Government – Page 7 – artdiamondblog.com

Medicare Rewards Health Insurers for Overestimating Future Prescription-Drug Costs

I believe that the perverse incentives that Medicare creates for insurers, as described in the 2019 article quoted below, still exist. But I need to confirm my belief.

(p. A1) Each June, health insurers send the government detailed cost forecasts for providing prescription-drug benefits to more than 40 million people on Medicare.

No one expects the estimates to be spot on. After all, it is a tall order to predict the exact drug spending for the following year of the thousands of members in each plan.

However, year after year, most of those estimates have turned out to be wrong in the particular way that, thanks to Medicare’s arcane payment rules, results in more revenue for the health insurers, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found. As a consequence, the insurers kept $9.1 billion more in taxpayer funds than they would have had their estimates been accurate from 2006 to 2015, according to Medicare data obtained by the Journal.

Those payments have largely been hidden from view since Medicare’s prescription-drug program was launched more than a decade ago, and are an example of how the secrecy of the $3.5 trillion U.S. health-care system promotes and obscures higher spending.

Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit, called Part D, was designed to help hold down drug costs by having insurers manage the coverage efficiently. Instead, Part D spending has accelerated (p. A12) faster than all other components of Medicare in recent years, rising 49% from $62.9 billion in 2010 to $93.8 billion in 2017. Medicare experts say the program’s design is contributing to that increase. Total spending for Part D from 2006 to 2015 was about $652 billion.

The cornerstone of Part D is a system in which private insurers such as CVS Health Corp., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Humana Inc. submit “bids” estimating how much it will cost them to provide the benefit. The bids include their own profits and administrative costs for each plan. Then Medicare uses the estimates to make monthly payments to the plans.

After the year ends, Medicare compares the plans’ bids to the actual spending. If the insurer overestimated its costs, it pockets a chunk of the extra money it received from Medicare—sometimes all of it—and this can often translate into more profit for the insurer, in addition to the profit built into the approved bid. If the extra money is greater than 5% of the insurer’s original bid, it has to pay some of it back to Medicare.

For instance, in 2015, insurers overestimated costs by about $2.2 billion, and kept about $1.06 billion of it after paying back $1.1 billion to the government, according to the data reviewed by the Journal.

. . .

If those big insurers were aiming to submit accurate bids, the probability that they would have overestimated costs so frequently and by such a large amount is less than one in one million, according to a statistical analysis done for the Journal by researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who study pharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement.

Insurance companies use heaps of data to predict future spending. If truly unpredictable events were blowing up their statistical models, the proportion of overestimates to underestimates would be closer to 50/50, says Peter Bach, director of Sloan Kettering’s Center for Health Policy and Outcomes, which conducted the statistical analysis.

“Even expert dart throwers don’t hit the bull’s-eye every time. But their misses are spread around in every direction,” says Dr. Bach. “If they start missing in one particular direction over and over they are doing it on purpose.”

For the full story see:

Joseph Walker and Christopher Weaver. “Medicare Overpaid Insurers Billions.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Jan. 5, 2019 [sic]): A1 & A12.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 4, 2019 [sic], and has the title “The $9 Billion Upcharge: How Insurers Kept Extra Cash from Medicare.”)

When a Therapy Fails in a Clinical Trial, Is That the Fault of the Therapy or of the Trial?

