It is disturbing to regularly see the efforts of those for whom your disease respresents an opportunity. These are people who exploit the fact that people become ill, to make money. The medical devices industry is not all bad, many of its players are well-meaning, but plenty appear to be purely motivated by money.
The same cannot be said for the pharmaceutical industry, where the overwhelming intention is simply to make money and perhaps a secondary intention is to weild power. It has become impossible to say with any certainty that at some level there is some genuine interest in benefiting consumers.
But there are other hangers-on. These are people who seem excited when they discover yet another way to capitalise on misfortune. Consider the following press release for example.
Report on the global market for prostate cancer therapeutics
Reportlinker.com announces that a new market research report is available in its catalogue: Prostate Cancer Therapeutics – A Global Market Perspective http://www.reportlinker.com/p0164266/Prostate-Cancer-Therapeutics—A-Global-Market-Perspective.html
Growth in prostate cancer therapies can be attributed to the increase in number of prostate cancer incidences in men aged more than 60 years. Given the longevity of an average individual, and the rapidly aging world population, the risk of prostate cancer stands tall. Invasive cancer carries a high risk of spreading to the bone if left untreated, thereby making timely intervention of crucial importance. The market for world prostate cancer therapeutics continues to gain traction as companies explore advancements and improvements in drug delivery techniques translating to greater market opportunity.
Several options exist for treating prostate cancer in its early development stage. Radiation therapy or surgery offer effective cure when the disease is diagnosed in initial stages. External Beam Radiation Therapy entails release of radioactive beams, either exclusively to the prostate gland (radiation only for prostate) or may cover the adjacent pelvic lymph glands besides the prostate gland (full pelvic radiation). In Brachytherapy or crevice insertions, the surgeon keeps tiny seeds or pallets of radioactive substance straight inside the prostate gland.
These and other market data and trends are presented in “Prostate Cancer Therapeutics: A Global Market Perspective,” by BizAcumen, Inc. Our reports are designed to be most comprehensive in geographic coverage and vertical market analyses.
SOURCE Reportlinker
The price of the report is $2,995. It is disturbing to think about who pays that kind of money for marketing information relating to those suffering from prostate cancer. But this is just one example.
The point is that while so many people stand to make money from disease, and it is a vast amount of money, we will always find a certain amount of motivation to keep people sick. So sales and marketing of processed and unhealthy foods, development and prescription of drugs, and false reassurance by having bureaucracies called Departments of Health, and similar, will continue.
Tags: disease exploitation, disease means money, therapy pedlars
According to a study presented by Marijke Jansen-van der Weideat at a conference at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America on 30 November, radiation from annual mammograms may further increase the risk that young women with genetic mutations or family histories linked to breast cancer will develop the disease.
High doses of radiation can increase the risk of breast cancer. That mammograms use a low dose may not be enough protection since the same genetic mutations that increase the risk of breast cancer in some women might also make them more susceptible to cancer caused by radiation. This is especially important to consider given that typically doctors urge high-risk patients to begin breast cancer screening earlier in life.
The researchers examined data from six previous studies on about 5,000 high-risk women. They found that women who had mammograms or chest X-rays prior to age 20, or who had had at least five radiation exposures, were two-and-one-half times more likely to develop breast cancer than women who had had no exposure. This is a substantially increased risk of developing breast cancer and amounts to another case of iatragenesis (doctor caused disease).
The study’s findings will contribute to the debate brought on by a recent Journal of the American Medical Association article questioning current breast cancer screening practices and recent U.S. Preventive Services Task Force guidelines stating that most women can begin mammograms later in life and have them less frequently than is generally recommended. However, there is no debate on this issue at The Health Gazette. Our position is that mammograms represent unacceptable risk and should be avoided as routine screening tools.
Tags: breast cancer, iatragenesis, mammogram
The Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA) and Cook County Hospital (currently John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital of Cook County), released an eye-opening study on the economic impact of antibiotic overuse and antibiotic-resistant infections (ARIs) sponsored by an unrestricted educational grant from bioMerieux and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The authors conducted an exhaustive chart-by-chart review of 1,391 patients hospitalized in the year 2000, 188 of which had ARIs (13.5%). The medical costs attributed to these ARIs ranged from $18,588 to $29,069 per patient, while the duration of hospital stay was extended 6.4 – 12.7 days for affected patients. Additionally, the excess mortality attributed to ARIs alone was 6.5% — a death rate two-fold higher than in patients without ARIs. The authors also estimated the societal costs incurred at this hospital as a result of the ARIs to be between $10.7 and $15 million, which is the cost that hits the families of those infected.
