What’s up with prices

In case you were curious, drug makers raised the list prices of their meds by an average of 2.9% in the first quarter of the year. The U.S. annualized inflation rate is about 1.6%.

Some drugs, including Cosentyx, Daytrana, and Xtampza ER were raised almost 10 percent.

The large number of drugs that increased in price by over 9.0% is not a coincidence. As the conversation regarding drug prices has heated up over the past couple of years, manufacturers have slowly taken a pledge to keep price increases below 10% annually—but they continue to push the limit and raise prices by 9.9%.

Notes: These are list prices, not ‘real’ prices. The average covers both generics and name-brand meds.

Quick flu update

Still widespread, but waning. Georgia is one of about seven states where it’s still regionally active (as opposed to “widespread,” which is worse. Most states are only seeing sporadic cases now. And yes, it was (is) the longest flu season in at least a decade.

Don’t miss out on the convention T-shirt

These can become collector’s items — make sure you order yours!

Vasopressin, autism, and two new drugs

To give you an idea of how complex autism is, two new drugs seem to act as treatment for some symptoms. One blocks the hormone vasopressin (to treat adults), while the other is vasopressin in nasal-spray form (to treat teens).

Despite working in opposite ways, both drugs appear to help autistic people improve their social interactions. And it’s good to see this caveat: “Both of these studies suggest that the mechanism is worth further study, but I think we want to be careful not to overinterpret the findings.” —Lawrence Scahill, director of clinical trials at the Marcus Autism Center in Atlanta.

Another take-back day, another record

The DEA says that Saturday’s nationwide drug take-back day netted the largest amount of unwanted pills yet: 469 tons of meds from 6,258 collection sites.

One gene, one cancer

Could turning off a single gene prevent pancreatic cancer? The answer is “maybe,” because we all know that genes don’t act alone. Still….

When the researchers removed the ATDC gene, none of the cancer-prone mice developed cancer.

Can’t we do better?

Even with health insurance from their employers, almost one in five Americans has had to make a sacrifice to pay medical bills. We’re not just talking about not taking vacations. We’re talking about not buying food, or taking another job, or borrowing from friends and family.

And more than half “report that they or someone in their household have skipped or delayed some type of medical care or prescription drug in the past 12 months because of the cost.” (Again, these are people who have health insurance.)

Alzheimer’s test might come soon enough to act

A new test for Alzheimer’s appears to be able to detect the disease up to 20 years before it begins to manifest — potentially early enough to begin treatment.

“Through the combination of both analyses, 87 of 100 Alzheimer’s patients were correctly identified in our study,” summarises Klaus Gerwert. “And we reduced the number of false positive diagnoses in healthy subjects to 3 of 100.”

That’s Professor Klaus Gerwert from the Department of Biophysics at Ruhr University – Bochum, one of the study’s authors

Really important medical news

Knowing that many of our members are frequent players of water polo, we wanted to share this story: “Perils of water polo head injuries“.