When a proposed therapy fails in a clinical trial is that because the therapy can’t work, or is it because the trial itself was flawed? It is far from written in stone how a clinical trial should be set up. Should the therapy be given by pill or intravenously? In what doses? How often, for how long? At what stage of the disease? Because Stage 3 clinical trials are so expensive and difficult to implement, some therapies may have only one shot to succeed. How many therapies that could have helped some people, will never do so, because the researchers had bad luck, or less skill, in implementing the trial? This problem could be reduced the regulatory mandate to requiring only the Stage 1 and Stage 2 clinical trials, that mainly establish safety (as opposed to the much-more-expensive Stage 3 that mainly establishes efficacy). That way researchers who lacked the deep pockets of the researchers discussed in the article quoted below, could still more often afford multiple shots at designing a trial that would succeed at identifying what therapy, applied to which patients, in what modalities, might cure them, or at least lengthen their lives, or reduce their symptoms. Some of the greatest advances in medicine occurred in an environment of quick trial and error, as when medicine has to be precticed on the battlefield of war, or when Emil Freireich improvised new ingredients for his chemo cocktail to cure some children of childhood leukemia or when Freireich’s protégé Vincent DaVita did the same to cure some adults of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Ideally I would eliminate all mandates, both to enhance liberty, and to speed trial-and-error therapies. But here I suggest eliminating only Stage 3 clinical trials, not because I think that is ideal, but (following Milton Freidman) because I suspect that policy reform may be the best that is politically feasible. We would maximize trial and error adjustments by eliminating all mandated clinical trials. In the vast majority of decisions in life we make judgements without the benefit of a clinical trial. And such judgements usually are effective and improve with experience. [Gary Klein persuasively makes this point through a multitude of examples, in his tour de force Sources of Power.] What is done in life generally, can also be done in medicine in particular, bringing us more cures, faster.

(p. D4) “There is no reason why cancer vaccines would not work if given at the earliest stage,” said Sachet A. Shukla, who directs a cancer vaccine program at MD Anderson Cancer Center. “Cancer vaccines,” he added, “are an idea whose time has come.” (Dr. Shukla owns stock in companies developing cancer vaccines.)

That view is a far cry from where the field was a decade ago, when researchers had all but given up. Studies that would have seemed like a pipe dream are now underway.

“People would have said this is insane,” said Dr. Susan Domchek, the principal investigator of a breast cancer vaccine study at the University of Pennsylvania.

. . .

“We had this trial, 63 patients, Stage 4 cancer. They had failed all therapies,” Dr. Finn said.

. . .

In their initial studies, it became clear to Dr. Finn and her colleagues that the cancers were too far advanced for immunizations to work. After all, she notes, with the exception of rabies, no one vaccinates against an infectious disease in people who are already infected.

“I said, ‘I don’t want to do that again,’” Dr. Finn said. “It is not the vaccines. We have to look at different patients.”

Now, she and her colleague at Pittsburgh, Dr. Robert Schoen, a gastroenterologist, are trying to prevent precancerous colon polyps with a vaccine. But intercepting cancer can be tricky.

They focused on people whose colonoscopies had detected advanced polyps — lumps that can grow in the colon, but only a minority of which turn into cancer. The goal, Dr. Schoen said, was for the vaccine to stimulate the immune system to prevent new polyps.

It worked in mice.

“I said, ‘OK, this is great,’” Dr. Schoen recalled.

But a recently completed study of 102 people at six medical centers randomly assigned to receive the preventive vaccine or a placebo had a different result. All had advanced colon polyps, giving them three times the risk of developing cancer in the next 15 years compared to people with no polyps.

Only a quarter of those who got the vaccine developed an immune response, and there was no significant reduction in the rate of polyp recurrences in the vaccinated group.

“We need to work on getting a better vaccine,” Dr. Schoen said.

. . .

Dr. Domchek said she can envision a future in which people will have blood tests to find cancer cells so early that they do not show up in scans or standard tests.

“To paint a grand future,” she said, “if we knew the tests predicted cancer we could say, ‘Here’s your vaccine.’”

For the full story see:

Gina Kolata. “New Hopes for a Cancer Vaccine.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022 [sic]): D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 10, 2022 [sic], and has the title “After Giving Up on Cancer Vaccines, Doctors Start to Find Hope.” Where the wording of the versions differs, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

Gary Klein’s main book that I praise in my initial comments is:

Klein, Gary A. Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions. 20th Anniversary ed. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.