The study, titled “Hospital and Societal Costs of Antimicrobial Resistant Infections in a Chicago Teaching Hospital: Implications for Antibiotic Stewardship,” analyzed the medical and human cost associated with ARIs. It was conducted at the Cook County (Stroger) Hospital of Chicago, IL. Several studies have looked at the medical costs of these infections, but this is the first to look at the cost to families as well.
Antibiotic resistance is fueled by misuse and overuse of antibiotics. Bacteria become resistant to the very medicines developed to treat and cure the infection they cause. ARIs include methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), and a growing number of additional pathogens that are developing resistance to many common antibiotics.
The study was published in the Oct. 15 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, published by the Infectious Disease Society of America.
“The findings indicate that significant health and economic benefits could be realized through effective interventions to reduce antimicrobial-resistant and healthcare-associated infections,” according to Dr. Rebecca Roberts, Department of Emergency Medicine, Cook County (Stroger) Hospital and the lead study author.
“At a time when our country is debating how to deliver better, more affordable care, this study demonstrates the enormous cost savings that could be realized, for both the healthcare system and to individuals and their families. These costs will only continue to increase if we don’t amend our behavior and practice a more prudent usage of antibiotics,” said Dr. Stuart Levy, professor of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, a senior author of the paper and co-founder and president of the APUA, which initiated the study in accord with its mission to “preserve the power of antibiotics”.
SOURCE bioMerieux
Tags: antibiotic resistance, antibiotics
If you are neglecting a healthy lifestyle because you trust the health system to save you, it is time to think again. The chance of surviving an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest has not improved since the 1950s, according to a report by the University of Michigan Health System.
The analysis shows only 7.6 percent of victims survive an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, a number that has not changed significantly in almost 30 years.
It’s a dismal trend considering enormous spending on heart research, new emergency care protocols, and the advent of new drugs and devices such as defibrillators.
Each year, 166,000 people experience cardiac arrest – an event during which the heart stops beating – away from a hospital.
Physicians report in the current issue of Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes that there are some key factors that can make a difference in saving lives when cardiac arrest happens at home, a hotel, restaurant or workplace.
“Our study shows that patients with a heart rhythm that can be shocked, or who have bystander CPR or a pulse restored at the scene have a much greater chance of survival,” says lead author Comilla Sasson, M.D., a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar and emergency medicine physician at the U-M Health System.
Although half of cardiac arrests are witnessed by a bystander, according to the study, only 32 percent, or about 1 in every 3 people, is receiving bystander CPR.
This is the first study that looks at the associations between five clinical variables and overall survival from an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.
The variables studied include: witnessed by emergency medical services provider, bystander CPR, types of heart rhythm — asystole (motionless) vs. ventricular fibrillation (rapid or twitching) and return of spontaneous circulation.
Researchers evaluated data on 142,740 patients from 79 studies published internationally between January 1950 and August 2008.
Here’s what researchers found:
- Of the more than 140,000 patients, only 23.8 percent survived to hospital admission, and 7.6 percent, or about 1 in 10 people, lived to be discharged from the hospital.
- Cardiac arrest victims who received CPR from a bystander or an emergency medical services provider, and those who had a shockable heart rhythm, referred to as ventricular fibrillation, were more likely to survive.
- The strongest predictor of survival was a return of spontaneous circulation, meaning a pulse was restored at the scene. Among them, 15.5 percent (in low-performing EMS systems) to 33.6 percent (in high performing EMS systems) survived.
“Increasing bystander CPR rates, increasing the awareness and use of devices to shock the heart, and keeping paramedics on scene until they restore a person’s pulse needs to occur if we are ever going to change our dismal survival rate,” Sasson says.
Places like Seattle, which has the highest rates of cardiac arrest survival in the country, are doing these three basic things exceptionally well, says the U-M physician. “We can learn a lot from that emergency response system,” she says.
The lack of progress in survival across the U.S. and abroad may be linked to an aging population, a lower number of people who are found in a shockable rhythm, which is associated with the highest chance of survival, and longer EMS drives due to the increasing size of cities and traffic congestion, authors write.
While the overall rate of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival has not improved, the field of cardiac and cerebral resuscitation is rapidly evolving.
