Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Mental Health And Suicide In Spotlight Following Designer Kate Spade's Death
Los Angeles Times: Designer Kate Spade's Death Renews Conversation About Mental Health Awareness
The death of Kate Spade has renewed discussions of mental health awareness, with celebrities mourning the fashion designer’s death with missives about depression and suicide prevention. Spade, whose colorful handbags, bold prints and cheerful sayings once dominated American fashion, was found dead on Tuesday in her New York apartment in an apparent suicide, according to the Associated Press. A former accessories editor at the now-defunct magazine Mademoiselle, Spade founded her fashion label in 1993 with her husband, Andy, who was involved with his own fashion label, Jack Spade, and now has the branding venture, Partners & Spade. (Saad and Paniogue, 6/5)
The New York Times: A Promising Cancer Treatment Made Patients Worse, Not Better
Drugs that activate the immune system to fight cancer have brought remarkable recoveries to many people in recent years. But one of those drugs seems to have had the opposite effect on three patients with an uncommon blood cancer who were taking part in a study. After a single treatment, their disease quickly became much worse, doctors reported in a letter to The New England Journal of Medicine. (Grady, 6/5)
NPR: ASCO: Less Can Be More For Cancer Treatment
For many years, the death rate from cancer climbed steadily, and the focus of big cancer meetings was the quest for better treatments to bring malignancies under control. Cancer death rates have been falling in recent decades, and that's allowed researchers to ask another important question: Are some people getting too much treatment for their cancers? The answer, from the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago these past few days, is an emphatic yes. (Harris, 6/5)
The New York Times: Do You Have The Right Stuff To Be A Stool Donor?
Wanted: fecal matter from healthy adults with a regular constitution and a good heart. Screening is rigorous. Reimbursement is modest but can add up for those willing to make daily donations of waste that would otherwise be flushed away. Fecal transplants are being used increasingly to treat Clostridium difficile, an often intractable and debilitating bacterial infection. The potential for expanding the therapeutic applications of fecal transplants sent Canadian researchers on a quest to pinpoint what precisely motivates stool donors and how they might recruit more volunteers. (Rabin, 6/5)
NPR: A Clinic Creating 3-Parent-Babies In Ukraine Stirs Controversy
In a clinic on a side street in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, doctors are doing something that, as far as is publicly known, is being done nowhere else in the world: Using DNA from three different people to create babies for women who are infertile. "If you can help these families to achieve their own babies, why it must be forbidden?" Valery Zukin, director of the Nadiya Clinic, asks as he peers over his glasses. "It is a dream to want to have a genetic connection with a baby." (Stein, 6/6)
The New York Times: Weight Training May Help To Ease Or Prevent Depression
Lifting weights might also lift moods, according to an important new review of dozens of studies about strength training and depression. It finds that resistance exercise often substantially reduces people’s gloom, no matter how melancholy they feel at first, or how often — or seldom — they actually get to the gym and lift. There already is considerable evidence that exercise, in general, can help to both stave off and treat depression. A large-scale 2016 review that involved more than a million people, for instance, concluded that being physically fit substantially reduces the risk that someone will develop clinical depression. Other studies and reviews have found that exercise also can reduce symptoms of depression in people who have been given diagnoses of the condition. (Reynolds, 6/6)
Austin American-Statesman: Weight Loss Balloons Linked To 12 Deaths, FDA Warns
A total of 12 patients have died since 2016 due to weight loss balloon surgery, the Food and Drug Administration reported Monday. ... Officials are keeping an eye on the Orbera Intragastric Balloon System from Austin, Texas-based Apollo Endosurgery and San Clemente, California-based ReShape Lifesciences’ ReShape Integrated Dual Balloon System, according to Monday’s news release. (Pirani, 6/5)
