Reports on this study linking job-difficulty level with Alzheimer’s are all over the news today. “Those with high levels of leisure activity had a 38 percent lower risk of developing dementia, even when controlling for other risk factors, including ethnic background. Leisure activities included reading, going to movies, taking walks and talking with friends.”

But no account was taken in the study of whether the people might not have assumed more challenging job responsibilities as they grew older because they were already developing the beginning stages of the disease. An earlier study seemed to support the idea that a brain reserve could be built up (from formal education and other learning experiences) that might serve as a backup when the disease begins to manifest.

Clearly it can’t hurt to exercise your brain as well as your body.

Sun Herald – 08/10/04: “Health Management Associates buys up hospitals in rural areas and upgrades the level of care so that local residents don’t have to commute to major urban centers for high quality treatment. Their chairman once described HMA as the ‘Wal-Mart of the hospital business,’ according to the Hoover’s Online”

In the same article we see a reference to a proposed class action suit that’s been filed against HMA in Florida for supposedly price-gouging by charging more to non-insured patients than to those with insurance. Have heard the same accusations against Wal-Mart. The challenge of maintaining ethical standards in the midst of great financial success clearly isn’t confined to any particular industry.

Stains that lower cholesterol may cause muscle damage. Some patients complain of previously non-existent muscle pain after starting statin-containing drugs. Blood tests often reveal elevated levels of the enzyme creatine kinase, an indication of muscle damage.

No one is about to give any definitive answers yet, since the drugs work wonders for lowering cholesterol. But one physician said the risks are worth it for those who are trying to prevent a second heart attack. Maybe not, he said, under other circumstances.

The point is that many physicians are unaware of the connection–and that takes away the patient’s right to make a fully informed choice. When you’re testing a drug, where do you draw the line to determine where you stop testing for other issues?

Patients taking pergolide to help control movement in Parkinson’s disease have a much greater incidence of heart valve damage. : Investigators are recommending switching to a nonergot agonist “until the safety of pergolide can be firmly established.” says an article in Neurology magazine.

So many things we don’t know all the consequences of. Sometimes it must seem to investigators that they’re moving down a long narrow tunnel and can’t see other branches of the tunnel until they fall down one…

It’s good to know there’s a better product out there to keep our hot dogs or ready-to-eat chicken slices from trying to kill us…

Axen30 said to kill Listeria in 30 Seconds instead of 10 minutes.: Inventor PURE Bioscience says they’re responding to increasing “industry and consumer use of ‘green’ products… This new molecule, silver dihydrogen citrate (SDC), is an electrolytically generated source of stabilized ionic silver… SDC liquid is colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-caustic and formulates well with other compounds.”

Boston Scientific is voluntarily expanding its recall of drug-coated stents used in angioplasty.(washingtonpost.com): After finding that 3000 more stents had the same problem (on units manufactured in their Ireland plant the balloon used to hold open the blood vessel was sometimes failing to deflate properly), the company announced it was adding them to the 100,000 Taxus and Express 2 stents it had already recalled.

No telling how much this is costing Boston Scientific. How well does your insurance cover this kind of loss? From the MedMarc/the Hartford Company’s online article about Risk Management for medical device professionals, here’s a list of questions you should ask yourself when you’re buying insurance:

• Is this kind of loss best addressed by insurance?
• Which insurance proposal offers the broadest coverage?
• Which offers the best price?
• What kind of service can the device company expect if it has a claim?
• How financially stable and solvent are these insurers?

MSNBC – TGen draws top bioscience collaborators to Phoenix. Two-year old TGen is a magnet for collaboration–even between competitors. TGen first attracted the International Genomics Consortium to Phoenix. Recently they’ve been working collaboratively with organizations like the Mayo Clinic, Agilent and Affymetrix (the last two of which are competitors).

A few things they’re working on together include identifying “regions of chromosomes that have been lost or multiplied in cancer cells, allowing tumors to escape normal growth controls.” The technology–comparative genomic hybridization (CGH)–lets them analyze and compare gene expression and high-resolution CGH data to gain new insights into various kinds of cancers. They hope the data will also help them develop diagnostic and prognostic tools and target the most promising drugs for development.

What brings competitors together like this? It seems that in bioscience everything is connected–it’s all about life, after all–and everyone’s goals are similar, though aimed in slightly different directions. Since no one company can afford to do all the necessary research on every possible facet of their piece, and everyone understands that knowledge in any one area will expand much faster when the big picture is clearer, it seems to make more sense for bioscience companies to collaborate. And of course there’s the scientific tradition of sharing (nice book chapter).

Although, it’s well understood that human beings don’t always do what makes sense… I just think that, unlike most business in general, there’s a unifying force among those who study life. Working together to find answers to the big questions–like genetics–can mean that everyone can go back to their own labs sooner and apply what they’ve learned to their own piece of the pie.

Bacterin to Receive $1.4 Million From Defense Appropriation: The company will develop ways to “add bioactive coatings to temporary orthopedic fixation devices used to treat battlefield wounds. Anti-inflammatory, anti-infective, anti-coagulant, or pain relief properties embedded in a bioactive coating could significantly reduce the high rate of infection.” They expect to be able to reduce the rate at which soldiers lose limbs–and even their lives–because of inadequate treatments that are applied on the battlefield to hold until the victim gets to a military hospital (70% of wounds get infected).

Thank you. If we must wage war, the women would really appreciate it if you could keep the men in one piece.

Digital Chosunilbo: Korea: PPA has long been known as a dangerous ingredient in cold medicines. Products containing PPA have been banned in the U.S. for a number of years.

This story says the Korean FDA at first only published a portion of its earlier report–and pretty much led people to believe that the connection to hemorrhagic stroke (ruptured blood vessel in the brain) wasn’t clear. For some reason, they’re now publishing the whole report–which states that the connection is very clear. In fact, the latest research indicates PPA is also a factor in causing ischemic stroke, the much more common type (blockage of a blood vessel in the brain).

Strange and seemingly unethical behavior. Did they just not want to give up making money from the distribution of those drugs?

U.S. Won’t Override AIDS Drug Patents (washingtonpost.com): Abbott Laboratories quintupled the price of its AIDS drug Norvir late last year–and NIH says it’s okay. Patient groups and some members of Congress called the move price-gouging and “pushed the NIH to intervene by overriding Abbott’s patents, since Norvir’s discovery was partially funded by taxpayer dollars.”

How does a reasonable person take sides on an ethical issue where the law says there’s no problem with pricing that’s drastically uneven (only the U.S. has the 5-times-the-price problem) and customers’ lives are at stake? Maybe there’s a middle road for both. The manufacturer could show a willingness to compromise; the government could offer legislative or other interventions to help the manufacturer make a fair profit while taking steps to make the drug more accessible.

If tax money helped develop it, why not use tax money to help get it to the people who need it?