Social Media Shows Promise for Clinical Trials. Social media can be used to increase enrollment and reduce clinical trial delays, according to a new survey by Blue Chip Patient Recruitment.

ACSM Releases New Exercise Guidelines. The new guidelines by the American College of Sports Medicine aren’t all that different from their old ones, except they emphasize that sitting for long periods is a health risk that can’t be negated simply by exercising regularly.

Spine Journal Takes Aim at Infuse Research. The Spine Journal is devoting an entire issue to critical reviews of published studies of Medtronic’s bone morphogenetic protein-2 product known as Infuse (see Pizaazz coverage of the matter here).

Google+ Begins Limited Field Testing. The company’s top secret social layer supposedly turns the search engine into a giant social network. It’s the culmination of a year-long project, and amounts to Google’s answer to Facebook.

Social Media Being Used as a Platform to Disclose Illness. The Internet has not only transformed how consumers gain access to health information, it is also significantly changing how they seek comfort during a health crisis, according to new research from Russell Herder. 

In the 1993 film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays a TV weatherman who finds himself trapped in a do-loop, covering the numbingly boring display of Punxutawney Phil, over and over again.

Forgive those of us who follow news from the Department of Health and Human Services for feeling like Bill Murray in that movie.

Last month, HHS released an action plan to reduce racial disparities in health care. The plan called for new care models, more service delivery sites, a beefed-up health and human services workforce, and targeted efforts to reduce cardiovascular disease, childhood obesity and other scourges of minority populations.

Remarkably however, the plan came with no funding. Apparently, it was supposed to prompt agencies within HHS to assure that their own internal plans were aligned with the effort to reduce racial disparities. Worse yet, the plan involved only HHS itself. In effect, it assumed that a ‘medical model’ can solve racial disparities in health care. However as I argued here, these disparities aren’t about health, at all. They are about socioeconomic status, and HHS can’t fix that by itself.

Solving the problem of racial disparities in health care clearly requires input from many branches of government, including those involved with education, urban planning, transportation and more, in addition to HHS.

When it was all said and done, the HHS plan came off looking like a political stunt by the Obama administration. While the administration probably does want to fund a bona fide effort to reduce racial disparities, today’s incessant (and appropriate) focus on deficit reduction forced the administration to release a plan with no teeth. It isn’t going to make a dent in the problem.

“Oops!…I Did It Again.” Britney Spears

Now barely a month later, HHS has pulled the same stunt again! With considerable fanfare, it released something called a National Prevention Strategy. It too, is not funded.

To its credit, the National Prevention Strategy does involve multiple agencies. “If we want to achieve our goals and make a real change in the health of our nation, it can’t just be one department doing the work. If we’re going to serve healthier school lunches, we need to work with the departments of Agriculture and Education … If we want to create healthier homes, we need to work with the Department of Housing and Urban Development,” HHS Secretary Sebelius explained. (more…)

Who Pays On A Date Depends On Your Looks. A new study found that men find it easier to imagine paying for dinner if their companions happen to be pretty (duh). Here is where it gets interesting, though: the more attractive a man is, the more women expect him to pay.

FDA Issues US Sprout Warning. The Food and Drug Administration is warning against eating Evergreen Produce brand alfalfa sprouts and spicy sprouts. The sprouts are possibly linked to 20 reported cases of Salmonella Enteritidis in several states. The outbreak is not linked to the European one.

Membership in High-Deductible Health Plans on the Upswing.  Enrollment in high-deductible health plans grew from 10 to 11.4 million members in the year ending January 2011, according to America’s Health Insurance Plans. Experts worry that enrollees don’t understand limitations in their coverage.

Location-Based Services to Hit $10.3 Billion by 2015. That’s according to a report by Pyramid Research, which paints a picture of massive growth in both location-based services and location-based advertising.

Exhibit Shows Government Role in US Diet over the Years. A 1945 government food guide included a butter group and told readers that “in addition to the basic 7 [food groups], eat any other foods you want.” That old poster is part of the National Archives’ exhibition “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?”

Next Virus Victim: Your Doctor’s Or Nurse’s iPad? Networked devices used by medical personnel are vulnerable to viruses and security threats, requiring careful teamwork between IT and clinical engineering, experts say.

New York City’s Ban on Smoking Called ‘an Absolute Joke’. In the first month of the Big Apple’s new smoking ban in 1,700 parks and along 14 miles of beaches, the city issued exactly one ticket.

