Voxiva, a Washington DC-based mobile technology firm, has launched a government-sponsored program that uses standard text messaging to educate and encourage healthy habits in pregnant women.

The “Text4baby” program sends tips to expectant mothers who sign up using their cell phones. To participate, women text the word, “baby” (or “bebe” for Spanish speakers) to the number 511411. 

Enrollees receive 3 text messages per week, timed to correspond with the woman’s delivery date. The messages cover nutrition, health maintenance and pregnancy management.

The service is entirely free to end-users thanks to government subsidies and the largesse of the wireless carriers. Launched last month, the service had 6,500 sign-ups in the first day. Before this program, Voxiva offered similar text-based services in the US, but they were not free.

Voxiva has launched more than 150 mobile health campaigns in Africa, India and Latin America, areas characterized by developing economies and/or a scarce supply of physicians. These projects are usually underwritten by governments or pharmaceutical firms. They provide news and treatment tips for people with AIDS, obesity, diabetes and smoking.

One of main goals of Text4baby is to discourage alcohol and tobacco use, habits that increase the risk of premature birth. In the US, one out of 8 babies, or about 500,000 births per year, is born prematurely each year. 

Despite the buzz about health-related apps for the iPhone and other smart phones, text messages are ideal for reaching Text4baby’s most important target group, which includes women that can’t afford smart phones. About 90% of US adults carry a cell phone, and nearly all of them support text messaging.

People who look younger than their actual age have a longer life expectancy than those who look their age, according to Danish scientists.

To reach this conclusion, Kaare Christensen of the University of Southern Denmark and colleagues asked nurses, teachers-in-training and peers to guess the age of 1,826 pairs of twins from their photos.

The twins were at least 70 years old when they were photographed.
 
For all 3 assessor groups, perceived age of the twins was associated with their survival, even after adjustment for chronological age, gender, pre-existing medical conditions, cognitive abilities and socioeconomic status.

Furthermore, the bigger the difference in perceived age within the pair, the more likely it became that the older looking twin died first.

The authors even provided a possible physiological explanation for their finding: key pieces of cellular DNA known as telomeres, which predict the ability of cells to replicate, were also linked to perceived age, the group found.

Shorter telomeres are associated with more rapid ageing, and the scientists found that people who looked younger had longer telomeres.

Christensen suggested to the BBC that people who have had a tougher life are more likely to die early – and that their life is reflected in their face.

“It’s probably a combination of genes plus environment over a lifetime that are important,” said UK professor Tim Spector, who has been doing similar research on twins. “We are also finding this in our study.”

The write-up is in the British Medical Journal.

Executives from Google, the Washington Post and New York Times have announced a new partnership to create living story pages, tools which they believe might revolutionize the way people find news on line.

The concept is to group developing stories about a particular subject on one Web page which automatically updates when new content is added.

“So much of what you see online today is a reflection of the way it’s told in newspapers,” Josh Cohen, senior business product manager for Google News told Post media critic Howard Kurtz. “They haven’t taken advantage of what the Web offers to tell news in a different way.”

The Post and Times could conceivably boost their rankings on Google by grouping stories in this manner. This could increase the likelihood that people will click on their stories, and that might translate into increased revenue for the beleaguered print giants.

The Times has established 5 living story pages covering Afghanistan, executive compensation, global warming, health care and swine flu. Meanwhile, The Post has launched 3, devoted to DC schools, health-care reform, and the moribund Washington Redskins.

The experimental story pages currently reside at Google Labs as the parties work out the kinks. The goal is to transfer the pages to the Web sites of the newspapers themselves.

“Over the coming months, we’ll refine Living Stories based on your feedback,” Google says in a blog posting. If the format gains traction, Google plans to offer it to any interested newspaper, magazine or Web site, at no charge.

Kurtz reports that the living story page concept grew from discussions last spring involving Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Donald Graham, CEO of The Washington Post Co. Later, Google began separate conversations with executives at the Times.

