More Price Transparency Needed in Healthcare, House Members Say
WASHINGTON — How much difference would more price transparency make in healthcare? House members heard — and gave — a variety of opinions on the topic at a Ways & Means Committee hearing Tuesday. “Price transparency works,” said Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.). “In the past 20 years, the prices of medical services increased by […]
Do Orphan Drugs Really Need Development Incentives?
Drugs approved for an “orphan” indication ended up making just as much money as their non-orphan counterparts, even though they were helped by incentives during development, researchers found. There was no significant difference in median 5-year net sales between orphan and non-orphan drugs ($719 million vs $812 million, P=0.09), reported Benjamin Rome, MD, MPH, of […]
Opinion | ‘A 400% Price Increase Is Preposterous’: What We Heard This Week
“Why do you need this much money? A 400% price increase is preposterous.” — Senator Mike Braun (R-Ind.) pressing Moderna’s CEO to lower the price of its COVID-19 vaccine (Spikevax) during a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. “This is the way that medicine should be practiced.” — Diana Nole, of […]
Daily Thiazide No Help in Preventing Recurrent Kidney Stones
A common diuretic wasn’t much help for staving off recurrent kidney stones, the NOSTONE trial showed. Over a median follow-up of 2.9 years, symptomatic or radiologic recurrence of kidney stones occurred in 59% of patients who received hydrochlorothiazide (12.5 mg once daily) and 59% of those assigned placebo (rate ratio [RR] 1.33, 95% CI 0.92-1.93), […]
Dementia Accompanying Cardiometabolic Disease: Does It Come Down to Genetics?
There may be a limit to how much reducing cardiometabolic disease would lower the risk of dementia in older people genetically predisposed to both conditions, a twin study suggested. Twins over age 60 developed dementia at an incidence of 16.9% over a median 15.4 years of follow-up in a cohort counting over 17,000 individuals in […]
How plants protect themselves from oxidative stress during iron uptake — and why this is also important for humans: Biology, chemistry and medicine: Interdisciplinary publication in Plant Physiology
Iron is a critical micronutrient for the survival of plants and humans, yet too much iron can also be toxic. An interdisciplinary research team from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (HHU) has discovered that the protein PATELLIN2 is not only involved in regulating iron levels in plants. PATELLIN2 is one of a group of proteins that […]
Early life experiences can have long-lasting impact on genes
Early life experiences can impact the activity of our genes much later on and even affect longevity, finds a new study in fruit flies led by UCL researchers. In the study published in Nature Aging, the scientists report that gene expression ‘memory’ can persist across the lifespan, and may present a novel target for improving […]
COVID Superspreader Events Still Exist. Here’s What They Look Like Now.
We haven’t heard much about superspreader events in the past year or so, mainly because we haven’t really been looking for them. The United States defunded and scaled back its testing and contact tracing programs in early 2022, and in doing so, we lost track of just how widespread COVID is. But if you’ve been […]
Pious Parasites: Medieval Monks Battled Nasty Gut Germs
Latest Infectious Disease News FRIDAY, Aug. 19, 2022 (HealthDay News) Medieval monks were much more wormy than average folks, a new archaeological analysis has revealed. Those living in medieval Cambridge were nearly twice as likely to be infected by intestinal parasites as city dwellers, researchers found. Even though Augustinian friars had access to advanced sanitation […]
What a Martian meteorite can teach us about Earth’s origins
These days, not so much. But more than 4.5 billion years ago, it’s possible the Red Planet had a crust comparable to Iceland today. This discovery, hidden in the oldest martian fragments found on Earth, could provide information about our planet that was lost over billions of years of geological movement and could help explain […]