Regulations – Page 3 – artdiamondblog.com

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.

Large Medical Databases Would Allow Discovery and Testing of Causal Patterns of Diseases

After considerable effort, as of the writing of the article quoted below, Dr. Wagle has only been able to gather data on 375 of the roughly 155,000 metastatic breast cancer patients in the U.S. Many have long complained about the difficulty in obtaining and consolidating medical records. Exploring the reasons would take a longer article than the one quoted below. Part of the story is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). It was passed to protect patient privacy, but it served as cover for medical institutions to stonewall patients, policy makers, and other medical institutions from obtaining information. The institutions make the process of obtaining medical information as slow, opaque, and onerous as possible. Partly this is a result of the general inefficiency of medical bureaucracy. Regulations limit competition among medical institutions and limit entrepreneurship, allowing inefficiencies to persist. To those who are mission-oriented within the bureaucracy, providing records may seem a lower priority than issues affecting current medical care. But also, restricting information may increase patient lock-in. Ceteris paribus, a patient may choose to stay at an institution that has long health records for the patient. Also, providing less information to third parties may make the institution less vulnerable to criticism and law suits.

Ideally, Dr. Wagle’s database would serve as a modern day version of the dusty hospital archives that Dr. William Coley pursued to find a pattern among the patients who had been spontaneously cured of their cancer in the late 1800s.

From personal experience I can say that getting patient information is easier now than it was 30 years ago, at least for the patient to obtain their own information.

An important side point is Dr. Wagle’s emphasis on the value of obtaining patient narratives, in addition to coded data. Narratives allow the discovery of additional causes or effects, beyond what the initial coders include in the coded data. Gary Klein makes this point in defending the value of what he calls “stories” (Klein 2017).

(p. D4) Dr. Nikhil Wagle thought he had a brilliant idea to advance research and patient care.

Dr. Wagle, an oncologist at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and his colleagues would build a huge database that linked cancer patients’ medical records, treatments and outcomes with their genetic backgrounds and the genetics of their tumors.

The database would also include patients’ own experiences. How ill did they feel with the treatments? What was their quality of life? The database would find patterns that would tell doctors what treatment was best for each patient and what patients might expect.

The holdup, he thought, would be finding patients. Instead, the real impediment turned out to be gathering their medical records.

. . .

Dr. Wagle is making data from medical records and patients’ experiences public as he gets them. After 2 1/2 years, though, he is disappointed by how little there is to share.

The patient who inspired his project had a lethal form of thyroid cancer. She was expected to die in a few months. In desperation, doctors gave her a drug that by all accounts should not have helped.

To everyone’s surprise, her tumors shrank to almost nothing, and she survived. She was an “extraordinary responder.”

Why? It turned out that her tumor had an unusual mutation that made it vulnerable to the drug.

And that got Dr. Wagle thinking. What if researchers had a database that would allow them to find these lucky patients, examine their tumors, and discover genetic mutations that predict which drugs will work?

. . .

Dr. Wagle decided to build a database, starting with metastatic breast cancer, his specialty. There are about 155,000 metastatic breast cancer patients in the United States. He would use social media, online forums and advocacy groups to reach out to patients for their records.

. . .

Startlingly, faxing “is the standard,” Ms. McGillicuddy said, for medical records requests.

The process can be frustrating. Fax numbers can be out of date. Some medical centers will not accept electronic patient signatures on the permission forms.

Sometimes, the medical centers just ignore the request — and the second request. In the end, Ms. McGillicuddy said, the project gets fewer than half the records it requests.

Then comes the laborious task of extracting medical information from the records and entering it into the database. A faxed medical record may be 100 or 200 pages long.

So far, the breast cancer project has received 450 records for 375 patients. (Each patient tends to have more than one record, because the women typically are seen at more than one medical center.)

For the full story see:

Gina Kolata. “Concealing New Cancer Treatments.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 22, 2018 [sic]): D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 21, 2018 [sic], and has the title “New Cancer Treatments Lie Hidden Under Mountains of Paperwork.” 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.

“Sunlight Can Degrade Polystyrene in Centuries or Even Decades”

Oregon, New York, Colorado, and Washington D.C. forbid restaurants from giving plastic straws to patrons. When I drink from a paper straw in those locales, the straw routinely collapses before I finish the drink, causing me to curse intrusive regulators. The anti-plastic-straw regulations are one example of the environmentalist fear of the effects of plastic. On Thurs., Oct. 10, 2019, Collin P. Ward, the lead author of a 2019 study, said: “Policymakers generally assume that polystyrene lasts forever. That’s part of the justification for writing policy that bans it” (as quoted in Broad 2019, p. D4). We often hear, for instance from the United Nations Environment Program, that the most common plastic in the environment, polystyrene (used for instance in Styrofoam), will likely take thousands of years to degrade. But is what we hear true?