Medical Mergers Can Reduce Competition and Raise Prices When Government Aids Incumbents or Fetters Entrepreneurs

The story quoted below gives useful evidence that in the recent past hospital mergers have generally resulted in higher prices. But the story is incomplete, creating the misleading impression that government antitrust action is clearly needed. My hypothesis: mergers can increase efficiency and lower patient prices, but only tend to do so when hospitals are constrained by the real or potential entry of entrepreneurial health providers. Unfortunately entry is currently very limited, often by government actions. Often new hospitals must acquire a certificate of need before they are allowed to exist.

Often, incumbent hospitals successfully object to those certificates. Federal subsidies differentially go to large incumbent hospitals. Federal Covid-relief funds went to large incumbent hospitals that used much of the funds to buy up other hospitals. Less directly, enormous government regulation creates a differential burden on the small new entrant that likely cannot afford the huge specialized staff to successfully navigate the voluminous opaque regulations.

If we want lower prices, government should allow mergers, but also stop creating constraints that discourage entry. Government should especially reduce the regulations that discourage medical entrepreneurship.

(p. D4) The nation’s hospitals have been merging at a rapid pace for a decade, forming powerful organizations that influence nearly every health care decision consumers make.

The hospitals have argued that consolidation benefits consumers with cheaper prices from coordinated services and other savings.

But an analysis conducted for The New York Times shows the opposite to be true in many cases. The mergers have essentially banished competition and raised prices for hospital admissions in most cases, according to an examination of 25 metropolitan areas with the highest rate of consolidation from 2010 through 2013, a peak period for mergers.

The analysis showed that the price of an average hospital stay soared, with prices in most areas going up between 11 percent and 54 percent in the years afterward, according to researchers from the Nicholas C. Petris Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

The new research confirms growing skepticism among consumer health groups and lawmakers about the enormous clout of the hospital groups. While most political attention has focused on increased drug prices and the Affordable Care Act, state and federal officials are beginning to look more closely at how hospital mergers are affecting spiraling health care costs.

During the Obama years, the mergers received nearly universal approval from antitrust agencies, with the Federal Trade Commission moving to block only a small fraction of deals. State officials generally looked the other way.

President Trump issued an executive order last year calling for more competition, saying his administration would focus on “limiting excessive consolidation (p. B1) throughout the health care system.” In September [2018], Congress asked the Medicare advisory board to study the trend.

. . .

Prices rise even more steeply when these large hospital systems buy doctors’ groups, according to Richard Scheffler, director of the Petris Center.

“It’s much more powerful when they already have a very large market share,” said Mr. Scheffler, who recently published a study on the issue in Health Affairs. “The impact is just enormous.”

For the full story see:

Reed Abelson. “When Hospitals Merge, Patients Often Pay More.” The New York Times (Wednesday, November 14, 2018 [sic]): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “When Hospitals Merge to Save Money, Patients Often Pay More.” Where the wording of the versions differs, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The article co-authored by Scheffler and mentioned above

Scheffler, Richard M., Daniel R. Arnold, and Christopher M. Whaley. “Consolidation Trends in California’s Health Care System: Impacts on Aca Premiums and Outpatient Visit Prices.” Health Affairs 37, no. 9 (Sept. 2018): 1409-16.

Government Gave “40 Years of Seriously Incorrect Advice” on Trans Fats

The government’s advice often turns out to be wrong. That is an added argument for not giving the government the power to enforce its advice through mandatory regulations. (“Added” to the fundamental argument based the right to free choice.)

[In May 2021 Nicholas Wade, the author of the review quoted below, showed enormous courage in being one of the first few to risk cancelation by presenting a cogent case that Covid leaked from a Wuhan lab.]

(p. C9) Rachel Carson rightly complained in “Silent Spring” that farmers were sloshing far too many harmful pesticides into the environment. But she took aim at the wrong one. DDT, a mild and enormously effective pesticide, helped rid the United States of malaria and its benefits, if more discriminately pursued, could have outweighed its costs.