Most people have assumed that direct-to-consumer advertising has helped drive up the cost of drugs, but there really hadn’t been much proof of that. Until now, that is.

The proof comes in the form of a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

In the study, Michael Law of the University of British Columbia and others looked at US sales of Plavix, the $4 billion clot-busting blockbuster co-marketed by BMS and Sanofi-Aventis for the prevention of recurrent heart attacks and strokes, and thrombotic complications following stent placement.

Plavix was introduced to the US market in 1998. DTC advertising for the drug began 3 years later, and exceeded $350 million dollars over the next 4 years.

Law’s group queried pharmacy data from 27 Medicaid programs from 1999 through 2005 to analyze changes in Plavix prescription volume, the cost per unit dispensed, and total pharmacy expenditures before and after DTC advertising was introduced.

The scientists detected no change in the preexisting trend in the number of Plavix prescriptions written after DTC advertising was introduced.

They did, however, detect a sudden, sustained increase in cost per unit of the drug, of $0.40 per unit dispensed which coincided with the introduction of DTC advertising.

This resulted in an incremental cost of $40.58 per 1000 Medicaid enrollees per quarter, or an additional $207 million in total pharmacy expenditures.

“The key issue is whether advertising to consumers, which has risen 330% in the last 10 years in the US, contributes to the significant cost increases in publicly funded health insurance programs such as Medicaid,” Stephen Soumerai told BurrillReport.

When Thai and US Army scientists announced last month that their experimental HIV vaccine reduced the risk of contracting the disease by 31%, it caused quite a stir. After all, every one of the 100 or so previous HIV vaccine trials over the last 20 years had failed completely.

Alas, a second analysis of the $105 million study that was released weeks after the announcement suggests the apparent, moderate benefit may have been caused by a statistical fluke.

Worse yet, it turns out that the results of the second analysis were available to the scientists when they announced their original findings.

“We thought very hard about how to provide the clearest, most honest message,” said Jerome Kim, an Army scientist involved with the study. “We stand by the fact that this is a vaccine with a modest protective effect.”

Kim’s team based its initial announcement on a “modified intent to treat analysis,” which includes all volunteers that enrolled in the study, whether they received the full course of the vaccine or not. Such analyses reflect real world situations in which some people don’t show up for all shots in the vaccine sequence.

Using this analysis, the scientists determined that there was only a 3.9% chance that the observed 31% reduction in HIV among the vaccine-treated group was caused by a simple statistical fluke…in scientific parlance, this is considered to be a borderline significant result.

The second, so-called “per protocol” analysis included just the study participants that received all vaccines in the regimen at the right time.

Such analyses normally corroborate intent to treat findings, but for unknown reasons, it did just the opposite in this study. It suggested there was a 16% chance the results could have been due to chance alone—far too high to support claims that the vaccine was efficacious.

Some AIDS activists and scientists believe the vaccine merits further study, but worry that the botched announcement might undermine support for the vaccine and HIV vaccine trials generally.

“I would have preferred to have seen both results straight up. It might spring back on (the scientists), and that would be unfortunate,” Mitchell Warren, director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition said.

Are you reading this while checking email, chatting on IM, waiting for your purchase to clear PayPal and signing your mum’s birthday card?

If so, please set all that aside for a moment and take note.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science suggests that people who tend to involve themselves in multiple media-oriented activities at the same time perform relatively poorly on tests requiring them to shift attention from one task to another.

To reach these conclusions, Clifford Nass and colleagues at Stanford administered a survey to 262 college students which elicited a history of media utilization and whether or not they tendened to engage in multiple tasks simultaneously.

They collected information regarding the use of computer games, online video and audio, TV, cell phones, text and instant messaging, and computer software like word processors.

After completing the survey, the students underwent a battery of tests in which they had to evaluate certain colored triangles while ignoring other ones, categorize words, alternate between classifying numbers and letters, and press a certain button when they saw a match between 2 symbols presented at different times.