Ward’s 2019 paper answered the question. It turns out that instead of lasting almost forever, “sunlight can degrade polystyrene in centuries or even decades” (Broad 2019, p. D4). Previous claims that polystyrene lasts almost forever were based on the finding that bacteria cannot consume polystyrene. But previous claimants did not let the sun shine in!

The article discussed and quoted above is:

William J. Broad. “Sun Breaks Down Common Ocean Pollutant, Study Says.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 22, 2019 [sic]): D4.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 11, 2019 [sic], and has the title “In the Sea, Not All Plastic Lasts Forever.”)

Ward’s co-authored 2019 academic article discussed above is:

Ward, Collin P., Cassia J. Armstrong, Anna N. Walsh, Julia H. Jackson, and Christopher M. Reddy. “Sunlight Converts Polystyrene to Carbon Dioxide and Dissolved Organic Carbon.” Environmental Science & Technology Letters 6, no. 11 (2019): 669-74.

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.

Potential Malaria Breakthrough Drug Forgotten and Now Ignored Due to Its Chemical Relative and Its Venue of Invention

Progress in science, like progress everywhere, is not inevitable. Progress often requires champions or entrepreneurs to persist in overcoming obstacles. In the case of DFDT, the obstacles arise due to the drug’s association with the chemical DDT and with Nazi Germany, the first of which is unjustly reviled and the second of which is justly reviled. But DFDT should not be judged by either its relatives or its venue of origins It should be judged by its efficacy against malaria, and by its effects, if any, on the environment.

(p. D1) In postwar Allied intelligence reports examined by Dr. Ward and his colleagues, German scientists claimed their insecticide, now called DFDT, was more effective than DDT. Allied officials dismissed those assertions as fanciful, especially given the deplorable behavior of Hoechst, the German chemical manufacturer that developed the insecticide, during the war. The company had forced residents of countries occupied by Germany to work in its factories, and it tested drugs on concentration camp prisoners.

The insecticide was forgotten for decades.

Now, work by Dr. Ward and his colleagues, reported this month [Oct. 2019] in an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, appears to corroborate the German claims. The forgotten compound killed mosquitoes in as little as one-fourth the time as DDT.

. . .

(p. D4) Conceivably the more lethal DFDT could be used in even smaller, possibly safer doses. A new option could allow public health officials to rotate insecticides and thwart the resistance to DDT in many mosquitoes today.

“It’s exciting and desperately needed,” said Duane J. Gubler, an emeritus professor in the emerging infectious diseases program at Duke University and the National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School. He was not involved in the study.

But will anyone today risk the time and money needed to determine whether DFDT could be a safe and effective tool against malaria as well as other mosquito-borne diseases like Zika, dengue and yellow fever?

“Donors, governments, they just don’t want the backlash, even if it’s not wholly justified,” said Bart Kahr, Dr. Ward’s colleague at N.Y.U. and an author of the paper.

. . .

The N.Y.U. chemists started the research with no interest in insecticides whatsoever.

They were studying materials that crystallize in a twisted helical pattern. One of the ways to identify such molecules is to scan the internet for images of crystals made by hobbyists. DDT, they found, exhibited the characteristic pinwheel gradients of a helical crystal when illuminated with polarized light.

Jingxiang Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at N.Y.U., started growing DDT crystals and found not only the expected crystals but also more jumbled, chaotic patterns.

“There was some organized and some crazy,” Dr. Kahr said. “We didn’t expect the other stuff, and that other stuff turned out to be a different arrangement of molecules in the crystal. That form wasn’t known to science.”

That led to the next set of experiments. “Since we have two forms,” Dr. Kahr said, “it was natural to ask, which of these forms was the historical killer of insects?”

It turned out that the chaotic form of DDT is deadlier.

As they were going through early scientific data on DDT, the N.Y.U. chemists found mentions of DFDT.

The compound, difluoro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane is the same molecule as DDT, except with fluorine atoms replacing two of the chlorines.

The Germans developed DFDT at least in part to avoid paying the licensing fees for DDT to the Swiss. It is also possible that the chemical ingredients for DFDT, although considerably more expensive at the time than those for DDT, may have been more readily available in wartime Germany.

