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Showing prescribers a medication’s cost could help them save patients money

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By Emma Bascom

Seeing how much a medication would cost a patient helped some physicians make decisions when prescribing, according to the results of research published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

“Many Americans struggle with the affordability of their prescription drugs, and we need interventions that can help people find lower cost medications to help people be able to afford their needed medications,” Anna Doar Sinaiko, PhD, MPP, an assistant professor of health economics and policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Healio. Read the full article in Healio.

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Cell therapy shows promise for improving gas exchange in COPD, may offer potential cure

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By Isabella Hornick

Patients with COPD who underwent autologous transplantation of lung progenitor cells had improved gas exchange capacity, quality of life and walking distance, according to study results.

Further, these results, presented at European Respiratory Society International Congress, showed that transplant of these P63+ progenitor cells repaired lung damage in those with mild emphysema.
Read more from Healio.

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Region’s first robotic liver transplant; donor’s second gifted organ

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Robotic liver transplants, perfected in the Middle East, and now done in Colorado, promise fewer complications, faster recovery.

By Todd Neff, for CU Health

For Colorado and neighboring states, it was a first.

Never before in the region had a liver-transplant donor surgery been performed by a surgical robot. Given the robotic procedure’s proven advantages in shorter recovery time and fewer complications, the timing couldn’t have been better.

The robotic part was new for Danel Kuhlmann also. But she had donated an organ before. Read more from CU Health.

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Only 40% of Diabetes Patients Get Recommended Kidney Health Testing

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~ Study Reveals Alarming Disparities in Chronic Kidney Disease Testing and Highlights Path to Equitable Care for Americans living with Diabetes ~

(August 30, 2023, New York, NY) — Not enough diabetes patients are getting their recommended kidney health screenings, according to a new study by the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) and the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA).

According to new data published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings: Innovations, Quality & Outcomes journal, less than 40% of patients with diabetes have been recommended at least annual kidney health screening tests. Diabetes raises the risk of chronic kidney disease (CKD), a serious condition that often remains asymptomatic until reaching an advanced stage. Read more from the National Kidney Foundation.

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This Isn’t COVID’s Final Act

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— We must keep the virus, and long COVID, center stage

By Stuart Katz, MD, Alice Perlowski, MD, MA, and Brittany Taylor, MPH 

This year marks the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over time, as the virus morphed and continued to disrupt our daily lives, people around the world grew tired of COVID restrictions. As a result, we saw mask mandates lift, social distancing practices fade, and vaccination rates decline as more shots became available. Understandably, people were — and still are — longing for pre-pandemic normalcy. Nonetheless, a looming reality remains: With hundreds of deaths and thousands of hospitalizations each week in the U.S. alone, the pandemic is neither over nor behind us. Read more in MedPage Today.

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Certain CF children at greater risk of removal from transplant waitlist

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Poor functional status while on waitlist is linked to worse outcomes, study finds

By Steve Bryson, PhD

Children and adolescents who are wait-listed for lung transplantation and have the worst functional status are at the greatest risk of being removed from the waitlist due to clinical deterioration or death, a study reports.

The risk is highest for patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) and for adolescents compared with younger children, data indicate.
Read the full story in Cystic Fibrosis News Today.

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Q&A: Physical activity is ‘an effective intervention for mental health conditions’

Photo by Arek Adeoye on Unsplash
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By Emma Bascom

Physical activity was associated with improvements in mental health conditions compared with usual care, and primary care physicians should discuss the benefits of it with their patients, according to researchers.

Ben Singh, PhD, a research fellow at the University of South Australia, and colleagues conducted an umbrella review to synthesize the evidence on the impacts of physical activity on symptoms of anxiety, depression and psychological distress among adults.
Read the full story in Healio.

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This Isn’t COVID’s Final Act

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— We must keep the virus, and long COVID, center stage

by Stuart Katz, MD, Alice Perlowski, MD, MA, and Brittany Taylor, MPH 

This year marks the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over time, as the virus morphed and continued to disrupt our daily lives, people around the world grew tired of COVID restrictions. As a result, we saw mask mandates lift, social distancing practices fade, and vaccination rates decline as more shots became available. Understandably, people were — and still are — longing for pre-pandemic normalcy.
Read the full article in MedPage Today.

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Women with ESKD less likely to be referred for transplantation vs. men

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By Shawn M. Carter

Women with ESKD are more likely than men to face kidney transplant-related disparities, according to a recently published study conducted in the southeast U.S.

“Reasons for this disparity have not been delineated, though some evidence … include greater provider perceptions of frailty regarding female candidates, higher levels of obesity, higher psychosocial and health-related concerns and a lack of provider awareness of sex/gender-related disparities,” Jessica L. Harding, PhD, an epidemiologist at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, and colleagues wrote. Read the complete article in Healio.

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New matching system enables world’s first four-way liver exchange

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Reviewed by Lily Ramsey, LLM

In a breakthrough in liver transplantation that may lead to the ability to connect more living donors and patients, a new matching system designed by a team led by Boston College economists enabled the world’s first four-way liver exchange and a cascade of additional matches, researchers reported recently in the American Journal of Transplantation.

The results show that expanding the capacity of the donor-patient matching mechanism beyond the traditional 2-way change – matching two patients with two donors – can increase the number of transplants that can be matched among a larger group of participants, according to the study, co-authored by BC Professors of Economics Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver. Read the complete article in News Medical Life Sciences.

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