The scientists found that heavy multitaskers executed these functions more slowly than with those who rarely used more than one medium at a time. The multitaskers, it turned out, were more easily distracted by irrelevant information because they retained it in their short-term memories for a longer period of time.

The difference amounted to about a half-second delay on most tests, a difference large enough to cause noticeable problems in everyday life. (more…)

Chinese news Web sites have been given secret orders by the government to require that new users log on using their true identities if they want to post comments, reversing existing policies allowing them to weigh in on stories anonymously.

News portals like Sina, Sohu and Netease began implementing the change about a month ago after receiving a confidential order from the State Council Information Office, a Chinese government agency that supervises the Internet.

Chinese authorities said the directive was part of an initiative to foster “social responsibility” and “civility” among users, according to the New York Times.

The chief editor of one portal, who requested anonymity, said the reason for the so-called real-name system was that, “the influence of public opinion on the Net is still too big.”

China’s online community includes 340 million people and is the world’s largest.

The new initiative is the just the latest effort to squelch freedom of speech in China. Earlier this year, Chinese officials shut down more than a thousand sites in a supposed war on “vulgarity,” shuttered liberal Web sites on grounds they spread “harmful information,” and temporarily blocked access to popular social media outlets like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.

They also blocked Internet service to the Xinjiang region after deadly clashes erupted there between ethnic Uighurs and Han Chinese this summer.

In addition, China’s government had also attempted to require all computer makers to install “pornography-filtering software” that could be controlled centrally, but were forced to back off when various trade organizations protested and hackers revealed the software could also be used to interdict politically offensive material as well.

The State Council Information Office’s edict does not impact previously registered users. It also does not appear to impact most blogs or government news outlets like Xinhua and People’s Daily.

The news cycle, a process by which information becomes news, gains attention, and then fades from the public eye has been impacted by technology ever since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

Radio and TV had dramatic effects, and to the surprise of no one, Cornell scientists have concluded the Internet has as well.

Yet even in the Internet era, the scientists found that most of the time, traditional news outlets are out first with news stories, followed approximately 2.5 hours later by blogs.

To reach these conclusions, John Kleinberg and colleagues used computerized meme-tracking software to scan 1.6 million media sites and blogs during the final 3 months of last year’s presidential campaign. In all, they scrutinized nearly 90 million articles and blog posts.

The research is “a step toward understanding why certain points of view and story lines win out, and others don’t,” Kleinberg told the New York Times.

The most widely captured phrase was “lipstick on a pig,” which many will remember was the Big O’s response to claims by Top Gun that he represented the real voice for change in the campaign.

At the time, Republicans felt the comment represented a jab at McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin. 

Only 3.5% of the story lines originated in the blogosphere, with the most memorable one being Obama’s response to a question about when life begins after conception. That’s “above my pay grade,” he said.  Blogs ran first with that story.

The blogs found to be quickest to identify stories that subsequently gained wide attention were Hot Air and Talking Points Memo.

But Sreenath Sreenivasan, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School said that the findings may already be outdated due to the rise of Twitter as a news recommendation and distribution network.

“Even from last fall to today, the dynamics of the news cycle are very different, because of Twitter,” Sreenivasan told the Times.

A version of this post initially appeared on the Practice Fusion blog.

In the last 2 years alone, Big Pharma has cut its sales force by 10% to 92,000 and some experts predict the number could drop by another 15,000 in the next 2 years.

That will save $3.6 billion for the pharmaceutical companies, who know all too well that results from the investment it has made in its sales force are way down.

In fact, just 37% of drug reps who visit physician offices are able to place drug products in the sample drawer, and a only 20% speak directly with a physician.

Nearly a quarter of all physicians practice within a group that bans reps altogether.

That one reason why Big Pharma has become so excited about ePromotion, a term encompassing 3 relatively new techniques by which drug manufacturers can doctors about their products, even in the absence of Sid the Drug Rep.