Diabetes Drug May Help Others Lose Weight. The diabetes drug liraglutide (Victoza), touted for its weight-loss effects in that patient population, may also help non-diabetic patients keep pounds off, researchers said.

Nearly 10% of the World’s Adults Have Diabetes. In addition, the prevalence of the disease is rising rapidly, researchers found. Increased obesity and inactivity are the primary reasons in wealthy nations and developing nations as well.

RunKeeper Adds New Integration to its Health Graph. The company has been building a tool to identify correlations between a user’s eating habits, workout schedule, social interactions and more, according to TechCrunch.

Spinal fusions jumped 1,500% among Medicare patients between 2002 and 2007. The explosion had nothing to do with changes in prevalence of the conditions for which the complex surgery is performed. It had everything to do with the release of Infuse, a bone growth stimulator that reduces the complexity of the procedure.

Infuse (pictured) is marketed by Medtronic. It was approved by the FDA in 2002, specifically for spinal fusions of the lumbar (lower) spine using a particular surgical technique: the frontal approach. Soon after the FDA green-light however, surgeons began using it for other kinds of lumbar fusions and cervical (neck) fusions as well. Peer-reviewed studies of these non-approved uses helped drive the explosion in spinal fusions. Now, remarkably, off-label use accounts for 85% of Infuse use. The biological garners nearly $900 million in annual revenues for Medtronic.

There’s More to the Story
Unfortunately, newer studies of spinal fusion have found it to be no more effective for common back pain than physical therapy. Use rates of Infuse have not responded to this growing literature.

Beyond this, the off-label use studies mentioned above were sponsored by Medtronic and led by scientists that received tens of millions of dollars’ worth of royalty payments and consulting fees from Medtronic. It has recently been alleged that these scientists knew about certain complications caused by Infuse, and either failed to disclose them or de-emphasized them in their write-ups.

The complications include some that are potentially fatal– neck swelling severe enough to compromise breathing, and possibly an increased cancer risk, for example. They also include sterility in men, a complication Medtronic and surgeons with financial ties to Medtronic appear to have been aware of—but did not report–since 2002. (more…)

The Real Story of Cloud-Based Health Record Security Breaches. A report by Software Advice found extremely few security breaches involving Web-based EHRs, and suggested that they offer advantages over client-server models in that no patient data is stored locally and subject to theft.

PopCap Games To Be Acquired For $1 Billion+. The company behind hits like Plants vs Zombies and Bejeweled is in the process of being acquired, Techcrunch has reported. Among the potential suitors are Zynga, Electronic Arts and several Asian gaming companies.

SMART Health App Challenge Crowns $5,000 Winner. A developer challenge issued this spring by researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, aimed at inspiring innovation in health IT applications, has awarded its prize to a multilingual EMR interface.

Supreme Court Overturns Ban on Drug Data Mining. The US Supreme Court, on a 6-3 vote, struck down as unconstitutional a 2007 Vermont law that prohibited the collection and sale of physicians’ prescription data without consent.

Guidelines for Cancer Surgery Not Always Followed. Surgical oncologists got a mixed review for adherence to clinical guidelines, including high grades for adjuvant therapy but low marks for nodal management, according to the results of retrospective study.

“I keep talking to other colleagues who have confidence that someone else is working things out. But I keep looking around thinking, ‘If we’re not doing it, then who is?’” Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.), a freshman member of the Budget Committee, on the fact that time is running out on congressional negotiators to agree on the biggest debt-reduction package in at least 20 years.

“Doctors conducting clinical trials examining the safety and effectiveness of Infuse on behalf of Medtronic (knew that Infuse could) cause medical complications, but failed to report this in the medical literature.” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, in a letter to Medtronic concerning the company’s bone-growth protein, now widely used in spinal surgery.

“Today, the prison-industrial complex has become little more than a massive government-run make-work program that profits from human bondage. To oversimplify — just a bit — we pay poor, unemployed rural whites to guard poor, unemployed urban blacks.” Peter Moskos, commenting on overcrowding in US prisons.

“We’ve seen many changes in the market dynamics. The competitive landscape has increased with a number of new competitors and competitive products. We’ve seen changes in pricing. We’ve seen procedures slowing.” Seth Fischer, an executive with Johnson & Johnson, announcing that the company’s Cordis unit was exiting the $5 billion global business for cardiac stents that it had created.

