More Hospitals Use Social Media to Gather Feedback from Patients’ Families; With Some Medicare Payments Based on Patient Satisfaction, More Hospitals Are Relying on Parents as Virtual Advisers

August 19, 2013, 6:57 p.m. ET

More Hospitals Use Social Media to Gather Feedback from Patients’ Families

With Some Medicare Payments Based on Patient Satisfaction, More Hospitals Are Relying on Parents as Virtual Advisers

LAURA LANDRO

Hospitals are turning to social media to engage patients and improve the patient experience, which is by its nature often frightening and unpleasant. WSJ’s Laura Landro and virtual advisor Jim Burrows join Lunch Break with details. Photo: Getty Images.

When staffers at the Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., want to simplify appointment scheduling, make surgery smoother for kids or even work on doctors’ bedside manner, they turn to a special group of experts, a “virtual advisory council” made up of parents on a private social network. Read more of this post

Antibiotics Do’s and Don’ts; Doctors Too Often Prescribe ‘Big Guns’; Impatient Patients Demand a Quick Fix

August 19, 2013, 7:12 p.m. ET

Antibiotics Do’s and Don’ts

Doctors Too Often Prescribe ‘Big Guns’; Impatient Patients Demand a Quick Fix

SUMATHI REDDY

Doctors aren’t only handing out too many antibiotics, they also are frequently prescribing the wrong ones, researchers and public-health officials say. Recent studies have shown that doctors are overprescribing broad-spectrum antibiotics, sometimes called the big guns, that kill a wide swath of both good and bad bacteria in the body. Instead, narrow-spectrum antibiotics, like penicillin, amoxicillin and cephalexin, can usually clear up many infections, while targeting a smaller number of bacteria. Professional organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, and public-health groups such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are pushing doctors to limit the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics. Among the most common broad-spectrum antibiotics are ciprofloxacin and levofloxacin—a class of drugs known as fluoroquinolones—and azithromycin, which is sold by one drug maker under the brand name Zithromax, or Z-Pak.   Read more of this post

A Dry Pipeline for Psychiatric Drugs

August 19, 2013

A Dry Pipeline for Psychiatric Drugs

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.

Fully 1 in 5 Americans take at least one psychiatric medication. Yet when it comes to mental health, we are facing a crisis in drug innovation. Sure, we have many antidepressants, antipsychotics, hypnotic medications and the like. But their popularity masks two serious problems. First, each of these drug classes is filled with “me too” drugs, which are essentially just copies of one another; we have six S.S.R.I. antidepressants that essentially do the same thing, and likewise for the 10 new atypical antipsychotic drugs. Second, the available drugs leave a lot to be desired: patients with illnesses like schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorder often fail to respond adequately to these medications or cannot tolerate their side effects. Yet even though 25 percent of Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any year, there are few signs of innovation from the major drug makers. Read more of this post

What If What You ’Survived’ Wasn’t Cancer?

What If What You ’Survived’ Wasn’t Cancer?

You’re feeling fine when you go for your annual physical. But your mammogram looks a little funny, or your PSA test is a little high, or you get a CT lung scan and a nodule shows up. You get a biopsy, and the doctor delivers the bad news: You have cancer. Because you don’t want to die, you agree to be sliced up and irradiated. Then, fortunately, you’re pronounced a “cancer survivor.” You’re glad they caught it early.

But maybe you went through all that pain for nothing.

For decades, the reigning theory has been that the earlier a cancer is spotted and treated, the less likely it is to be lethal, because it won’t have time to grow and spread. Yet this theory infers causality from correlation. It implicitly assumes that cancer is cancer is cancer, even though we now know that even in the same part of the body, cancer is many different diseases — some aggressive, some not. Perhaps people survive early-stage cancers not because they’re treated in time, but because their disease never would have become life-threatening at all. Read more of this post

Dengue Fever Sweeps Southeast Asia; Thailand, Laos, Singapore See Surge in Mosquito-Borne Illness; Unusually Early Rains Are Blamed

August 16, 2013, 7:13 p.m. ET

Dengue Fever Sweeps Southeast Asia

Thailand, Laos, Singapore See Surge in Mosquito-Borne Illness; Unusually Early Rains Are Blamed

NOPPARAT CHAICHALEARMMONGKOL

An early rainy season in Southeast Asia has led to an unexpected jump in cases of dengue fever as governments struggle to control the mosquito populations that transmit the disease. Video by WSJ’s Nopparat Chaichalearmmongkol.

BANGKOK—Southeast Asia is scrambling to combat a deadly outbreak of dengue fever, the tropical illness transmitted by mosquitoes, which has hit parts of the region especially hard. Health experts suspect that an unusually early rainy season that brought mosquitoes out in April, months ahead of what is expected, contributed to the seriousness of the dengue challenge. Also, above-average temperatures that many experts blame on global warming encouraged early mosquito breeding. Meanwhile, dengue is thought to be mutating as a result of immunity that has built up in the region. And as the virus is spread by travelers, more countries are expected to be affected.

Read more of this post

Shooting Beams at Brain Helps Ease Tremors in Patients

Shooting Beams at Brain Helps Ease Tremors in Patients

Researchers have devised a way to shoot focused beams of ultrasound through the skull to calm essential tremor, potentially the first non-invasive approach for hard-to-treat forms of the involuntary-shaking disorder.

As many as 10 million people in the U.S. have essential tremor, which is four times more common than its close cousin Parkinson’s disease. The condition often begins in young adults, worsening over time. While drugs help, deep-brain stimulation and surgery are used for those with disabling symptoms. Read more of this post

Tuberculosis “time bomb” costs Europe billions of euros a year

Tuberculosis “time bomb” costs Europe billions of euros a year

Thu, Aug 15 2013

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – Europe is facing a multi-billion-euro time bomb of rising costs to control tuberculosis (TB) as drug-resistant forms of the lung disease spread, a pioneering study found. Often thought of as a disease of the past or one restricted to marginalized communities, TB is already inflicting annual direct costs of more than 500 million euros on the region and another 5.3 billion euros in productivity losses. The study, by health economists based in Germany, also suggests the economic burden of TB far outweighs the likely costs of investing in much-needed research to develop more effective medicines and vaccines – something they said governments and the drug industry should do urgently. Read more of this post

A new generation of synthetic drugs is presenting novel legal problems; “The bad guys know what we do and they just tweak another molecule. They’re changing faster than we can write our names.”

August 14, 2013, 7:52 p.m. ET

‘Bath Salts’ Pose a Hurdle for Prosecutors

Chemical Tweaks Can Keep Synthetic Drugs From Being Linked to Banned Substances

DEVLIN BARRETT

A new generation of synthetic drugs is presenting novel legal problems, according to law-enforcement agents and prosecutors, who say the shifting chemistry behind the products makes it difficult to win convictions. The synthetic drugs are typically sold in retail shops in small packages labeled “bath salts,” which investigators say is a ploy to hide their true purpose. When smoked, snorted or injected, they can cause a range of reactions, from increased energy and euphoria similar to cocaine or ecstasy, to hallucinations, similar to LSD. Users who have had bad reactions report feeling extreme paranoia, or the sensation that their skin is burning, leading them to tear off their clothes. Read more of this post

Brain Shaking Technique Offers Measure of Consciousness

Brain Shaking Technique Offers Measure of Consciousness

A new technique for measuring consciousness offers a reliable way to guide treatment of patients with brain injuries who can’t respond to commands, according to a study.

By using a device that shakes the entire brain with strong magnetic stimulation, researchers led by a team at University of Milan in Italy measured the amount of information flow occurring in the brain. They were able to discriminate between various levels of consciousness with a numerical index they developed. The study was published today in Science Translational Medicine. Read more of this post

America’s doctors, like Wall Street, need a cultural shift; An ‘eat what you treat’ system can tempt doctors to offer excessive treatments

August 14, 2013 6:39 pm

America’s doctors, like Wall Street, need a cultural shift

By Gillian Tett

An ‘eat what you treat’ system can tempt doctors to offer excessive treatments

How can America cut its healthcare costs? The question is generating political heat in Washington right now. No wonder. Healthcare spending now stands at an eye-popping 17 per cent of US gross domestic product. And next year, President Barack Obama’s divisive “Obamacare” reforms will take effect, extending insurance to a much wider part of the population than ever before. But as politicians trade ideas (and insults) about cutting costs – with proposals ranging from better use of information technology through to insurance exchanges – there is another issue that needs to be discussed: doctors’ pay. Read more of this post

Bee Sting Therapy Causing a Buzz in China

Bee Sting Therapy Causing a Buzz in China

By Neil Connor on 2:15 pm August 13, 2013.

In a photo taken on August 2, 2013, a patient receives a bee sting administered by a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine at a clinic on the outskirts of Beijing. Patients in China are swarming to acupuncture clinics to be given bee stings to treat or ward off life-threatening illness, arthritis, and cancer, practitioners say. More than 27,000 people have undergone the painful technique — each session can involve dozens of punctures — at Wang Menglin’s clinic in Beijing, says the bee acupuncturist who makes his living from believers in the concept. (AFP Photo/Ed Jones)

Beijing. Patients in China are swarming to acupuncture clinics to be given bee stings to treat or ward off life-threatening illness, practitioners say. More than 27,000 people have undergone the painful technique — each session can involve dozens of punctures — at Wang Menglin’s clinic in Beijing, says the bee acupuncturist who makes his living from believers in the concept. But except for trying to prevent allergic reactions to the stings themselves, there is no orthodox medical evidence that bee venom is effective against illness, and rationalist websites in the West describe so-called “apitherapy” as “quackery.” Read more of this post

A Glut of Antidepressants: Overdiagnosis of depression is seen as one factor in the rise in antidepressant use

