me, " don ' t let it make you paralytic. " Hey, I ' m trying.Just sensing a kind of coalescence in all the corruption our bloggers keep writing about. How do we even differentiate these activities across so many sectors of society. We were going to see our swamp drained...
Source: Health Care Renewal - June 12, 2018 Category: Health Management Source Type: blogs
Bad Blood & Mad Love at Theranos —Psychopaths at Work
By MATTHEW HOLT
I’ve been kidding John Carreyrou on Twitter that I was going to give Bad Blood, his tale about the Theranos fraud, a one star review because he never sent me a preview copy. But it’s a barn burner, and I can’t recommend it enough, even though I spent my own $13.95 on the Kindle version!
By now the story is well known. The young blonde Stanford drop out with the baritone voice says she’s going to change lab testing forever, then hides in stealth in Silicon Valley. I caught a few whispers over the years that this company was doing something but as lab testing was a little away from the mainstream of...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 25, 2018 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Matthew Holt Tags: The Business of Health Care Bad Blood Elizabeth Holmes John Carreyrou Theranos Source Type: blogs
The March of Legal Settlements Made by Pharmaceutical Companies is Diminishing - Presaging Even Less Accountablity for Top Health Care Organizational Leaders?
DiscussionSo my perceptions that the number of the sorts of legal settlements of interest to us has likely been diminishing was accurate. Unfortunately, rather than the decrease being due to better behavior, decresed reporting, or my laxity in case-finding, it now looks that US government efforts to combat bad behavior by big health care corporations and to hold top leaders of these organizations accountable is getting even more lax.So once again, with feeling... We seem to be sliding backwards in efforts to make the leaders of large health care organizations accountable, and particularly to combat the worse man...
Source: Health Care Renewal - May 25, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: Donald Trump health care prices impunity kickbacks legal settlements Pfizer Source Type: blogs
Real World Evidence (RWE) vs Randomized Control Trials (RCT): The Battle For the Future of Medicine
By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD
Randomized control trials – RCTs – rose to prominence in the twentieth century as physicians and regulators sought to evaluate rigorously the performance of new medical therapies; by century’s end, RCTs had become, as medical historian Laura Bothwell has noted, “the gold standard of medical knowledge,” occupying the top position of the “methodologic heirarch[y].”
The value of RCTs lies in the random, generally blinded, allocation of patients to treatment or control group, an approach that when properly executed minimizes confounders (based on the presumption that any significant confound...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 15, 2018 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
The Case For Real World Evidence (RWE)
By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD
Randomized control trials – RCTs – rose to prominence in the twentieth century as physicians and regulators sought to evaluate rigorously the performance of new medical therapies; by century’s end, RCTs had become, as medical historian Laura Bothwell has noted, “the gold standard of medical knowledge,” occupying the top position of the “methodologic heirarch[y].”
The value of RCTs lies in the random, generally blinded, allocation of patients to treatment or control group, an approach that when properly executed minimizes confounders (based on the presumption that any significant confound...
Source: The Health Care Blog - May 15, 2018 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: John Irvine Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
Don't Know Much About Health Care and Public Health, and Don't Care Much About Their Missions - but in Leadership Positions in US Government Health Agencies
Here we go again. As we We have frequently discussed how health care leadership is oftenill-informed ( look here). More and more people leading non-profit, for-profit and government health care organizations have had no training or experience in actually caring for patients, or in biomedical, clinical or public health research. Obviously health care and health policy decisions made by ill-informed people could have detrimental effects on patients ' and the public ' s health.Through 2016, our examples of ill-informed leadership in health care tended to be executives of hospital systems (e..g.,in 2014...
Source: Health Care Renewal - April 27, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: DHHS disinformation Donald Trump ill-informed management mission-hostile management propaganda Source Type: blogs
9th Aggregate Spend and Open Payments Conference
On June 11th and 12th, 2018, the Ninth Aggregate Spend and Open Payments Conference will be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at the Sonesta Philadelphia Hotel Rittenhouse Square.
The organizers of the event recognize the importance of transparency reporting and the moving pieces that are involved in aggregate reporting of compensation data to avoid any conflicts of interest. Organizers note that while compliance leaders do their best to reduce any discrepancies prior to the Physician Payments Sunshine Act reporting deadline, they still spend millions of dollars annually to manage reporting errors. In an effort to contin...
Source: Policy and Medicine - April 24, 2018 Category: American Health Authors: Thomas Sullivan - Policy & Medicine Writing Staff Source Type: blogs
Through the Revolving Door, with a Few Stumbles - Health Care Corporate Executives and Consultants Continue to Become Leaders of Trump's Department of Health and Human Services
We continue to see a remarkable stream of people transiting therevolving door from high-level positions in health care corporations to high-level positions in health care policy or regulation for the Trump administration. Lately, though, these transitions have not been without missteps. The most recent cases we have found, in the order of their public appearance, appear below.John Bardis, Who Went from MedAssets to Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services for Administration, Resigned Under FireWe first discussed the appointment of Mr Bardis in May, 2017,here. We noted then that most recently Mr Bar...
Source: Health Care Renewal - April 18, 2018 Category: Health Management Tags: conflicts of interest CVS Donald Trump finance health care corruption Pfizer revolving doors Source Type: blogs
A Failure to Treat Alzheimer's by Interfering in RAGE-Induced Inflammation
Alzheimer's disease certainly has an inflammatory component to it, as do other neurodegenerative conditions. The immune system of the brain runs awry in characteristic ways. Evidence exists to suggest that short-lived advanced glycation end products (AGEs) of the sort found in individuals with metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes are a significant source of inflammation. They act via the receptor for AGEs, RAGE. This, I should note, is entirely unrelated to the detrimental effects of persistent, long-lived AGEs on tissue structure. Short-lived AGEs are more of a lifestyle issue, in that everyone has them to some degree, ...
Source: Fight Aging! - April 13, 2018 Category: Research Authors: Reason Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs
