Research Studies

November 1, 2019

Too many spoons full of sugar going down in kids’ drinks

Grownups shouldn’t be surprised that child obesity is a major and rising concern for 1 in 5 of the nation’s young, putting their short- and long-term health at serious peril: That’s because Big Sugar and major food makers persist in a costly, relentless barrage on kids and adults for unhealthful products, notably sweet drinks that hook children into hard-to-break habits for a lifetime.

Although pediatricians and nutrition experts keep warning that babies and tots, especially, should get much lower amounts of sugar in various forms in their daily diet, almost “two-thirds of the $2.2 billion in beverages marketed to children contained added sweeteners, according to a report released last week by the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at the University of Connecticut,” the New York Times reported.

Rudd researchers found that just three food industry titans sprinkled $21 million in advertising for sugary liquids.

October 29, 2019

Who will step up to deal with dementia and Alzheimer’s?

by Patrick A. Malone

With as many as 14 million Americans potentially suffering from various forms of dementia by 2040, including the common Alzheimer’s disease, and with the costs of the care for them forecast to soar soon to more than $500 billion, a frenzied race is on for ways to deal with the debilitating cognitive syndromes. But will individual initiative or Big Pharma products matter most for seniors and their loved ones in the days ahead?

Industry analysts and patient advocates alike were stunned when drug maker Biogen reversed itself and announced that it would seek federal Food and Drug Administration approval for aducanumab, which the New York Times reported “is a monoclonal antibody, an expensive type of drug that attaches to specific proteins in order to disable them. The drug clears a key protein in Alzheimer’s disease — beta amyloid — that accumulates in plaques in patients’ brains. Aducanumab is given as an intravenous infusion once a month.”

Biogen had spent heavily on multiple tests of this drug, suddenly pulling the plug on it last spring, declaring with the counsel of an independent advisory board that the prospective prescription medication — and possibly the line of inquiry about beta amyloids and Alzheimer’s that had led to its creation — was a failure.

October 24, 2019

Seniors are getting urine over-tested and joints over-injected

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s the 21^st century, and excellent information is more available than ever due to communication and technology advances. But doctors and hospitals keep harming patients by testing and treating them in ways that are unsupported by rigorous medical evidence, and by carrying out safety recommendations in extreme ways.

Just consider:

Hospitals have become so obsessive about protecting seniors from falls while under their care that they’re all but lashing them to their beds, damaging their already shaky fitness, according to Melissa Bailer, a Kaiser Health News reporter whose work appeared in the Washington Post. She quotes experts as warning of an “epidemic of immobility” for older patients.

October 22, 2019

Caveat emptor: It’s not only an open season ‘for’ but also ‘on’ health coverage

by Patrick A. Malone

Americans in coming weeks will make important decisions on the national and personal level about how best to safeguard themselves and their loved ones with a crucial component of the U.S. health care system: their insurance coverage.

Though the exact timing of the open enrollment season varies by geography and plan, it’s that key time for millions who get their coverage via Medicare and may wish to make changes. These are important weeks, too, for many who obtain health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Many workers are hearing a lot from their human resources folks about their employer-provided plans.

It’s clear from the political polling and the sometimes-dreary Democratic presidential debates that there’s huge interest and lots of devil in the details about Americans’ health insurance options.

October 18, 2019

Flu shot urgency rises with warnings from Down Under and vaping illnesses

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s an imperfect predictor, health officials concede. Still, a nasty season of infections Down Under has increased the urgency of their recommendations to the U.S. public to get the annual flu shot before Halloween and certainly before everyone sits down for Thanksgiving dinner.

Although concern already had been growing about bad months ahead in the United States for flu, an early and “fairly severe” season in Australia has increased officials’ worries, the New York Times reported.

That’s because the Aussies, while not a 100% reliable bellwether, showed the more populous States about flu severity as recently as last season, according to Donald G. McNeil Jr., who has reported on disease outbreaks in more than 60 countries for the New York Times. He wrote this:

October 15, 2019

In U.S. health care, experts assail $1 trillion-plus in waste, fraud and abuse

by Patrick A. Malone

Politicians almost by reflex decry the skyrocketing cost of U.S. health care by blaming much of it on waste, fraud, abuse. They, alas, really may be on to something, newly published research shows.

Health care experts, including a medical leader of health insurer Humana, “combed through 54 studies and reports published since 2012 that estimated the waste or savings from changes in practice and policy,” leading them to some jaw-dropping calculations about how well spent is the $3.5 trillion or so that Americans drop on health care, the New York Times reported.

Answer: Really badly. The researchers, in their published work, estimated that 20%-25% of American health care spending is wasteful. That turns into giant sums, fast, as the newspaper reported, including:

October 9, 2019

Safety concerns grow over cars’ high-tech braking and summoning features

by Patrick A. Malone

Technology advocates may be ignoring due cautions as they put software ahead of safety in the push to make the vehicles of today and tomorrow more self-driving (aka autonomous).

Car and truck owners, safety advocates warn, should proceed with care before relying on automatic emergency braking systems, especially as they purport to safeguard pedestrians. Restraint also may be the watchword for a new feature that allows a luxe electric car to be “summoned” to its driver, shifting out of a parked position and navigating short distances on its own.

The American Automobile Association reported that it sought to get ahead of the curve by subjecting the new automatic emergency braking systems to track tests in mid-sized sedans of their safety applications under “real world” conditions. The outcomes were worrisome, AAA found:

October 6, 2019

Where’s the beef? Experts chew on meat-eating: Bad for you, unknown, or what?

by Patrick A. Malone

The elite of public health organizations are up in arms about a new report from a group of international researchers who looked at red meat and its health benefits and harms, and more or less shrugged. The new take goes like this, reported the New York Times:

“If there are health benefits from eating less beef and pork, they are small, the researchers concluded. Indeed, the advantages are so faint that they can be discerned only when looking at large populations, the scientists said, and are not sufficient to tell individuals to change their meat-eating habits.”

That view, of course, contradicts what public health and nutrition experts have recommended for years, and so blue-chip health outfits like the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health condemned the researchers for supporting what now may be akin to a health heresy.

September 27, 2019

A toast to clear and simple advice: Parents, it’s just milk and water for the kids

by Patrick A. Malone

Milk and water — it’s that simple. That’s the latest and official recommendation for what children 5 and younger mostly should drink.

For parents, if any doubt persists, that advice comes from leading health authorities, including Healthy Eating Research, a nutrition advocacy group funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The group developed the kids’ drink guidelines with the backing of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the American Heart Association, and the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry.

The experts cautioned grown-ups about giving children sugary drinks, including, in a sure-to-be-contested suggestion, recommending a hard cap on fruit juices: for 100% juice, less than a cup a day.

September 20, 2019

Nursing homes and long-term care facilities may be infection ‘cauldrons’

by Patrick A. Malone

The battle to reduce the sky-high cost of hospital care may have created its own unforeseen and harmful consequence: By hastening to get patients out of traditional hospitals and into skilled nursing facilities and long-term care centers, doctors and policy-makers may be contributing to a medical nightmare — serious infections acquired in health care institutions.

The New York Times reported that “public health experts say that nursing facilities, and long-term hospitals, are a dangerously weak link in the health care system, often understaffed and ill-equipped to enforce rigorous infection control, yet continuously cycling infected patients, or those who carry the germ, into hospitals and back again.”

Hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) pose significant risks to already ill and injured patients, as well as adding to the fearsome costs of institutional care, the Leapfrog Group, an independent patient safety and advocacy group has found. As Leapfrog has reported: