Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Alzheimer Drug Failure Deals Crushing Blow To Scientists Who Rail Over 35 Years Of Missteps
Stat: Alzheimer’s Researchers Seethe Over Years Of Missteps After Latest Drug Failure
In the wake of disappointing results this week for yet another experimental Alzheimer’s drug, scientists who have toiled for decades to understand the devastating disease expressed frustration and even anger that their field has not made more progress toward a cure. ... To a growing number of scientists, the problem isn’t that there’s been too little time to make meaningful progress against a hugely complicated disease that strikes an organ unrivaled for its complexity. It’s that the field has made many missteps, that its leaders stifled research that deviated from the dominant theory of what caused Alzheimer’s, and that it was too easy to count as progress journal papers rather than advances that help patients. (Begley, 7/28)
In other public health news, a new organ donation technique offers hope to patients, experts caution against a new trend of injecting gas into the areas around the eye and a study puts a price tag on the world's growing sedentary lifestyle —
The Philadelphia Inquirer: For Organs Kept Alive Before Transplant, Tantalizing Possibilities
The process is called perfusion... it means the delivery of oxygenated blood to the tissues of the body. Normally, they are inside. But donor kidneys have been perfused before transplant since the 1960s. Surgeons started experimenting with small numbers of other organs about a decade ago. Pumping blood or a synthetic solution through them for several hours allows time to run tests rather than discarding an organ because of the mere possibility of a problem. It also opens up all sorts of futuristic medical ideas. (Jablow, 7/29)
Stat: Trend Watch: People Are Injecting Gas Into Their Eyelids To Fix Dark Circles
Forget all those creams that promise to reduce eye puffiness. A new beauty trend makes your eyes swell up on purpose — with the goal of making you look less tired. Fans of the procedure, called carboxytherapy, can spend thousands of dollars to have carbon dioxide injected both above and below the eye, hoping to stimulate blood flow and erase dark circles. But experts caution there isn’t any evidence to back up the procedure. It’s likely not even targeting the real root of the skin blemishes. “I would be very skeptical of its use for dark circles,” said Dr. Molly Wanner, a cosmetic dermatologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. (Thielking, 7/29)
CBS News: How Much Are Couch Potatoes Costing The World?
Obesity, heart disease, and even an early death are some of the risks of physical inactivity. But what if we could put a dollar amount on the financial burden of an increasingly sedentary world? Researchers from the University of Sydney in Australia attempted to do just that in the first study to estimate the global cost of physical inactivity. The results are startling. The report, published in The Lancet, found that physical inactivity cost the world $67.5 billion in direct and indirect costs in 2013. (Welch, 7/28)