The overstrict verdict against DDT is an instance of the harms that can ensue when scientific evidence is ignored. This and other cases described by Paul A. Offit in “Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong” raise provocative questions about the reasons that science is misused in modern society.

. . .

Another case of medical advice based on insufficient data is that of dietary fat. As Dr. Offit tells the story, in the 1970s the government advised cutting down on fat consumption. In the 1980s the message changed. Unsaturated fats were good; only saturated fats were bad: Eat margarine, not butter. But then it turned out that unsaturated fats came in two forms, known to chemists as “cis” and “trans,” and that “trans fats” were appallingly active promoters of heart disease. Margarine and hydrogenated vegetable cooking oils, whose use had been encouraged, were rich in trans fats. After 40 years of seriously incorrect advice, trans fats were mostly eliminated from the American diet only in 2012.

. . .

Besides his overconfidence in the checking mechanisms of science, Dr. Offit goes too easy on the motives of those who abuse science. Environmentalists, for instance, are interested in achieving political results, not in distracting scientific caveats and uncertainties, which they do their best to suppress. It is their propensity to take everything to excess that leads to obscurantist positions, such as irrational fear of genetically modified crops.

For the full review see:

Nicholas Wade. “A Little Knowledge.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 8, 2017 [sic]): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated April 7, 2017 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

The book under review is:

Offit, Paul A. Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2017.

When the Highly Restrictive Enrollment Criteria for Clinical Trials Steal Hope from the Innocently Desperate, It “Just Feels Unjust”

Muscular dystrophy is sometimes called “Duchenne.” The full name of the disease is “Duchenne muscular dystrophy.” When I was a student at Monroe elementary school a classmate named Frank Goldsberry played on the basketball team. In high school he was in a wheel chair with muscular dystrophy. When the high school principle, Howard Crouch, proposed to do away with the academic honor of valedictorian on the ground that there was some arbitrariness in who received it, I argued that to do would be to diminish the honor given to academic achievement. Crouch relented. It turned out that our valedictorian was Frank Goldsberry. He died a few years later in his early 20s. Frank’s father told my mother that Frank was grateful to me for speaking up. Howard Crouch had a point, but I am glad that after working hard under dire circumstances, Frank received the award.

The F.D.A. should stop mandating randomized double-blind clinical trials (RCTs) so that those who have muscular dystrophy can seek any therapy that they, their parents, and their physicians believe has promise. Not everyone will be cured, but we will learn what works through a Bayesian process of trial and error. More parents and boys will be allowed to hold on to hope.

(p. D1) Lucas was 5 before his parents, Bill and Marci Barton of Grand Haven, Mich., finally got an explanation for his difficulties standing up or climbing stairs. The diagnosis: muscular dystrophy.

Mr. Barton turned to Google.

“The first thing I read was, ‘no cure, in a wheelchair in their teens, pass in their 20s,” Mr. Barton said. “I stopped. I couldn’t read any more. I couldn’t handle it.”

Then he found a reason to hope. For the first time ever, there are clinical trials — nearly two dozen — testing treatments that might actually stop the disease.

The problem, as Mr. Barton soon discovered, is that the enrollment criteria are so restrictive that very few children qualify. As a result, families like the Bartons often are turned away.

. . .

Ryan and Brooke Saalman know how hard it can be to know what to do. “We did a lot of praying,” said Ms. Saalman, mother of two boys with Duchenne in Columbus, Ga.

They decided to enroll their oldest son, Jacob, 6, in a trial of a highly experimental drug.

. . .

. . . they discovered that gene therapy may be irreversible. And if it didn’t work, Ja-(p. D3)cob would be ineligible for an even more promising approach in the future: gene editing, to snip out the deadly mutation that causes Duchenne, an effort now in preclinical development.

. . .

The Bartons found out about a gene-therapy trial at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, testing a treatment by Sarepta Therapeutics.

They watched a miraculous video of a little boy struggling to walk up a flight of stairs before treatment — and then doing it easily afterward.