AUGUST 12, 2013, 2:53 PM

A Glut of Antidepressants

By RONI CARYN RABIN

Over the past two decades, the use of antidepressants has skyrocketed. One in 10 Americans now takes an antidepressant medication; among women in their 40s and 50s, the figure is one in four. Experts have offered numerous reasons. Depression is common, and economic struggles have added to our stress and anxiety. Television ads promote antidepressants, and insurance plans usually cover them, even while limiting talk therapy. But a recent study suggests another explanation: that the condition is being overdiagnosed on a remarkable scale. Read more of this post

New Laws and Rising Costs Create a Surge of Supersizing Hospitals

August 12, 2013

New Laws and Rising Costs Create a Surge of Supersizing Hospitals

By JULIE CRESWELL and REED ABELSON

Hospitals across the nation are being swept up in the biggest wave of mergers since the 1990s, a development that is creating giant hospital systems that could one day dominate American health care and drive up costs. The consolidations are being driven by a confluence of powerful forces, not least of which is President Obama’s signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act. That law, many experts say, is transforming the economics of health care and pushing a growing number of hospitals into the arms of suitors. Read more of this post

Gene Breakthroughs Spark a Revolution in Cancer Treatment

August 12, 2013, 11:03 p.m. ET

Gene Breakthroughs Spark a Revolution in Cancer Treatment

RON WINSLOW

A growing number of cancer practices are sequencing the DNA of tumors to uncover their genetic abnormalities. The aim: to pair a drug with the specific mutation fueling a patient’s disease. UC San Francisco’s Dr. Trever Bivona discusses.

Kellie Carey’s doctor finally stopped dodging questions about how long she had to live six weeks after he diagnosed her lung cancer. “Maybe three months,” he told her in his office one sunny May morning in 2010, she recalls. Yet she is still alive, a testament to the most extraordinary decade of progress ever in the long scientific struggle against lung cancer. Tests found Ms. Carey’s lung cancer to be of a rare type that researchers had found just three years earlier by deciphering its genetic code. The 45-year-old businesswoman in 2010 went on a drug Pfizer Inc. PFE -0.07% was testing for that type. By pinpointing her cancer, the drug probably helped give her years more to live than chemotherapy would have, her doctors say. That is remarkable because lung cancer for decades defied efforts to find drugs that could extend an average patient’s life by even a few weeks. But an explosion in knowledge about the genetic mutations that cause tumors is just now offering the first real promise of drugs that can control what is the most-common and most-deadly cancer. Ms. Carey has one of at least 15 lung-cancer variations, almost all of which scientists didn’t know existed 10 years ago. Researchers have identified those variations, most of them in just the past four years, by decoding DNA in tumors—akin to how crime labs analyze DNA to genetically fingerprint suspects. Read more of this post

Drug companies are shifting their focus to researching complex molecules to enable more personalised treatments

August 12, 2013 7:21 pm

Pharmaceuticals: Back to the lab

By Andrew Jack

Drug companies are shifting their focus to researching complex molecules to enable more personalised treatments

He has promised no big shift in strategy or focus, spurned big acquisitions and suffered a series of research setbacks. Yet Pascal Soriot, who became chief executive of AstraZeneca last October, has been rewarded by investors as he attempts to turn round the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical group. Mr Soriot, who left a secure senior job at Roche to take the top post at AstraZeneca, has ridden a fresh wave of investor optimism towards the prescription medicines sector after a long period of gloom. “We are committed to science and innovation,” he says. “If we make the right choices, we’ll transform our portfolio.” Read more of this post

Autism Risk May Be Raised for Children When Labor Induced

Autism Risk May Be Raised for Children When Labor Induced

Boys born to mothers who needed their doctor to start or help along the birth may have a higher risk of autism, a study found.

Boys whose mothers had labors that were induced, which stimulates the uterus to bring on contractions, or augmented, which increases the strength, duration and frequency of contractions, had a 35 percent greater risk of autism then children whose mothers didn’t need those procedures to help the births, according to research today in JAMA Pediatrics.

Today’s study is the largest to examine the potential link between birth procedures and autism and to find that males may be more affected than females, said Simon Gregory, the lead author. While induced labors help reduce deaths among mothers and babies, more studies are needed to better understand why these procedures may raise autism risk, he said. Read more of this post

Autism’s Unexpected Link to Cancer Gene

August 11, 2013

Autism’s Unexpected Link to Cancer Gene

By GINA KOLATA

Researchers studying two seemingly unrelated conditions — autism and cancer — have unexpectedly converged on a surprising discovery. Some people with autism have mutated cancer or tumor genes that apparently caused their brain disorder. Ten percent of children with mutations in a gene called PTEN, which causes cancers of the breast, colon, thyroid and other organs, have autism. So do about half of children with gene mutations that can lead to some kinds of brain and kidney cancer and large tumors in several organs, including the brain. That is many times the rate of autism in the general population. “It’s eerie,” Evan Eichler, a professor of genome science at the University of Washington, said about the convergence. Read more of this post