. . .

Dr. Kahr wonders: If DFDT had displaced DDT, would the 1955 push have succeeded in bringing malaria under control before resistance set in? “What if this compound wasn’t forgotten,” he said. “What would the world be like? Science doesn’t go as linearly as the general public thinks it does.”

For the full story see:

Kenneth Chang. “Old Mix To Fight Malaria?” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 22, 2019 [sic]): D1 & D4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed month, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 22, 2019 [sic], and has the title “A Nazi Version of DDT Was Forgotten. Could It Help Fight Malaria?” Where the more detailed online version differs from the print version, the passages quoted above follow the print [sic] version.)

The academic article co-authored by Ward, Kahr, and others, and mentioned above, is:

Zhu, Xiaolong, Chunhua T. Hu, Jingxiang Yang, Leo A. Joyce, Mengdi Qiu, Michael D. Ward, and Bart Kahr. “Manipulating Solid Forms of Contact Insecticides for Infectious Disease Prevention.” Journal of the American Chemical Society 141, no. 42 (2019): 16858-64.

The Efficacy of Personalized Drugs Designed for Only One Patient Cannot Be Tested by Randomized Double-Blind Clinical Trials (RCTs)

We know that there are times when therapies work for some patients, but not for others. But clinical trials often do not account for such differences. If the effects of the new drug are not widespread enough among the general population, the trial will be deemed a failure, and the F.D.A. will not allow the drug to be taken even by the patients who would have benefitted from it. Maybe the solution is liberty. Allow physicians liberty on what therapies to suggest, and patients liberty on what therapies to try. This especially makes sense when the disease is dire and no effective therapy is yet widely known.

Many predict that we are moving toward personalized medicine. We need less regulation and more liberty so personalized medicine can progress, and more patients can be more quickly cured of more diseases. We need a sense of urgency in requesting liberty.

(p. D3) A new drug, created to treat just one patient, has pushed the bounds of personalized medicine and has raised unexplored regulatory and ethical questions, scientists reported on Wednesday [Oct. 9, 2019].

The drug, described in The New England Journal of Medicine, is believed to be the first “custom” treatment for a genetic disease. It is called milasen, named after the only patient who will ever take it: Mila (mee-lah) Makovec, who lives with her mother, Julia Vitarello, in Longmont, Colo.

. . .

Ms. Vitarello . . . set up Mila’s Miracle Foundation and was appealing for donations on GoFundMe. So, she began fund-raising in earnest, eventually raising $3 million for a variety of research efforts.

Dr. Yu’s team oversaw development of the drug, tested it in rodents, and consulted with the Food and Drug Administration. In January 2018, the agency granted permission to give the drug to Mila. She got her first dose on Jan. 31, 2018.

With continued treatments, the number of seizures has diminished so much that the girl has between none and six a day, and they last less than a minute.

Milasen is believed to be the first drug developed for a single patient (CAR-T cancer therapies, while individualized, are not drugs). But the path forward is not clear, Dr. Yu and his colleagues acknowledged.

. . .

. . . how might a custom drug’s efficacy might be evaluated, and how should regulators weigh the urgency of the patient’s situation and the number of patients who could ultimately be treated.

For the full story see:

Gina Kolata. “Drug Designed for One Raises Many Questions.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 15, 2019 [sic]): D3.

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

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 9, 2019 [sic], and has the title “Scientists Designed a Drug for Just One Patient. Her Name Is Mila.” Where the more detailed online version differs from the print version, the passages quoted above follow the print [sic] version.)

The academic article co-authored by Dr. Yu that reports on the personalized drug milasen is:

Kim, Jinkuk, Chunguang Hu, Christelle Moufawad El Achkar, Lauren E. Black, Julie Douville, Austin Larson, Mary K. Pendergast, Sara F. Goldkind, Eunjung A. Lee, Ashley Kuniholm, Aubrie Soucy, Jai Vaze, Nandkishore R. Belur, Kristina Fredriksen, Iva Stojkovska, Alla Tsytsykova, Myriam Armant, Renata L. DiDonato, Jaejoon Choi, Laura Cornelissen, Luis M. Pereira, Erika F. Augustine, Casie A. Genetti, Kira Dies, Brenda Barton, Lucinda Williams, Benjamin D. Goodlett, Bobbie L. Riley, Amy Pasternak, Emily R. Berry, Kelly A. Pflock, Stephen Chu, Chantal Reed, Kimberly Tyndall, Pankaj B. Agrawal, Alan H. Beggs, P. Ellen Grant, David K. Urion, Richard O. Snyder, Susan E. Waisbren, Annapurna Poduri, Peter J. Park, Al Patterson, Alessandra Biffi, Joseph R. Mazzulli, Olaf Bodamer, Charles B. Berde, and Timothy W. Yu. “Patient-Customized Oligonucleotide Therapy for a Rare Genetic Disease.” New England Journal of Medicine 381, no. 17 (Oct. 9, 2019): 1644-52.

An accompanying editorial commenting on the regulatory challenges raised by personalized drugs like milasen is:

Woodcock, Janet, and Peter Marks. “Drug Regulation in the Era of Individualized Therapies.” New England Journal of Medicine 381, no. 17 (Oct. 9, 2019): 1678-80.

A Cheap Nonrefrigerated Drug that Could Have Saved Tens of Thousands of Women’s Lives Languished for Half a Century Waiting for a Clinical Trial

They already knew tranexamic saved lives of bleeding soldiers and bleeding car crash victims. Why did regulators make the world wait 50 years, and finally do an expensive randomized double-blind clinical trial, to know that it also would save the lives of bleeding new mothers? You can’t blame drug companies. The drug’s patent had expired long ago, so no drug company would make profits from the sale of the drug sufficient to pay the expense of the clinical trial.

(p. D3) An inexpensive generic drug that saves the lives of wounded soldiers and civilian car crash victims has now been shown to rescue women suffering hemorrhages in childbirth.

. . .

In a major six-year trial involving over 20,000 women in 21 countries, researchers showed that tranexamic acid, a little-known blood-clotter invented in the 1950s, reduced maternal bleeding deaths by a third if it was given within three hours. It costs less than $2 a dose and does not require refrigeration.

The trial — known as Woman, short for World Maternal Antifibrinolytic — was led by doctors at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and paid for by the Wellcome Trust, Pfizer, Britain’s health department and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Results were published in The Lancet on Wednesday [April 26, 2017].

. . .

The World Health Organization currently recommends treating birth hemorrhages by massaging the uterus and injecting uterus-shrinking drugs like oxytocin.

Tranexamic acid acts in a different way — it allows blood to clot more quickly — and so it should be given in addition to the usual measures and at the same time, said Dr. Ian Roberts, one of the study’s lead authors.

. . .

The drug was invented in Japan by a husband-wife research team, Shosuke and Utako Okamoto. They hoped it would be used to prevent birth hemorrhages, but local obstetricians declined to organize a clinical trial.

Ultimately, they turned the patent over to a Japanese pharmaceutical company, which sold it as treatment for heavy menstrual periods and as an ingredient in skin-whitening creams. Some oral surgeons used it when doing dental work on hemophiliacs, Dr. Roberts said.

For the full commentary see:

Donald G. McNeil Jr. “Global Health; A Cheap Drug Can Save Hemorrhaging Mothers.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 2, 2017 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added. The Wednesday, April 26, 2017 date is the date The Lancet posted a co-author discussion of the results of the study.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 26, 2017 [sic], and has the title “Global Health; Inexpensive Drug Prevents Deaths in New Mothers, Study Finds.” Where the more detailed online version differs from the print version, the passages quoted above follow the print [sic] version.)

The academic article in The Lancet and mentioned above is:

Shakur, Haleema, Ian Roberts, Bukola Fawole, Rizwana Chaudhri, Mohamed El-Sheikh, Adesina Akintan, Zahida Qureshi, Hussein Kidanto, Bellington Vwalika, Abdulfetah Abdulkadir, Saturday Etuk, Shehla Noor, Etienne Asonganyi, Zarko Alfirevic, Danielle Beaumont, Carine Ronsmans, Sabaratnam Arulkumaran, Adrian Grant, Kaosar Afsana, Metin Gülmezoglu, Beverley Hunt, Oladapo Olayemi, Ian Roberts, Iain Chalmers, Pisake Lumbiganon, Gilda Piaggio, Tony Brady, Haleema Shakur, Ian Roberts, Zarko Alfirevic, Diana Elbourne, Metin Gülmezoglu, Carine Ronsmans, Eni Balogun, Tracey Pepple, Danielle Prowse, Nigel Quashi, Lin Barneston, Collette Barrow, Danielle Beaumont, Lisa Cook, Lauren Frimley, Daniel Gilbert, Catherine Gilliam, Rob Jackson, Taemi Kawahara, Hakim Miah, Sergey Kostrov, Maria Ramos, Ian Roberts, Haleema Shakur, Phil Edwards, Tom Godec, Sumaya Huque, Bukola Fawole, Olujide Okunade, Olusade Adetayo, Rizwana Chaudhri, Aasia Kayani, Kiran Javaid, Bukola Fawole, Rizwana Chaudhri, Chrstine Biryabarema, Zahida Qureshi, Robert Tchounzou, Mohamed El-Sheikh, Hussein Kidanto, Mohan Regmi, Bellington Vwalika, Kastriot Dallaku, Mateus Sahani, Sayeba Akhter, Abdulfetah Abdulkadir, Nicolas Meda, Anthony Kwame Dah, Adesina Akintan, Olufemi Odekunle, Oluwabusola Monehin, Austin Ojo, Grace Akinbinu, Ifeoma Offiah, Saturday Etuk, Ubong Akpan, Uduak Udofia, Useneno Okon, Ezukwa Omoronyia, Okpe James, Oladapo Olayemi, Nike Bello, Blessed Adeyemi, Chris Aimakhu, Olufemi Akinsanya, Bamidele Adeleye, Oluwaseun Adeyemi, Kayode Oluwatosin, Abiodun Aboyeji, Abiodun Adeniran, Adebayo Adewale, Noah Olaomo, Lawrence Omo-Aghoja, Emmanuel Okpako, Lucky Oyeye, Francis Alu, John Ogudu, Ezekiel Ladan, Ibrahim Habib, Babasola Okusanya, Olatunde Onafowokan, David Isah, Abalaka Aye, Felix Okogbo, Egbaname Aigere, Mark Ogbiti, Temitope Onile, Olaide Salau, Yinka Amode, Kamil Shoretire, Adebola Owodunni, Kehinde Ologunde, Akintunde Ayinde, Moses Alao, Olalekan Awonuga, Babatunde Awolaja, Omololu Adegbola, Fatimah Habeebu-Adeyemi, Adeyemi Okunowo, Hadiza Idris, Ola Okike, Nneka Madueke, Josiah Mutihir, Nankat Joseph, Babatunde Adebudo, Adeniyi Fasanu, Olugbenga Akintunde, Olufemi Abidoye, Owigho Opreh, Sophia Udonwa, Gladys Dibia, Simeon Bazuaye, Arafat Ifemeje, Aniefiok Umoiyoho, Emmanuel Inyang-Etoh, Sununu Yusuf, Kayode Olayinka, Babalola Adeyemi, Olusegun Ajenifuja, Umar Ibrahim, Yusuf Baffah Adamu, Oluwarotimi Akinola, Grace Adekola-Oni, Paul Kua, Roseline Iheagwam, Audu Idrisa, Ado Geidam, Andrea Jogo, Joseph Agulebe, Joseph Ikechebelu, Onyebuchi Udegbunam, Jacob Awoleke, Oluseyi Adelekan, Hajaratu Sulayman, Nkeiruka Ameh, Nurudeen Onaolapo, Affiss Adelodun, William Golit, Dachollom Audu, Adetunji Adeniji, Folasade Oyelade, Lamaran Dattijo, Palmer Henry, Babalola Adeyemi, Olabisi Loto, Odidika Umeora, Abraham Onwe, Emily Nzeribe, Bartthy Okorochukwu, Augustine Adeniyi, Emmanuel Gbejegbe, Akpojaro Ikpen, Ikemefuna Nwosu, Abdulrasaq Sambo, Olubunmi Ladipo, Sola Abubakar, Ola Nene Okike, Enyinnaya Chikwendu Nduka, Eziamaka Pauline Ezenkwele, Daniel Onwusulu, Theresa Azonima Irinyenikan, Swati Singh, Amaitari Bariweni, Hadiza Galadanci, Peter Achara, Osagie Osayande, Mohammed Gana, Rizwana Chaudhri, Kiran Jabeen, Ayesha Mobeen, Sadaf Mufti, Maliha Zafar, Shehla Noor, Basharat Ahmad, Maimoona Munawar, Jeharat Gul, Naseema Usman, Fehmida Shaheen, Mariam Tariq, Nadia Sadiq, Rabia Batool, Habiba Sharaf Ali, Manahil Jaffer, Asma Baloch, Noonari Mukhtiar, Tasneem Ashraf, Raheela Asmat, Salma Khudaidad, Ghazala Taj, Roshan Qazi, Saira Dars, Faryal Sardar, Sanobar Ashfaq, Saeeda Majeed, Sadaqat Jabeen, Rukhsana Karim, Farzana Burki, Syeda Rabia Bukhari, Fouzia Gul, Musarrat Jabeen, Akhtar Sherin, Qurratul Ain, Shahid Rao, Uzma Shaheen, Samina Manzoor, Shabween Masood, Shabana Rizvi, Anita Ali, Abida Sajid, Aisha Iftikhar, Shazia Batool, Lubna Dar, Shahenzad Sohail, Shazia Rasul, Shamsa Humayun, Rashida Sultana, Sofia Manzoor, Syeda Mazhar, Afshan Batool, Asia Nazir, Nasira Tasnim, Hajira Masood, Razia Khero, Neelam Surhio, Samana Aleem, Naila Israr, Saba Javed, Lubna