“This was what we were hoping for,” Mr. Barton said.

Lucas was the right age, and he seemed to qualify. But testing showed that he carries antibodies to the virus used to deliver the treatment. It would not work for him.

The Bartons were drained, devastated. And for now, there is no other trial that Lucas qualifies for.

“I had my put my hopes into this,” Mr. Barton said. “It was the miracle.”

Dr. Jeffrey Bigelow, a neurologist, and his wife, Alexis Bigelow, of Millcreek, Utah, hoped against hope that their son Henri, 8, would qualify for the only gene therapy trial that will accept boys his age.

Then the Bigelows found out that enrollees of Henri’s age have to be able to lie down and then stand up with their hands at their sides in less than 10 seconds.

It took Henri 10 seconds to do that last spring, when he was evaluated for another trial. Now it would probably take him 20 seconds, his father said.

“It feels like Henri is being punished for losing the ability to stand up from the ground too soon,” Dr. Bigelow said.

He also worries about older boys with Duchenne who are lucky enough to still walk. They are shut out from the trial because they are not yet in wheelchairs. And other trials won’t accept boys that old.

“These are boys who, like Henri, desperately need the treatment, and if they don’t get it in the next one to two years, likely will be confined to a wheelchair, to never walk again,” Dr. Bigelow said.

“This just feels unjust.”

For the full story see:

Gina Kolata. “One Shot To Qualify For Hope.” The New York Times (Tuesday, March 26, 2019 [sic]): D1 & D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 25, 2019 [sic], and has the title “For Many Boys With Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, Bright Hope Lies Just Beyond Reach.”)

F.D.A. Chief Sets Low Bar for Cancer Progress–Three Months of Longer Life Is “A Major Therapeutic Advance”

F.D.A. regulations have slowed progress toward curing cancer. Rather than reduce regulations, the head of the F.D.A. redefines “progress” as occurring when a new drug increases average lifespan by a mere three months.

(p. D3) Was there a moment when you realized a new era had begun?

It was a gradual thing. I wish I could say I had an “a-ha” moment.

I remember though, one of our first approvals of a PD-1 drug (a drug that unleashes the immune system to fight cancer). A division director sent me an email with a survival curve for patients in a study. It was a Friday afternoon. I saw it and I nearly fell off my seat. It was such a positive study for these patients with squamous cell lung cancer. They lived an average of six months with standard chemotherapy. With the new drug they lived 9.2 months.

I called the division director and said, “What are we going to do to expedite this?”

We had to get a submission from the drug company and that can take several months. Sometimes it takes six months and sometimes up to a year because of the voluminous amount of material that must be provided.

We got the submission in a couple of months. Nivolumab was approved in March of 2015.

It was a major therapeutic advance. These were people who heretofore had few therapeutic options.

. . .

. . ., my regret? I won’t be here in 2049, my presumed 50th F.D.A. anniversary.

I would love to see what oncology looks like given the rapid changes in the past 25 years. Hang on tight. The velocity of innovation will only increase.

For the full interview see:

Gina Kolata, interviewer. “F.D.A.’s Cancer Chief Is Forward Focused.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 19, 2024): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Nov. 8, 2024, and has the title “He’s the F.D.A.’s Cancer Chief, Not a Fortune Teller.” The question is from the interviewer Gina Kolata. The rest of the words are quoted from the answers of Dr. Richard Pazdur.)

Peppermint at One Time Required a Prescription, While Strychnine Was Sold Over-the-Counter

I suspect I would not much like the Remaking the American Patient book–it seems to blame capitalism for all of the ills of the healthcare system. But it does include one compelling example of the limitations of government regulation of drugs: allowing strychnine while restricting peppermint.

(p. D3) Medical historians who focus on the conquest of dire diseases serve up narratives of progress and triumph. Not Ms. Tomes, a professor of history at Stony Brook University, who has chosen to examine instead the health care experience of average healthy citizens, the great silent majority whose lives are punctuated by a variety of minor ills and only the occasional major calamity.

