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What We're Reading: Opioid Restrictions Hurt Those Who Need the Drugs Most
What we're reading, June 7, 2016: opioid restrictions disproportionately affect older patients with chronic pain; Genentech and OSI Pharmaceuticals settle Tarceva lawsuit; and trouble raising Zika virus funds.
With a growing opioid epidemic, new restrictions are making it more difficult to obtain painkillers. Unfortunately, while abuse and misuse of opioids is higher among younger patients, restrictions are disproportionately affecting the elderly, who rely on opioids for chronic pain, reported The New York Times. Older patients are more likely to have painful musculoskeletal disorders, nerve damage, and surgery, and they need treatment to deal with the pain they feel. Unfortunately, this population is also more likely to suffer the ill effects of these drugs, so physicians are left pondering the trade-offs.
Genentech and OSI Pharmaceuticals are paying $67 million to settle a lawsuit over the drug Tarceva. According to the AP, the lawsuit involved allegations that the 2 companies misled physicians about the effectiveness of the lung cancer drug. Neither company is acknowledging wrongdoing.
Raising funds to fight the Zika virus outbreak has been difficult. While the world is alarmed by Zika, and the devastating birth defects it causes, Congress has not approved funding for the United States, the World Health Organization has received a small fraction of the money it requested, and the United Nations isn’t receiving much money either, reported STAT. The problem is that the majority of people affected by Zika show no or mild symptoms, and following the Ebola crisis, donors are fatigued.
Government agencies have created an online portal for the public to report potential anticompetitive practices in health care; there are changes coming to the “boxed warning” section for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapies (CAR T) to highlight T-cell blood cancer risk; questions about the safety of obesity medications during pregnancy have arisen in women on them who previously struggled with fertility issues.
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Gene, Light Therapy Combo Shows Promise Against Prostate Cancer Cells in Proof-of-Concept Study
April 18th 2024In their preclinical model, the researchers found efficacy both in vitro and in vivo by using CRISPR-Cas9 to mimic porphyria and combining the technology with light therapy.
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Oncology Onward: A Conversation With Penn Medicine's Dr Justin Bekelman
December 19th 2023Justin Bekelman, MD, director of the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation, sat with our hosts Emeline Aviki, MD, MBA, and Stephen Schleicher, MD, MBA, for our final episode of 2023 to discuss the importance of collaboration between academic medicine and community oncology and testing innovative cancer care delivery in these settings.
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Many Patients With Psoriasis in Clinical Trials Experience Nocebo Effects, Study Finds
April 18th 2024Half of patients exposed to placebo in clinical trials experienced adverse events (AEs), which may be partially explainable by nocebo effects, according to a recent review and meta-analysis.
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