Most of the studies in the analysis were conducted before the advent of therapeutic hypothermia, a body cooling treatment that has shown to benefit resuscitated patients. U-M C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital is leading a clinical trial to evaluate therapeutic hypothermia to prevent brain damage in children who have cardiac arrest.
Studies did not distinguish between patients treated with traditional CPR and those cared for under new American Heart Association guidelines for CPR which emphasizes chest compressions over mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine report that cutting back on the consumption of processed and fried foods, which are high in toxins called Advanced Glycation End products (AGEs), can reduce inflammation and actually help restore the body’s natural defenses regardless of age or health status. These benefits are present even without changing caloric or nutrient intake.
The findings, published in the October/November issue of the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, provide a simple dietary intervention that could result in weight loss and have significant impact on several epidemic diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease.
The findings are the result of a clinical study involving over 350 people which was conducted in collaboration with, and with support from, the National Institute on Aging (NIA). The study builds on earlier research conducted in animal models that demonstrated the effective prevention of these diseases and even the extension of lifespan by consuming a reduced AGE diet.
“What is noteworthy about our findings is that reduced AGE consumption proved to be effective in all study participants, including healthy persons and persons who have a chronic condition such as kidney disease,” said the study’s lead author Helen Vlassara, MD, Professor and Director of the Division of Experimental Diabetes and Aging at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
“This suggests that oxidants may play a more active role than genetics in overwhelming our body’s defenses, which we need to fight off disease. It has been said that nature holds the power, but the environment pulls the trigger. The good news is that unlike genetics, we can control oxidant levels, which may not be an accompaniment to disease and aging, but instead due to the cumulative toxic influence of AGEs,” said Dr. Vlassara.
AGEs are harmful substances that are abundant in Western diets, and proliferate when foods are heated, pasteurized, dried, smoked, fried or grilled. Once absorbed in the body, AGEs adhere to tissues and oxidize them, causing inflammation which in turn can lead to disease. Numerous animal studies conducted by Dr. Vlassara and her team have shown that oxidative stress from high oxidant levels and inflammation related to long-term exposure to AGEs may increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and other chronic conditions.
For the study, a subset of 40 healthy participants who were either between the ages or 18 and 45 or older than 60, and another nine patients with kidney disease, were randomly assigned to one of two diets. One group followed their own regular Western diet that was rich in AGEs. The second group followed a diet of similar caloric and nutrient content, but with only one-half the amount of AGEs, known as the “AGE-less diet.” Participants in the AGE-less intervention were advised to avoid grilling, frying or baking their food and instead were instructed to poach, stew, or steam their meals. There was no change in calories or nutrient intake during this period.
After four months on the AGE-less diet, blood AGE levels, lipid peroxides, inflammatory markers, and biomarkers of vascular function declined by as much as 60 percent in healthy participants. A reduction of similar magnitude was found in kidney patients after only one month on the AGE-less diet.
Researchers also found a positive effect on a cellular receptor for AGEs called AGER1, which is critical for the clearance of toxic AGEs from the body. The number of copies of the AGER1 gene was measured in circulating blood cells. Since this number was severely suppressed in participants with kidney disease, all of whom had very high levels of AGEs, the researchers speculate that important defense mechanisms can become “exhausted” as a result of chronically elevated AGEs. However, after a short period on the AGE-reduced diet, the number of AGER1 gene copies was restored to normal levels among patients with kidney disease.
The investigators believe that daily AGE consumption in the standard Western diet is at least three times higher than the safety limit for these oxidants. This could, in part, explain the changes seen in disease demographics.
Dr. Vlassara cautioned, “Even though the AGEs pose a more immediate health threat to older adults, they are a similar danger for younger people, including pregnant women and children, and this needs to be addressed. AGEs are ubiquitous and addictive, since they provide flavor to foods. But they can be controlled through simple methods of cooking, such as keeping the heat down and the water content up in food and by avoiding pre-packaged and fast foods when possible. Doing so reduces AGE levels in the blood and helps the body restore its own defenses.”
SOURCE The Mount Sinai Medical Center
In other words, eating the typically recommended “naturopathic” diet and avoiding the types of foods and cooking methods most naturopaths recommend avoiding would mean you were consuming the AGE-Less diet. I hope you are, because we have been recommending it for a very long time. It is good to see this research from The Mount Sinai Medical Center as it further supports what has long been taught by us.