The ePromotion troika includes virtual details, which include video and audiotapes, text messages and email (but no live communication), video details, which include live chat or telephone-assisted Internet sessions in which physicians can speak directly with a representative, and virtual events which include CME events, webinars, conference calls and panel discussions.

Big Pharma’s enthusiasm will likely grow as it digests the results of a new survey showing that doctors’ attitudes toward ePromotion are becoming increasingly positive.

SDIHealth concluded this after completing its Annual Study of ePromotion, the 8th such iteration of the poll.

The Study revealed that 67% of physicians expressed a positive attitude toward ePromotion, up 5% from the previous year.

73% of the surveyed physicians felt ePromotion was at least as effective as face-to-face promotion by drug reps, a jump from 68% the year before.

 The average time spent per doctor, per ePromotion activity was a robust 18 minutes.

With each year, “we have seen acceptance toward ePromotion among physicians increase,” said Jason Fox, Associate Director at SDI.

“The results of this survey underscore a growing opportunity for the two groups to interact more regularly.”

At a 2004 retreat designed to prepare sales reps for the marketing launch of Abilify as a treatment for bipolar disorder, Bristol-Myers Squibb aired a video in which a patient, Andy Behrman, recounted how the drug changed his life for the better.

“Since I switched to Abilify, almost all the side effects have gone away,” he said. “In fact, all of them have gone away.”

Behrman continued to rave about Abilify through 2005. He pocketed $400,000 from BMS in return for the favor.

Now, Behrman claims he’d taken the drug for just 4 days before the video was shot, and subsequently he did experience side effects like dizziness and restless legs which forced him to discontinue the drug less than a year after he started it.

Behrman insists he informed BMS about the side effects before the end of 2005.

BMS claims it never instructed Behrman to misrepresent his experience with Abilify, and that he never raised concerns about the drug until it refused to extend his contract.

Recently, BMS released an email showing that Behrman wanted to be paid $7.5 million for the extension.

Behrman claims BMS forged the email to discredit him and that he’s speaking out now because his NDA with the company expired just recently. He says he wants people to know about the drug’s side effects, and the extensive marketing that drove its success.

Behrman says he doesn’t care what people think about his flip-flops. “I think it is normal to have had a lapse in judgment because I was handled and manipulated by so many people,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

Abilify generated $2.15 billion in revenues for BMS last year.

The FDA has warned General Mills that claims about heart benefits appearing on Cheerios boxes violate federal laws.

In particular, the company’s assertion that the iconic breakfast cereal has been “clinically proven to help lower cholesterol” effectively renders the product a drug, according to federal law.

Stephen Sundlof, the director of the FDA’s food-safety center, added that General Mills needs to file a new-drug application for Cheerios if it intends to leave the box labeling as it is.

Tom Forsythe, a gobsmacked GM spokesperson responded that Cheerios’ claim it can “lower your cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks” has been posted for 2 years, and that the labeling references a study in which Cheerios was factored into a low saturated fat, low cholesterol diet.

“The clinical study supporting Cheerios’ cholesterol-lowering benefit is very strong,” Forsythe told the Wall Street Journal.

An unimpressed Sundlof shot back that “we try to make a bright line between what can be said about a drug and what can be said about a food.”

A less specific claim that consuming whole-grain foods can reduce the risk of heart disease risk would be permissible in certain circumstances, he added.

In a letter to General Mills, the FDA said the food-maker must “promptly” correct the violations or else it would be forced to take action, which might include seizing products.

Apparently, the FDA’s intervention was prompted by a tip from the National Consumers League.

The FDA’s love letter follows by one month a case in which the Federal Trade Commission settled a dispute with Kellogg Co. regarding claims that Frosted Mini-Wheats improved children’s attentiveness by 20%.

Adolescents that had been exposed to adult-themed TV shows between the ages of 6 and 8 are more likely to make their sexual debuts before the age of 14, according to Hernan Delgado and colleagues from Children’s Hospital in Boston.