. . .

Are you perplexed by our regulatory chaos, with layer upon layer of well-meaning but persistently ineffective efforts to guarantee the safety of medical services? It turns out we come from a long tradition of such inadequacy: Patient safety has been the holy grail for everyone, long sought, never achieved.

Drug regulatory efforts have been inconsistent and confusing. (At one point in the 1940s, peppermint drops were available by prescription, while strychnine could be freely purchased by anyone).

For the full review see:

Abigail Zuger, M.D. “When Patients Became Purchasers.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 26, 2016 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 23, 2016 [sic], and has the title “Review: ‘Remaking the American Patient’.”)

The book under review above is:

Tomes, Nancy. Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers, Studies in Social Medicine. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.

Democratic New York Department of Environmental Conservation Raids Home, Seizing and Killing P’Nut, Internet-Famous Orphan Pet Squirrel

(p. A15) . . . P’Nut was an internet-famous squirrel who was seized and euthanized by New York State wildlife agents last week . . .

. . .

. . . Elon Musk lionized the rodent as a Jedi martyr — more powerful in death than in life.

“RIP Peanut,” read a post on a Trump campaign’s official TikTok account on Sunday [Nov. 3, 2024]. “Needlessly murdered by Democrat bureaucrats in New York.”

. . .

P’Nut’s journey from cowboy-hat-wearing Instagram cutie to conservative lightning rod began on Oct. 30 [2024]. That was when New York State Department of Environmental Conservation officers, responding to what the agency said were anonymous complaints, arrived at the home of his owner, Mark Longo, in Pine City in Chemung County. In New York State, it is illegal to house animals considered wildlife without a special permit; Mr. Longo has said he was in the process of applying for one.

D.E.C. agents seized the squirrel, which Mr. Longo had cared for ever since its mother was hit by a car seven years ago. Agents also apprehended Fred the raccoon. At some point, the squirrel bit a person involved with the investigation, according to a statement put out by the agency, leading its officers to swiftly euthanize both animals to test for rabies.

In tearful online posts, Mr. Longo and his wife, Daniela, railed against tax dollars being spent to kill the animals they considered pets.

. . .

In Macon, Ga., Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman, spoke at a Trump rally and compared Peanut’s fate to that of Laken Riley, a local woman who was killed by a Venezuelan man who had once lived in New York. She blamed Democrats in New York City, which is 200 miles from Pine City, for euthanizing P’Nut.

“Democrats in New York City went in and raided a home to kill a squirrel,” Ms. Greene said. “Yet it was the same State of New York that let the criminal illegal alien go that came to Georgia that murdered our very own Laken Riley.”

. . .

. . . the animals’ owner, Mr. Longo, 34, considers himself apolitical. He is not registered with any political party and said he has never voted in his life.

. . .

He has spent the past days grieving, he said, and when he found a stray almond that Peanut had sneaked into his pocket, he burst into tears. He was just grateful, he said, “that somebody is giving P’Nut a voice.”

“I don’t care if it was the blue side or the red side,” he added. “Somebody on this planet is fighting for my animals.”

For the full story see:

Sarah Maslin Nir. “Death of a Pet Squirrel Is a G.O.P. Rallying Cry.” The New York Times (Wednesday, November 6, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipses, bracketed date, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 4, 2024, and has the title “How the Death of a Celebrity Squirrel Became a Republican Rallying Cry.”)

A Drug’s Lack of Randomized Clinical Trials Does Not Imply the Drug Lacks Efficacy

(p. D5) In 2013, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association issued a series of statin recommendations for primary prevention, relevant to adults up to age 75 who have high cholesterol or diabetes, or who for other reasons face an estimated 7.5 percent risk or greater of developing heart disease within 10 years.

Last year, the United States Preventive Services Task Force similarly recommended statins for primary prevention in people aged 40 to 75 who had risk factors like high cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure or smoking, with a 10-year disease risk of 10 percent or greater.