Bashir, Samina Iqbal, Faiza Aleem, Rubina Sohail, Saima Iqbal, Samina Dojki, Alia Bano, Naseem Saba, Maimoona Hafeez, Nishat Akram, Naila Israr, Riffat Shaheen, Haleema Hashmi, Sharmeen Arshad, Rubina Hussain, Sadia Khan, Nighat Shaheen, Safia Khalil, Pushpa Sachdev, Gulfareen Arain, Amtullah Zarreen, Sara Saeed, Shamayela Hanif, Nabia Tariq, Mahwish Jamil, Shama Chaudhry, Hina Rajani, Tayyiba Wasim, Summera Aslam, Nilofar Mustafa, Huma Quddusi, Sajila Karim, Shazia Sultana, Misbah Harim, Mohd Chohan, Nabila Salman, Fareesa Waqar, Shamsunnisa Sadia, Lubna Kahloon, Shehla Manzoor, Samar Amin, Umbreen Akram, Ambreen Ikram, Samina Kausar, Tahira Batool, Brigadier Naila, Tahir Kyani, Christine Biryabarema, Ruth Bulime, Regina Akello, Bernadette Nakawooya Lwasa, Joselyn Ayikoru, Christine Namulwasira, Patrick Komagum, Isabirye Rebecca, Nayiga Annet, Nakirigya Nuulu, Elizabeth Nionzima, Rose Bwotya, Margret Nankya, Sarah Babirye, Joseph Ngonzi, Cesar Sanchez, Nkonwa Innocent, Kusasira Anitah, Ayiko Jackson, Elizabeth Ndagire, Christine Nanyongo, Dominic Drametu, Grace Meregurwa, Francis Banya, Rita Atim, Emmanuel Byaruhanga, Lema Felix, Hussein Iman, Vincent Oyiengo, Peninah Waigi, Rose Wangui, Faiza Nassir, Musimbi Soita, Rophina Msengeti, Zeinab Zubier, Hillary Mabeya, Antony Wanjala, Henry Mwangi, Brian Liyayi, Evelyn Muthoka, Alfred Osoti, Amos Otara, Veronicah Ongwae, Zahida Qureshi, Victor Wanjohi, Bonface Musila, Kubasu Wekesa, Alex Nyakundi Bosire, Etienne Asonganyi, Alice Ntem, Angeline Njoache, Alice Ashu, André Simo, Robert Tchounzou, Dorothy Keka, Kenfack Bruno, Amadou Ndouoya, Martin Saadio, Mesack Tchana, Odel Gwan, Pauline Assomo, Venantius Mutsu, Nji Eric, Pascal Foumane, Philemon Nsem, Jeanne Fouedjio, Ymele Fouelifack, Pierre Marie Tebeu, Georges Nko’ayissi, Eta Ngole Mbong, Wisal Nabag, Riham Desougi, Hadia Mustafa, Huida Eltaib, Taha Umbeli, Khalid Elfadl, Murwan Ibrahim, Abdalla Mohammed, Awadia Ali, Somia Abdelrahiem, Mohammed Musa, Khidir Awadalla, Samirra Ahmed, Mahdi Bushra, Omer Babiker, Hala Abdullahi, Mohamed Ahmed, Elhassan Safa, Huida Almardi, Duria Rayis, Saeed Abdelrahman Abdelgabar, Zarko Alfirevic, Gillian Houghton, Andrew Sharpe, Jim Thornton, Nick Grace, Carys Smith, Kim Hinshaw, Dawn Edmundson, Paul Ayuk, Alison Bates, George Bugg, Joanne Wilkins, Clare Tower, Alysha Allibone, Eugene Oteng-Ntim, Hussein Kidanto, Ahmad Kazumari, Anna Danford, Matilda Ngarina, Muzdalifat Abeid, Khadija Mayumba, Magreth Zacharia, George Mtove, Leonard Madame, Anthony Massinde, Berno Mwambe, Rwakyendela Onesmo, Sebastian Kitengile Ganyaka, Mohan Regmi, Shyam Gupta, Rabindra Bhatt, Ajay Agrawal, Pramila Pradhan, Nikita Dhakal, Punita Yadav, Gyanendra Karki, Bhola Ram Shrestha, Bellington Vwalika, Mwansa Lubeya, Jane Mumba, Willies Silwimba, Isaiah Hansingo, Noojiri Bopili, Ziche Makukula, Alexander Kawimbe, Mwansa Ketty Lubeya, Willard Mtambo, Mathew Ng’ambi, Kastriot Dallaku, Saimir Cenameri, Ilir Tasha, Aferdita Kruja, Besnik Brahimaj, Armida Tola, Leon Kaza, Mateus Sahani, Desire Tshombe, Elizabeth Buligho, Roger Paluku-Hamuli, Charles Kacha, Kato Faida, Badibanga Musau, Herman Kalyana, Phanny Simisi, Serge Mulyumba, Nzanzu Kikuhe Jason, Jean Robert Lubamba, Willis Missumba, Ferdousi Islam, Nazneen Begum, Sayeba Akhter, Ferdousi Chowdhury, Rokeya Begum, Farjana Basher, Nazlima Nargis, Abu Kholdun, Shahela Jesmin, Shrodha Paul, Hailemariam Segni, Getachew Ayana, William Haleke, Abdulfetah Abdulkadir, Hassen Hussien, Fikre Geremew, Moussa Bambara, Adolphe Somé, Amadou Ly, Roamba Pabakba, Horace Fletcher, Leslie Samuels, Henry Opare-Addo, Roderick Larsen-Reindorf, Kwadwo Nyarko-Jectey, Glen Mola, Malts Wai, Magdy El Rahman, Wafaa Basta, Hussein Khamis, Maria Fernanda Escobar, Liliana Vallecilla, and Gabriel Essetchi Faye. “Effect of Early Tranexamic Acid Administration on Mortality, Hysterectomy, and Other Morbidities in Women with Post-Partum Haemorrhage (Woman): An International, Randomised, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial.” The Lancet 389, no. 10084 (May 27, 2017): 2105-16.

