Startups Eagerly Dive Into Largely Untapped Marketplace Of Mental-Health Related Technology
From robot therapists to virtual reality worlds that help treat addiction, mental and behavioral health technology is booming. In other public health news: immunotherapy, HIV, black lung, genetic testing, sugar, and black infant mortality.
Stat:
The Opportunity 'Is Huge': Why Tech Developers Are Trying To Tackle Mental Health
Here in the technology epicenter of the world, developers are increasingly writing code and launching products to try to disrupt yet another field: mental health. Even as big tech players have conquered the markets in industries like transportation and lodging, they’ve largely steered clear of mental health treatment. Now, however, with an influx of funding, companies are revamping pills with digital sensors, designing virtual reality worlds to treat addiction and other conditions, and building chatbots for interactive therapy. (Robbins, 7/20)
Stat:
Scientists Explore New Kind Of Immunotherapy To Treat Autoimmune Diseases
Riding the coattails of CAR-T cancer therapies, scientists have begun to explore a spin-off: using similar immune cells to treat autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes and prevent rejection of transplanted organs. In CAR-T therapies, T cells are extracted from a patient’s blood, reprogrammed to attack cancer cells, and then re-infused into the bloodstream to carry out their new assignment. (Farber, 7/20)
WBUR:
Report Warns Of 'Dangerous Complacency' In The Fight Against HIV
Prevention efforts are a different story, and if the world doesn't figure out how to prevent new cases of HIV, stubbornly holding steady at about two million infections a year since 2005, according to a 2016 report in Lancet HIV, a resurgence in the epidemic is possible. That gloomy warning comes from a report by a new Lancet Commission led by the International AIDS Society and published in the July 19 Lancet just days before the start of the 22nd International AIDS Conference on July 22 in Amsterdam. (Brink, 7/19)
Reuters:
A Tenth Of U.S. Veteran Coal Miners Have Black Lung Disease: NIOSH
More than 10 percent of America’s coal miners with 25 or more years of experience have black lung disease, the highest rate recorded in roughly two decades, according to a government study released on Thursday that showed cases concentrated heavily in central Appalachia. The study by researchers from the government’s National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health marks the most authoritative evidence to date of a resurgence of the incurable respiratory illness caused by coal dust, which plagued miners in the 1970s but was nearly eradicated by the 1990s. (7/19)
The Associated Press:
Gene Tests Can Provide Health Clues -- And Needless Worry
Last year, Katie Burns got a phone call that shows what can happen in medicine when information runs ahead of knowledge. Burns learned that a genetic test of her fetus had turned up an abnormality. It appeared in a gene that, when it fails to work properly, causes heart defects, mental disability and other problems. But nobody knew whether the specific abnormality detected by the test would cause trouble. (7/19)
The New York Times:
Parents Aren’t Good Judges Of Their Kids’ Sugar Intake
More than 18 percent of elementary-school-age students in the United States are obese, and no one really knows why. The causes are numerous and tangled. But consuming too much sugar is widely accepted as an important factor. In 2015, the World Health Organization issued a recommendation: Everyone, regardless of age, should restrict his or her sugar intake to less than 10 percent of all calories consumed daily. For young children, that would mean no more than about 45 grams of sugar a day. Of course, few young children are responsible for their own diets or can be expected to capably monitor their sugar consumption. That oversight usually falls to a parent. And a recent study published in the International Journal of Obesity suggests that most of us, alas, are not adept at estimating how much sugar is in some common foodstuffs. (Reynolds, 7/19)
Cleveland Plain Dealer:
Can Targeting Race-Based Stress And Healthcare Bias Save Babies' Lives?
Plans to reduce the county's shockingly high rate of black infant mortality and narrow the huge and growing racial divide in infant deaths in our area have started to take shape. With hope to combat racial bias in health care, measure stress levels during pregnancy and interview families who have lost babies, three projects under the umbrella of the city-county infant mortality initiative First Year Cleveland have recently launched or are about to begin. (Zeltner, 7/20)
