Brain Injury Category Archives — Page 2 of 8 — DC Medical Malpractice & Patient Safety Blog Published by Washington, D.C. Personal Injury Lawyers

June 15, 2021

Speedy OK of Alzheimer’s drug creates a big mess for patients and taxpayers

The federal Food and Drug Administration has created an instant medical and regulatory morass by giving an accelerated approval to Biogen’s costly prescription medication targeted at patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

This is the first drug to win the precious official nod from the FDA in almost two decades.

But the agency’s OK to market aducanumab (pronounced “add-yoo-CAN-yoo-mab”), which will go by the brand name Aduhelm, may go in the books as one of the sketchiest and most ferociously contested in recent times. The drug somehow overcame Everest-sized reasons why, at best, it needed further study — which it is supposed to get. And it faces Himalayan-sized criticisms that it will raise false hopes for those afflicted with a condition that is spiking in a fast-graying nation, and for which no effective medical remedy has been found.

June 6, 2021

Top medical journals, ob-gyns, and NFL all face tough reckoning with racism

by Patrick A. Malone

Racial inequities roiled an array of health-related situations in recent days, showing how far the nation still must go to deal with pervasive injustices in medical systems nationwide.

The reported matters include:

The editor-in-chief departed a leading medical journal after one of his chief deputies, in a purported “education” session for which practitioners could earn professional credit, sought to deny the existence of racism in modern U.S. medicine and baldly asserted that no doctors are racist. The deputy already was forced out. The top editor, who served for a decade in his post, said he was sorry that the incident occurred on his watch, and his defenders praised his accomplishments at the Journal of the American Medical Association.

April 16, 2021

With malpractice claims constrained, injured Florida kids and families struggle

by Patrick A. Malone

When doctors, hospitals, and insurers bellyache about malpractice claims with little evidence on their prevalence or outcomes, patients and politicians should push back: And they can cite the nightmares people in grievous circumstance have suffered when their constitutional right to seek justice in civil lawsuits gets stripped away.

The Miami Herald and ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative website, have conducted a joint, deep dive into Florida’s decades-old legislative experiment, purportedly to assist families struggling with infants’ birth-related and catastrophic disabilities. The state’s neurological injury compensation initiative also was promoted as a way to stem a problem seen mostly in anecdote and not evidence — obstetricians and other specialists supposedly fleeing Florida, reputedly due to spiking malpractice insurance costs.

The media investigators, in a multipart series , have found that eliminating medical malpractice lawsuits for this slice of patients has benefited not the patients but instead, doctors, hospitals, and insurers.

March 26, 2021

With kids’ return to sports, a reminder about serious risks of head trauma

by Patrick A. Malone

With coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths falling from scary winter highs, the easing of public health measures may see young athletes returning fast to what are supposed to be the fun and educational benefits of organized sports.

But will players, and more importantly grownups, ensure that appropriate practices are followed to ensure kids not only are safe from coronavirus infection but also don’t suffer serious and lasting head injuries?

The Washington Post has posted articles that could provide important reminders about the risks of chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE — the degenerative brain disease associated with the repeated blows to the head.

October 30, 2020

As traffic resumes its crush, look out for big and little concerns on the road

by Patrick A. Malone

As pandemic-curtailed traffic returns to greater normality, motorists, bikers, and pedestrians may need to pay increased attention to two novel means of transportation taking to the roads: monster-sized SUVs and zippy high-tech scooters.

Even as officials in the nation’s capital approved, as expected, new rules on e-scooters, Andrew Hawkins, a reviewer at the Verge news and information site, deserves credit for raising safety concerns about a rising slice of the U.S. auto market: the over-sized Sport Utility Vehicle.

In case you missed it, SUVs have become the nation’s vehicular obsession, particularly in the kid-filled suburbs, with experts estimating they made up a large part — 47.4% — of auto sales in 2019.