In an interview shortly before her death, and before the clinical trial was completed, Utako Okamoto said that she already knew that the trial would show that tranexamic acid works to stop bleeding:

Tranexamic Acid (TXA) History

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.”)

Rigid Guidelines Don’t Allow for Individualizing Treatment and Discount the Doctor’s Clinical Judgment

The criticism of the Clovers sepsis clinical trial is that the the treatment and placebo arms of the trial each require rigid adherence to a protocol, and such adherence rules out personalizing individual treatment based on individual differences among patients and doctors’ clinical judgment based on past experiences. That criticism seems plausible and also seems to apply, not just to the Clovers sepsis clinical trial, but to all< randomized double-blind clinical trials.

(p. D1) A large government trial comparing treatments for a life-threatening condition called sepsis is putting participants at risk of organ failure and even death, critics charge, and should be immediately shut down.

A detailed analysis of the trial design prepared by senior investigators at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., concluded that the study “places seriously ill patients at risk without the possibility of gaining information that can provide benefits either to the subjects or to future patients.”

In a letter to the federal Office for Human Research Protection, representatives of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group compared the study, called Clovers, to “an experiment that would be conducted on laboratory animals.”

“The human subjects of the Clovers trial, as designed and currently conducted, are unwitting guinea pigs in a physiology experiment,” Dr. Michael Carome and Dr. Sidney M. Wolfe wrote in their letter.

Begun in March, Clovers is funded by the N.I.H. — despite the criticism of its own investigators — and aims to enroll 2,320 pa-(p. D3)tients at 44 hospitals around the country.

. . .

At issue is whether patients participating in Clovers are being given treatment that deviates from usual care — so much so that lives may be endangered by the research. . . .

When patients experience septic shock, current guidelines call for raising blood pressure by administering fluids within the first three hours of care, and then administering vasopressors within the first six hours if patients do not respond to fluids.

