Longer Looks: Missing Study Results; Antipsychotics For Kids; Giving Care In Nepal
Each week, KHN's Shefali Luthra finds interesting reads from around the Web.
STAT:
Law Ignored, Patients At Risk
Stanford University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and other prestigious medical research institutions have flagrantly violated a federal law requiring public reporting of study results, depriving patients and doctors of complete data to gauge the safety and benefits of treatments, a STAT investigation has found. The violations have left gaping holes in a federal database used by millions of patients, their relatives, and medical professionals, often to compare the effectiveness and side effects of treatments for deadly diseases such as advanced breast cancer. (Charles Piller, 12/13)
The New York Times:
Still In A Crib, Yet Being Given Antipsychotics
Cases like that of Andrew Rios, in which children age 2 or younger are prescribed psychiatric medications to address alarmingly violent or withdrawn behavior, are rising rapidly, data shows. Many doctors worry that these drugs, designed for adults and only warily accepted for certain school-age youngsters, are being used to treat children still in cribs despite no published research into their effectiveness and potential health risks for children so young. (Alan Schwartz, 12/10)
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel/MedPage Today:
FDA Repeatedly Approved Cancer Drug Afinitor Without Proof It Extended Life
Since 2009, the year the drug first got on the market, there have been nearly 9,000 reports of serious adverse reactions among Afinitor users, including more than 2,700 deaths and more than 3,100 hospitalizations, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today analysis of FDA data found. But in the desperate world of cancer medicine, toxic and expensive drugs that aren't proven to extend life can quickly achieve blockbuster status. For Afinitor, each FDA approval for a new condition increased the pool of potential patients — and potential sales — for the drug, sometimes substantially. (John Fauber and Coulter Jones, 12/12)
The New Yorker:
Medical Mountaineers
One autumn day, the Nomads Clinic, a medical-service trip, pilgrimage, and adventure expedition, set off from Juphal with six riding horses, and fifty pack mules laden with a month’s worth of food, cooking equipment, camping gear, and clothing. Six duffels were stuffed with medicine and medical equipment—asthma inhalers, deworming pills, vitamins, analgesics, antibiotics. Others held hundreds of solar lights, toothbrushes, sunglasses, and reading glasses, to be given away. It was the 2015 edition of a mobile clinic that Joan Halifax, a seventy-three-year-old American teacher of Zen Buddhism, has been coördinating since the nineteen-eighties, to provide medical care in places where there is little or none. (Rebecca Solnit, 12/13)
The Atlantic:
Pharma Bro's Latest Move Targets Latinos
After dropping $2 million on a Wu-Tang Clan album, the pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli has found a new project: making an essential treatment unaffordable for poor immigrants from Latin America. Shkreli, otherwise known as “pharma bro,” gained notoriety earlier this year when his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, increased the price of a drug used to treat AIDS patients from around $13.50 to $750. He’s now the CEO of KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, which recently announced its plans to submit benznidazole, a treatment for Chagas disease purchased earlier this month, for Food and Drug Administration approval next year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 300,000 people in the United States have the deadly disease. Most of them are immigrants from Latin America, where as many as 8 million people are infected. (Daisy Hernandez, 12/14)
Vox:
The Promise And Peril Of Ted Cruz’s Plan To Overhaul The Drug Approval Process
Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (TX) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) just introduced a new bill that would completely overhaul the Food and Drug Administration. The main idea: The senators want to expedite approvals for lifesaving drugs, give Congress space to intervene in FDA decisions lawmakers don't like, and expand the drugs and devices Americans have access to by allowing products approved in other countries onto the market. (Julia Belluz, 12/14)
STAT:
Insurers Want To Nudge You To Better Health. So They’re Data Mining Your Shopping Lists.
Insurance companies have always had access to your medical records, and in some cases your genetic data, too. Now, they’re paying data miners to sift through information on everything from what model car you drive to how many hours you sleep, from which magazines you read to where you shop and what you buy. The goal: To decipher patterns that will allow them to steer you away from health emergencies. And to save themselves a whole lot of money in the process. (Rebecca Robbins, 12/15)
The Atlantic:
The Second Assault
Christine White was a preteen when she went on her first diet. At school, she was bubbly and sociable, an honors student immersed in social causes. But at home, she would carefully ration her food. By the time she was 14, she had developed bulimia. It was easier to hide the purging from her family than it was to explain why she wasn’t eating. In her darkest moments, she would scribble her anxieties into a blue-lined journal. ... She didn’t fully understand what drove her binges, but she had one idea—an experience she referred to as “my hell” and “my secret” in later journals. ... Researchers are increasingly finding that, in addition to leaving deep emotional scars, childhood sexual abuse often turns food into an obsession for its victims. Many, like White, become prone to binge-eating. Others willfully put on weight to desexualize, in the hope that what happened to them as children will never happen again. (Olga Khazan, 12/15)