September 10, 2020

As fans miss fall games, experts see decline in kids’ ER visits for head harms

by Patrick A. Malone

Although many fans will be sad that football won’t dominate their lives as it usually does in the months after Labor Day, the pandemic-related constriction, postponement, and cancellation of so many prep and collegiate sports may have an upside: It likely will add to declines in the need for urgent care for dangerous and damaging head injuries.

Public awareness has soared about the risks of such trauma, with preventive measures leading to a sharp dip in the emergency department visits for sports- and recreation-related injuries to children and adolescents, federal researchers have found.

Their study for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was based on data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System–All Injury Program from 2001 to 2018. Early in that time period, young people’s ED trips peaked at “411 per 100,000 youths aged 17 years or younger in 2012 before declining by 32% to 299 per 100,000 by 2018,” journalist Bridget M. Kuehn wrote in an online article for the Journal of the American Medical Association.

August 7, 2020

The big Alzheimer’s puzzle: Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. Blood, too?

by Patrick A. Malone

It isn’t just the testing for the novel coronavirus that has already anxious Americans upset these days. Controversies also are swirling around existing and developing ways for experts to screen older patients for cognitive decline, namely dementia and its most familiar form, Alzheimer’s disease.

Alzheimer’s disease, which accounts for 60%-80% of dementia cases, is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States overall and the fifth leading cause of death for those age 65 and older, researchers say. Medical scientists have engaged in furious efforts for a while now to determine the condition’s causes and to create treatments for it — a response that is sorely lacking now.

But the New York Times reported that experts believe they are nearing a better way to screen and diagnose the illness using the blood rather than current “expensive methods like PET scans of the brain and spinal taps for cerebrospinal fluid.” As reporter Pam Belluck wrote:

July 31, 2020

Road toll, gun violence, heat risks, pesky skeeters — yipes, the perils abound

by Patrick A. Malone

While the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, other major killers of Americans — threats posed by vehicles and guns, as well as searing weather and nasty critters like mosquitoes — have not stopped. People need to be aware and safeguard themselves as they can from these risks.

The data keep growing and the news, for example, continues to be glum about the coronavirus lockdowns and road mayhem. As NBC News reported:

“Motor vehicle fatalities surged by 23.5% in May, as drivers took advantage of open roads to push to autobahn speeds, a situation made easier by the fact that authorities in many communities were pulling back on enforcement, in part, to avoid risking the possibility of their officers becoming exposed to the coronavirus. According to the National Safety Council (NSC) report, the May numbers mark the third-straight month that U.S. motorists were at a higher risk of dying from a crash …”

July 7, 2020

Concerns spike as police seek to medicalize tactics that end in arrest deaths

by Patrick A. Malone

The national outage over authorities’ excessive use of force, especially against black men, may take law enforcement, first responders, politicians, and critics into a murky and nightmarish area — call it the unfounded medicalization of official control.

Two fatal flash point cases — involving African Americans George Floyd in Minneapolis and Elijah McCain (shown, right) in a Denver suburb — already have raised disturbing questions about “excited delirium,” a mental health description or diagnosis manufactured by authorities, and whether paramedics should be asked and then if they should administer powerful narcotics to individuals at police request.

As the nonprofit, independent Marshall Project on criminal justice reported about excited delirium:

June 21, 2020

Details build on authorities’ brutal use of ‘less lethal’ projectiles and tear gas

by Patrick A. Malone

Just as law enforcement authorities find themselves under fire for instances of racist, excessive uses of force, police agencies across the country seem hell-bent on giving critics more and more evidence for their argument that major policing reforms are needed.

The independent, nonpartisan Kaiser Health News Service and USA Today deserve credit for scrutinizing dozens of incidents involving officials’ actions nationwide against people protesting the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd. As the news organizations reported (and in passages worth quoting at length):

“In a joint investigation into law enforcement actions at protests across the country after George Floyd’s death in police custody, KHN and USA TODAY found that some officers appear to have violated their department’s own rules when they fired ‘less lethal’ projectiles at protesters who were for the most part peacefully assembled. Critics have assailed those tactics as civil rights and First Amendment violations, and three federal judges have ordered temporary restrictions on their use.