Vasopressors can be administered early on, during or after the infusion of fluids; a new treatment guideline for hospitals says the drugs should be started within the first hour if patients aren’t responding to intravenous fluids.

Many physicians have been critical of rigid guidelines like this one because they don’t allow for individualizing treatment and appear to discount the doctor’s clinical judgment.

Both fluids in large amounts and vasopressors can cause serious complications, but when a patient’s condition continues to deteriorate, doctors use both interventions, adjusting them depending on the severity of illness.

They generally start with fluids, which in small amounts are considered less toxic than vasopressors.

But participants in Clovers are randomly assigned to a “liberal fluids” group who receive large infusions of fluids in a very short time but limits the use of vasopressors, or to a “restrictive fluids” group in which fluids are minimized and drug treatment begun earlier.

For the full story see:

Roni Caryn Rabin. “Critics Demand Halt of a Sepsis Trial.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 25, 2018 [sic]): D1 & D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 24, 2018 [sic], and has the title “Trial by Fire: Critics Demand That a Huge Sepsis Study Be Stopped.”)

The Number of Alzheimer’s Patients Is Too Few to Populate the Many Promising Clinical Trials

When the F.D.A. mandates randomized double-blind clinical trials (RCTs) be successfully performed before allowing the use of a new drug, it also mandates that diverse promising drugs will never be tested. Some of those drugs might help or even cure Alzheimer’s. The reason that some diverse promising drugs will never be tested, as explained by Gina Kolata in the passage quoted below, is that there are too few diagnosed and willing Alzheimer’s patients to conduct the number and kind of RCTs that the government mandates, for all the promising drugs under development. What is the alternative to mandated RCTs? Allow physicians to prescribe drugs that have a promising rationale. If their patients benefit the physicians will continue to prescribe the drug and they will tell their colleagues.

(p. D1) The task facing Eli Lilly, the giant pharmaceutical company, sounds simple enough: Find 375 people with early Alzheimer’s disease for a bold new clinical trial aiming to slow or stop memory loss.

There are 5.4 million Alzheimer’s patients in the United States. You’d think it would be easy to find that many participants for a trial like this one.

But it’s not. And the problem has enormous implications for treatment of a disease that terrifies older Americans and has strained families in numbers too great to count.

The Global Alzheimer’s Platform Foundation, which is helping recruit participants for the Lilly trial, estimates that to begin finding participants, it will have to inform 15,000 to 18,000 people in the right age groups about the effort.

Of these, nearly 2,000 must pass the initial screening to be selected for further tests to see if they qualify.

Just 20 percent will meet the criteria to enroll in Lilly’s trial: They must be aged 60 to 89, have mild but progressive memory loss for at least six months, and have two types of brain scans showing Alzheimer’s is underway.

Yet an 80 percent screening failure rate is typical for Alzheimer’s trials, said John Dwyer, president of the foundation. There is just no good way to quickly diagnose the disease.

The onerous process of locating just 375 patients illustrates a grim truth: finding patients on whom to test new Alzheimer’s treatments is becoming an insurmountable obstacle — no matter how promising the trial.

With brain scans, lab tests and memory tests, the cost per diagnosis alone is daunting — as much as $100,000 for each person who ends up enrolled in a trial, Mr. Dwyer said — even before they begin the experimental treatment.

Complicating the problem, the number of trials has exploded in recent years. There (p. D4) are more than 100 Alzheimer’s studies looking for a whopping 25,000 participants, Mr. Dwyer said.

To begin filling them all, 37.5 million patients in the right age group would first have to be informed. Ten percent would be referred to a trial site for screening.

Just 4 percent will move forward with an evaluation, and of these, just over 17 percent will drop out, given the current rate, leaving roughly 125,000 to be screened. And with an 80 percent screening failure rate, that leaves 25,000 participants of the 37.5 million who were first informed.

The numbers make it clear: There’s no way scientists are going to find 25,000 participants for all of the Alzheimer’s trials that have been approved.

“The irony is that the science has never been more promising,” Mr. Dwyer said. “How many promising drugs will be abandoned or their evaluation seriously delayed? Some good science is going to be left on cutting-room floor.”

For the full story see:

Gina Kolata. “Alzheimer’s Trials Hit a Roadblock.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 24, 2018 [sic]): D1 & D4.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 23, 2018 [sic], and has the title “For Scientists Racing to Cure Alzheimer’s, the Math Is Getting Ugly.”)

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.)