Delgado’s team tracked TV and movie exposure in 754 boys and girls who were younger than age 12 using diaries and computer-based self-interviews, and then 5 years later, asked participants about the age at which they first had sexual intercourse.

Among the youngest kids in the study, who were 6-8 years old at the time, it turned out that for every hour per day spent viewing adult-targeted programming, the chances of having sexual intercourse by early adolescence (ages 12-14) jumped by 33%.

In all, 10% of study participants reported losing their virginity by this age.

Surprisingly, the correlation was not found among the cohort of children who were older than the age of 8 at study onset.

“We think it’s because the younger you are, the more immature you are, and the media might have more influence,” Delgado told MedpageToday.

“Older children might be learning from peers, social norms, and families . . . but when they are young, they are probably using the media as a reference to make decisions as to what being an adult entails and what an adult relationship means,” he added.
 
“Watching characters on ‘90210′ or ‘Glamour Girls’ engaging in promiscuous lifestyles where there are no consequences for actions is going to convey that this is an ideal way to behave to get what you want and to be popular,” said Melissa Henson, director of communication at the Parents Television Council.

El Pollo Loco, a chain of 418 grilled-chicken restaurants based in the Southwest, is engaged in an ugly cock fight with industry giant Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Last month, KFC launched a grilled-chicken product amid great fanfare. It was the largest new-product launch in the history of the bespectacled Colonel’s storied franchise, and a lightning strike to the grill of El Pollo Loco.

It didn’t buckle the contender’s knees. In fact, El Pollo Loco’s CEO Steve Carley unleashed a furious counterattack including TV commercials challenging KFC to a taste test.

He even set up a toll-free number that the Colonel could to call to arrange a showdown.

Yum Brands’ KFC, which has 11,000 outlets world-wide, claims it wasn’t ruffled by the challenge.

“We’re certainly more focused on Kentucky grilled chicken than on any advertising or online efforts of competitors,” KFC spokesman Rick Maynard told the Wall Street Journal.

Maybe so, but when a flood of calls came in to the hot line from people claiming to prefer KFC’s entry, El Pollo Loco’s handlers determined by tracing the caller IDs that some of the calls originated from HQ over at KFC.

“We’ve been grilling our employees to see if anyone’s done any undercover dialing,” Maynard said.

For El Pollo Loco though, this was a chance to make some serious gravy. It posted follow-up videos on YouTube outing KFC’s purported sham calls and claiming it had gotten under the Colonel’s oven-baked skin.

The spat has now escalated to the grandest stage of all, as king-maker Oprah Winfrey--who in the last year alone got the other Big O elected president and quadrupled the value of Twitter—announced that viewers could download coupons from her Web site for a freebie at KFC.

Once again, El Pollo Loco was ready. The coupons, it turned out, were good through mid-May, excepting Mother’s Day.

The contender posted yet another video on YouTube.

“What does KFC have against Moms?” it asked, while offering to honor KFC’s coupons on the holy day.

The Walt Disney Company wants a bigger piece of the action in the pre-teen boy market, so it hired an anthropologist to sort through the dresser drawers of a 12 year-old.

Venturing into territory never before seen by human eyes, much less smelled by human noses other than his mother’s who–let’s face it–had no choice, Kelly Peña eventually found a Black Sabbath T-shirt scrunched into a corner on the top shelf.

When confronted with the artifact, the boy confided that “wearing it makes me feel like I’m going to an R-rated movie.” 

Disney hopes these and other penetrating psychological insights into a most assuredly confused demographic can help it recreate a time when Davy Crockett drove millions of boy-dollars its way, while hopefully counteracting its reputation as a provider of girl-friendly fare like (ew!) Hannah Montana.

Early results of Peña’s work are apparent on Disney XD, a new cable channel and Web site featuring urban skateboard parks populated by unassuming, nonthreatening boys, and on its TV hit “Aaron Stone,” where one character is quite average as a basketball player.