“Seems the glorious leader of LulzSec got arrested, it’s all over now… wait… we’re all still here! Which poor bastard did they take down?” The LulzSec hacking group, in a tweet responding to the arrest of a 19 year-old that was reportedly involved with the group. On Wednesday, LulzSec announced it had taken offline Brazil’s official government website and the Brazilian president’s website.

Surge in EHR Purchases Predicted. Half of more than 1,300 physician group practices said they expect to buy an electronic health records system during 2011, according to a survey by CapSite.

FDA Finds Silicone Breast Implants Safe, But Prone To Fail With Age. Although they are safe when used as intended and do not cause autoimmune disease, breast cancer or reproductive problems, as some previous reports had suggested, women frequently have problems with them, the FDA said. Oftentimes these problems require  removal or replacement of the implants.

Coffee May Protect Against Alzheimer’s Disease, Study Finds. Scientists at University of South Florida are reporting that a mystery ingredient in coffee protected mice that had been bred specifically to develop symptoms consistent with the memory-robbing disease.

Vendor To Oversee VA’s Open-Source EHR Efforts. The Department of Veterans Affairs has awarded a $5 million contract to the Informatics Applications Group to act as a custodial agent for an open-source software development community aimed at modernizing VistA.

Potato Chips a Top Culprit in Gradual Weight Gain. Roughly half of the average 3.35 pounds a healthy, nonobese American gains over 4 years can be attributed to eating potato chips, researhers at  Brigham and Women’s Hospital said.

Some of the greatest discoveries in the history of modern medicine came from scientists who noted spatial and temporal relationships between events that had not been previously recognized, and deduced from their observations that the events were causally linked.

In 1854 for example, John Snow observed that high cholera death rates in 2 districts of Soho were linked by a common water supplier. Snow created maps (pictured) to display the link and eventually traced the outbreak to one of the supplier’s water pumps. He convinced the supplier to remove the pump handle and treat the water with chlorine, and that promptly ended the epidemic. Snow’s work was canonized as a founding event in the science of epidemiology.

Then in 1928, Alexander Fleming–already renowned as a brilliant scientist with an untidy laboratory–accidentally spilled a beaker filled with a fungus (genus, Penicillium) onto a petri dish containing the staphylococcus bacteria, just before he left on vacation.

Upon returning, Fleming noticed that staph colonies close to the spill had died. Fleming subsequently showed that the fungus produced a substance which killed staph and many other bacteria. He named the substance Penicillin. The discovery revolutionized the treatment of bacterial infections and spawned the entire pharmaceutical industry in the process.
 
Last month, Finnish scientists used similar spatiotemporal analyses to explore the purported link between mobile phone use and brain cancer. Unfortunately, their results were not nearly as clear-cut as those of Snow and Fleming.

Here’s the Story
Mobile phones produce radio-frequency electromagnetic fields. To date, no study has proven that the radiation is tumorigenic, but doubt persists because it has proven difficult to quantify the amount radiation exposure in various areas of the brain, and the long latency period before cancer first develops and becomes clinically manifest. (more…)

Best Buy Leads $5.5M Investment with Valencell. The Series B investment in the mobile health company was joined by TDF and True Ventures. Valencell’s Healthset sensor tracks heart rate, calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, speed and more through earbuds.

Once Rare, Infection by Tick Bites Spreads. Babesiosis, a potentially devastating malaria-like infection spread through tick bites, has gained a foothold in the Hudson Valley and the coastal Northeast, researchers have found.

FDA Okays New Abuse-Resistant Opioid. The regulatory agency approved a narcotic painkiller with abuse-deterrent properties, Pfizer has announced. The new drug, Oxecta, uses a “unique composition of commonly used pharmaceutical ingredients” to stop potential abusers from crushing, chewing, snorting, or injecting the opioid.

FDA Issues Draft Guidance for Artificial Pancreas. Addressed in the FDA’s document is a Low Glucose Suspend System, which can reduce the severity of hypoglycemic episodes by temporarily reducing insulin delivery. The early-stage system requires patients to manage glucose levels with a meter and give themselves insulin as needed.

Crow’s Feet Faceoff Yields Clear Winner. Crow’s feet responded significantly better to treatment with abobotulinumtoxinA (Dysport) than with onabotulinumtoxinA (Botox), according to results of the first-ever randomized comparison of the two botulinum toxin compounds.