American Healthcare

The Institute of Medicines much-anticipated recommendations for which womens health services should be covered by health plans without co-pays or deductibles came out yesterday. Among the eight services it recommends insurers cover at no extra charge HHS will make the final decision are all forms of approved contraception, breastfeeding support and breast-pump rentals and domestic-violence screening.

One member of the committee charged with coming up with the recommendations, however, had several issues with how the report was developed so much so that he filed a dissent rather than endorsing the report.

You can read the dissent by economist Anthony Lo Sasso, a professor and senior research scientist in the division of health policy and administration at the University of Illinois at Chicagos School of Public Health, on p.

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San Diego – Scripps Health has acquired Del Mar Family Practice in an agreement to be complete by Sept. 1. The acquisition will add primary care to the existing Scripps Clinic Del Mar location at 12395 El Camino Real, which also includes Scripps Clinic Center for Weight Management and the Scripps Clinic Division of Plastic Surgery.

The physicians of Del Mar Family Practice will join Scripps Clinic Medical Group, which includes more than 400 physicians practicing in more than 50 areas of medicine and surgery. Scripps Health contracts for the exclusive services of the Scripps Clinic Medical Group physicians through the Scripps Medical Foundation.

Providers of Del Mar Family Practice include founder Lawrence J. S

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GE, Eli Lilly and Co and Bayer AG are all developing similar compounds, which stick to amyloid plaques in the brain and light up on positron emission tomography or PET scans If approved, the compounds will be used to help doctors rule out Alzheimer’s in people

Lilly unit Avid Radiopharmaceuticals was first to seek US Food and Drug Administration approval for its tracer, called florbetapir or Amyvid, but was dealt a setback when the agency said it should develop training programs to ensure the tests are read in a consistent manner

Jonathan Allis, general manager of PET Medical Diagnostics at GE Healthcare, told Reuters that his team plans to learn from the mistakes of its competitors

In an exclusive interview at the Alzheimer’s Association’s International Conference in Paris, Allis described what he called a long game in identifying and treating the brain-wasting disease

“I think our data is very good It’s tight We’re close to filing for approval,” Allis said of GE’s imaging agent, called flutemetamol

“They Avid did a great job, but I think we did the boring stuff better,” he said, referring to the company’s extensive work on manufacturing, imaging quality and image analysis

Radioactive tracers that test for fragments of beta-amyloid plaque are seen as a critical bridge in the search for effective drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, a fatal, mind-robbing disease that affects nearly 36 million people worldwide

Scientists believe these Alzheimer’s-linked plaques start developing at least a decade before symptoms occur, and spotting those changes in the brain early offers the best chance to intervene with new drugs that might prevent or delay the disease

EARLY DETECTION

Once they win approval for their products, GE, Lilly and Bayer will compete for market share To gain an edge, GE is developing a software program to help analyze the flutemetamol scans, and it is developing magnetic resonance imaging MRI scans to measure brain volume, which also changes as Alzheimer’s advances

“By the time we launch next year, we’ll launch the MRI images and combine the two together,” Allis said

Allis said GE has a growing interest in addressing Alzheimer’s, a disease that is expected to affect as many as 115 million people by 2050 unless effective treatments are found

“There is a huge interest in Alzheimer’s and it goes right to the top of GE,” Allis said, referring to GE Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt, who once headed GE Healthcare Systems

Besides amyloid imaging, GE plans to build on a partnership with Johnson & Johnson announced last December to search for other changes in the body that can be used to develop biomarker tests for Alzheimer’s

“That is the start of what we hope to be a much broader relationship with J&J in Alzheimer’s disease,” Allis said

Allis says finding earlier ways to identify Alzheimer’s patients is going to be critical as drug companies such as Lilly, Pfizer Inc and J&J look to test new agents that will stop the disease before it does too much damage

Current medications treat Alzheimer’s symptoms but cannot change the course of the disease, and new drugs that have been tried so far have failed, in large part, experts think, because they were tried only when the disease was too advanced

“If you look at all the pharmaceutical trials now, they are all in probably the wrong patient group They are too late,” Allis said

Amyloid imaging agents are already being commonly used to help drug companies identify people with amyloid in their brain who might be a good candidates for drug trials

Allis said GE and J&J are trying to identify screening tests for the disease that can be used in a wider population, in much the same way people are tested for early signs of prostate cancer

“It’s a long game I think we are not anywhere near the end,” he said

Editing by Michele Gershberg and Steve Orlofsky

To get to the core of what drives us batty, author Joe Palca had to invent his own methodology.

I thought psychologists and sociologists would warm to the topic, but they were dismissive and the process was terrifying, says Palca, who wrote the new book Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us with Flora Lichtman. Bigger emotions like anger and rage receive lots of attention. I decided it was time to figure out why certain experiences leave us annoyed.

It turns out, feeling annoyed is a different emotional state than being frustrated, tense or even agitated, like when youre stuck in a traffic jam, angry as the Incredible Hulk.

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ROME — Buoyed by trials of drugs to prevent the spread of HIV, a global AIDS conference on Monday debated how to draft recommendations and muster funds to transform these dramatic results into action in the field.

Researchers from around the world were getting their first look at full peer-reviewed data from a trial that, say veteran campaigners, could slow the 30-year-old juggernaut of AIDS.

It was carried out among 1,763 couples where one partner was infected by the human immunodeficiency virus while the other was HIV-free.

When the infected partner was given an early start on HIV drugs, this slashed the risk of transmitting the virus to the other by 96 per cent — a figure readily comparable to the effectiveness of a condom.

Other trials, in which the non-infected partner took the drugs, found a risk reduction of up to 73 per cent.

Even battle-hardened veterans in the war on AIDS are stunned.

Antiretroviral drugs which are a lifeline to millions of infected people are poised for a glittering new role, as a tool to prevent viral spread, they say.

“We are at an important tipping point,” Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. Na

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