Paul Raeburn's Tracker

I've already posted this week on conflicts of interest, orphan drugs, and the "financial toxicity" associated with some medications, and now I've found a story that combines all three.

A new cystic fibrosis drug--the first to be developed based on understanding of the genetics of the illness--is an orphan drug that can help only about 4 percent of patients with cystic fibrosis. Its financial toxicity is such that it can destroy the finances of those whose lives it saves: It costs $307,000 per year. And it sits in the center of a swarm of conflicting interests involving a pharmaceutical company, a non-profit patients' organization, and researchers who have taken their money.

This...

Toxicity is a common side effect of cancer treatment. Such things as fatigue, nausea, and pain are a serious concern for oncologists, who know that they can impede treatment and diminish quality of life.

Now, in a two-part essay published in the journal Oncology, doctors at Duke University argue that the financial side effects of cancer treatment can be just as important in impeding treatment and diminishing quality of life. Cancer treatment's costs are rising,  the treatment is often being overused, and the rising costs are increasingly being passed on to patients, the doctors write.

I first caught wind of this essay, which appeared online Feb. 15 and April 15, this week when I ran across an April 25 story by Nick Mulcahy at Medscape, who was apparently one of the first to pick up on it--possibly the first. It's important story,...

Maybe it's just me, but I can't get enough of Sandra G. Boodman's medical mysteries in The Washington Post. I'd like to see a collection of these, maybe as  a Kindle single, so I could have them all in one place.

Boodman was back again yesterday with a tale that was not only a mystery, but an outrage. I'm tempted to use a familiar vulgar phrase to describe my reaction, but that would be impolite. The doctors who saw 16-year-old Allison Partridge let her down, and there ought to be some sort of punishment for that. Maybe require them to attend 10-week remedial sessions to watch videos of her condition before they are allowed to practice again?

Even specialists failed to recognize what was going on....

Laura Beil at Science News begins her helpful survey of fructose research with an interesting historical footnote.  She reports that two chemists found an enzyme that could turn glucose from cornstarch into fructose, which is sweeter. What's interesting is that the discovery was published in Science in 1957, Beil reports, and largely ignored. It was not until the 1970s that Japanese researchers learned how to use the finding to produce fructose on an industrial scale. And it was not until 2004, she writes, that consumers began to be concerned.

Beil does a nice job of looking over the research on whether fructose might be, as critics, claim, particularly harmful to health--worse than sugar, or sucrose, produced from sugar cane. As I read the story, it seems to say that there is evidence of harm from fructose, because of how it affects the...

"Does the fate of a tiny, quizzical, picky, jaunty, crimson-eyed, migrating, night-flying, snail-eating, lagoon-living and horribly threatened water bird that lives only in the outback of Patagonia matter?"

That's the question Alanna Mitchell asks as she begins the first part of a gracefully written, two-part series on the hooded grebe of Patagonia. Mitchell, a Canadian journalist, lives almost as far from Patagonia, at the tip of South America, as one can be. What, she wonders, could the bird mean to Canadians?

If we, like the ancient Sisters of Fate, snip the hooded grebe’s thread of life, killing off a creature that painstakingly, chaotically, maybe randomly evolved over billions of years from a single-celled entity to a heart-tuggingly beautiful bird with a scarlet crest, are we diminished? Or here’s another thought: are we at risk too...

A strange kind of time shifting is going on at The New York Times, which I guess I'm not complaining about, because the result is more coverage of science.

Last week, the science writer Carl Zimmer began a weekly column in the Times, but not in Tuesday's Science Times. Instead, it appears on Thursdays, when it is less likely to be seen, I would wager. Last week's debut column concerned the 17-year cicadas, now appearing on fence posts and in trees in the Northeast and as far south as North Carolina. Today's is on some of the genes that were crucial in the transformation from wolves to dogs. The column leads the science page on the...

Last week, I chastised New Scientist for describing a blog post from the National Institute of Mental Health as "a bombshell."

Andy Coughlan and Sara Reardon wrote the following lede off of the post, written by the NIMH director, Thomas Insel:

The world's biggest mental health research institute is abandoning the new version of psychiatry's "bible" – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, questioning its validity and stating that "patients with mental...