But for people over age 75, both panels agreed, there was not sufficient evidence to reach a conclusion. As with many clinical trials, the major statin studies mostly haven’t included patients at advanced ages.

. . .

But Dr. Paul Ridker, a self-described “statin advocate” who directs the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, gets irked at the argument that we don’t know enough to give statins to older patients without heart disease.

“I don’t believe there’s any doubt that statin therapy is effective for primary prevention in older adults,” Dr. Ridker said. He cites a recent reanalysis of data from two major studies showing that patients over age 70 taking statins experienced the same reductions in cardiovascular events and mortality as younger ones.

Dr. Orkaby and her Harvard colleagues hoped to help resolve such questions with their recent study, published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, comparing physicians over age 70 who took statins for primary prevention with those who didn’t.

The team matched each group for 30 variables and found that over an average of seven years, statin-takers had an 18 percent lower death rate, though not a statistically significant reduction in cardiovascular events.

In the same issue, though, an editorial co-authored by Dr. Rich called statin use for primary prevention in older patients “an unresolved conundrum.”

The physician study was observational, so can’t establish causes, he pointed out.

For the full story see:

Paula Span. “The New Old Age; If You’re Over 75 and Healthy, Are Statins for You?” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 9, 2018 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 5, 2018 [sic], and has the title “The New Old Age; You’re Over 75, and You’re Healthy. Why Are You Taking a Statin?”)

The article on the effect of statins on older physicians, co-authored by Orkaby and mentioned above, is:

Orkaby, Ariela R., J. Michael Gaziano, Luc Djousse, and Jane A. Driver. “Statins for Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Events and Mortality in Older Men.” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 65, no. 11 (Nov. 2017): 2362-68.

Government Sugar Quotas Increase Demand for Harder-to-Metabolize Corn Syrup, Making Americans Fatter

For decades on the last day of every micro principles class I discussed the causes and effects of U.S. government sugar quotas. Government sugar quotas reduce the quantity of sugar that can be imported into the U.S., increasing the price of sugar. If the price of one substitute (sugar) rises, the demand for the other substitute (corn syrup) increases. As a result Americans consume more corn syrup which is harder to metabolize and easier to overconsume. Government sugar quota regulation thus increases obesity, and obesity-related diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

(p. D5) To clarify the effects of our high-sugar diet, I consulted an expert, Kimber L. Stanhope, a researcher in nutritional biology at the University of California, Davis, whose work is free of industry support and funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health. In a comprehensive 34-page review of research published in Critical Reviews in Clinical Laboratory Sciences in 2016, she linked consumption of added sugar to metabolic disease — cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease — as well as high blood levels of uric acid, a risk factor for kidney stones and gout.

In studies done in her lab among young adults consuming their normal diets, the risk for developing heart disease and kidney stones rose in direct proportion to the amount of high-fructose corn syrup they consumed.

. . .

“Fructose and glucose are not metabolized the same way in the human body,” which can account for the adverse effects of fructose, Dr. Stanhope said. Glucose is metabolized in cells throughout the body and used for energy. Fructose is metabolized in the liver, resulting in fat production and raising the risk of heart and fatty-liver disease. In addition, she explained, “fructose doesn’t stimulate the satiety-promoting substance leptin,” prompting some people to overconsume it, especially in soft drinks containing high-fructose corn syrup, and other tempting foods as well.

For the full story see:

Jane E. Brody. “The Sharp Bite of a Sweet Tooth.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 23, 2019 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 22, 2019 [sic], and has the title “The Downside of Having a Sweet Tooth.”)

The review article on the effect of sugar consumption on metabolism and obesity, mentioned above, is:

Stanhope, Kimber L. “Sugar Consumption, Metabolic Disease and Obesity: The State of the Controversy.” Critical Reviews in Clinical Laboratory Sciences 53, no. 1 (2016): 52-67.