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Medical debt. Explaining Aaron Rodgers back-to-back MVPs? Amazon and One Medical. Judge rules on 340B. 2/3 of MD are experiencing burnout.
Month: September 2022
Type I vs. Type II Errors: A case study from ALS
Today, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug Relyvrio (sodium phenylbutyrate/taurursodiol; also known as AMX0035), which is indicated for the treatment of patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Most people with ALS die within 2-5 years of diagnosis. In justifying the approval, FDA’s press release stated: “This…
Nature vs. Nurture: A case study on the heritability of Psychotic Episodes
Interesting study from Taylor et al. (2022), which aims to examine to what extent psychotic experiences become less heritable when adolescents are exposed to more environmental risk factors? The methods are outlined as follows: This twin study, conducted from December 1, 2014, to August 31, 2020, included a UK-based sample of twin pairs aged 16…
The benefit of HPV vaccination
In part due to the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination have become a hot button issue. This is true even for non-COVID vaccines that have proven significant health benefits, such as those for human papillomavirus vaccines (HPV). Although betweeen 2016 and 2021 the share of teenagers receiving their HPV vaccination series increased from 60% to 77%, Bloomberg…
Private equity in health care
Private equity investments have grown in health care in recent years. According to Appelbaum and Batt (2020), whereas in only 4.7% of leveraged buy-outs (LBO) were in health care in 2000, that number had risen to 12.2% in 2019. A 2022 white paper finds that investments in health care have risen even more: The number…
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Drug pull incentives and innovation. Symmetrical 4-set and 5-set Venn diagrams ICER white paper on rare disease. COVID-19, bullying and cyber-bullying. Rx provisions in the IRA.
Antimicrobial resistance is a major problem
A paper published earlier this year by the Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators in The Lancet aims to quantify the size of the problem. The authors used a variety of data sources including systematic literature reviews, hospital system data, surveillance systems, and other sources. The authors estimated that these data covered 471 million individual records or isolates.…
Some good news on inflation
The Economist has an interesting review of the book Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet. The book is an argument that more people in the world is a positive, not a negative development. In recent years, China has used the one-child policy to reduce population growth;…
Life expectancy in China surpasses the US
Back in 1960, life expectancy in the US was 69.7 years as compared to 43.7 years. At the turn of the century, this gap had closed to 76.8 to 71.4 years. As of 2021, however, US life expectancy was 76.1 whereas life expectancy in China was 77.1, a full year ahead of the U.S. Part…
Incentivizing increased fertility
Hungary has a controversial approach: …Hungary has exempted mothers of four or more children from income taxes for life…Victor Orban, the country’s prime minister, has justified it as a way to boost the population without allowing immigration to rise. Hat tip: The Economist.