Peña had suggested to producers that today’s boys relate with characters that are trying to grow and improve themselves. “Winning isn’t nearly as important to boys as Hollywood thinks,” she told the New York Times.

Boys in the 6 to 14 age range drive $50 billion in global sales per year, according to market researchers, but it’s a tough market to crack, a fact to which News Corporation can attest after its Fox Kids Network failed famously in the late 1990s. 

Despite Pena’s intrepid work to date, results have been modest. Disney XD has bumped its prime-time audience by 27% among kids between 6-14 years of age, but most of that has come from girls. Viewership among the boys is up 10%.

Just don’t tell that to the boys!

IBM is putting the finishing touches on a computer program that will compete against human contestants on “Jeopardy!” 

Comparing such an achievement to Deep Blue, the venerable tech company’s chess-playing program that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 is like comparing checkers to chess.

Chess is a game of simple statistical probabilities, a lot of them it’s true, and pieces with clearly defined powers.

“Jeopardy!” presents more daunting challenges for computers, which must weigh nuances of language including double entendres, puns, and analogies faster than Ken Jennings on crack.

The machine has been dubbed Watson in honor of IBM founder Thomas Watson. It is the culmination of a 3-year project involving a team of 20 with expertise in language processing, information retrieval and machine learning.

“The big goal is to get computers to…converse in human terms,” said David Ferucci, an AI scientist and the team’s leader.

In the contest, Watson will receive questions as electronic text, whereas the human contestants will, as usual, see the question and hear it spoken by host Alex Trebek.

Watson will use a synthesized voice to respond and select follow-up categories.

It will not be connected to the Internet during the contest, instead rendering answers from text that had been processed and indexed in advance.

Harry Friedman, the show’s executive producer, indicated he might invite Jennings to carry the flag for humans.

In 2004 Jennings won 74 consecutive contests and collected $2.5 million along the way.

In prepping for the contest, Watson will have stored a large chunk of the Web as indexed by Google, but it’ll mean nothing if the machine can’t understand the context of each clue.

For example, the sentence “I never said she stole my money” can have seven meanings depending on which word is stressed.

“We love those sentences,” Eric Nyberg said. “Those are the ones we talk about when we’re sitting around having beers after work.” The computer scientist from Carnegie Mellon University is on the development team.

Big Pharma cut DTC spending by 8% in 2008. It was the first such reduction in the 10 years since the FDA eased restrictions on the practice. DTC spending dropped from $4.8 billion in 2007 to $4.4 billion last year, according to IMS Health.

The drop-off has been chalked up to reductions in new drug introductions and a bit of ill-will directed at the industry by the public and congress.

Critics claim the advertisements, which are proscribed in most countries, inflate costs by encouraging people to request brand-name drugs in lieu of less expensive alternatives.

In response, PhRMA, Big Pharma’s trade group, points to a 6 year-old FTC statement claiming the ads inform consumers about medication options and have not been proven to cause health care cost escalations.

And Pfizer spokesperson Sally Beatty insisted to the Wall Street Journal that its ads raise awareness of health conditions.

“Erectile dysfunction… can be a signal for other serious medical issues, including high blood pressure, diabetes and cardiovascular disease,” she said.

Big Pharma adds that DTC constitutes only 40% of its marketing expenses for prescription drugs.

The remainder targets physicians.

Merck and the Plough, which jointly market Vytorin, shaved their DTC spend on the cholesterol buster from $114 million to $47 million, according to IMS.

That came after Michigan congressmen John Dingell and Bart Stupak denounced the companies for pushing the drug while delaying release of a study that showed Vytorin was no better for most patients than generic equivalents.

“We felt this temporary suspension was appropriate in light of the news coverage,” a Merck spokesperson told the Journal.

Even Abraham Lincoln, in his new role as Rozerem pitchman, took a hit.

Takeda cut DTC advertising for the sleeper by 90% to $14 million. We’re going to miss you too, Abe.