[afro-nets] What's Riskier: Your Aspirin Or Your Car?

["Kathleen Ford" <KFord@projecthope.org>]

What's Riskier: Your Aspirin Or Your Car?
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Amid growing debate about appropriate regulation of drug safety by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a new study released today in the journal Health Affairs compares mortality risks posed by drugs to risks related to work, transportation, and recreation.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/3/636

The mortality risks posed by Vioxx to treat arthritis and Tysabri to treat multiple sclerosis --drugs that have recently received scrutiny -- are comparable to or exceed the risk of dying in a car, working as a truck driver, or rock climbing. Even the widespread prophylactic use of aspirin poses a fatality risk on par with the risk associated with driving a car or working as a fire fighter, say study coauthors Joshua Cohen and Peter Neumann of Tufts-New England Medical Center, who stress that risks and benefits must be considered together. Their study is one of many in the May-June 2007 Health Affairs issue, a thematic volume entitled "The Shifting Benefit-Risk Landscape," to explore risks and benefits in health care. 

Table of contents at:
http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/vol26/issue3/

Other issue highlights:

Uninsured face highest hospital charges; gap is widening. People who lack health insurance and those who pay for care out of their own pockets were charged an average 2.5 times more for hospital services in 2004 than what health insurers pay and three times more than Medicare-allowable costs, reports Gerard F. Anderson of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. The gap between what uninsured and other self-pay patients are charged for hospital services and what Medicare pays has more than doubled over the past twenty years, from 1.35 in 1984 to 3.07 in 2004.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/3/780

Physician liability costs raise Medicare spending. Findings by Katherine Baicker of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and coauthors show that when malpractice awards and premiums increase, so does Medicare physician spending, particularly for the imaging services that are often believed to be driven by physicians' fears of malpractice suits. Using 1993-2001 state-level data, the researchers found that a 10 percent increase in average malpractice payments per physician within a state was associated with a 1.0 percent increase in total Medicare physician spending, a 2.2 percent increase in the imaging component of these services, and a small decrease in the use of major surgical procedures.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/3/841

Are patients making the right choices for breast cancer treatment? 
Information about treatment choices for breast cancer has never been more widely available than it is today. Yet making decisions about which course of treatment to pursue has never been more complicated for patients. Steven Katz and Sarah Hawley of the University of Michigan follow the story of mastectomy as the standard of treatment for breast cancer and review strategies to improve patient outcomes and decision-making.
http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/3/761 [2-month
free access article]

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Kathleen Ford
mailto:KFord@projecthope.org