U.S. Army Testing Equipment to Check Soldiers for Brain Injuries
In an effort to better identify hard-to-diagnose brain injuries in soldiers, the U.S. Army says it will soon begin testing new neuroimaging equipment, the Associated Press reported.
A new scanning camera that uses gamma rays and radioisotopes is expected to arrive within two weeks, said Col. John Cho, commander of the Evans Army Community Hospital at Fort Carson, Colo.
Soldiers who've already been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury will be used to test the equipment and its effectiveness. The findings will be given to an Army review board, the AP reported.
Thousands of U.S. soldiers have suffered brain injuries in the Iraq War. A recent study at Fort Carson found that 2,932 (18 percent) of 13,400 troops who'd been to Iraq had suffered at least some degree of brain damage after being hit by blasts caused by improvised explosive devices.
Some critics have accused the Army of not doing enough to diagnose soldiers with brain damage.
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Texas Company Stops Illegal Production and Sale of Drugs
A Texas-based company has agreed to stop the illegal manufacture and distribution of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Wednesday.
The agreement applies to PharmaFab Inc., its subsidiary PFab LP, and two company officials -- Mark Tengler, PharmaFab's president, and Russ McMahen, PFab's vice president of scientific affairs.
The products made by the company are illegal because they aren't made according to the required current good manufacturing practice and they may lack FDA approval.
PharmaFab made and distributed more than 100 different prescription and over-the-counter drug products, including ulcer treatments, cough and cold products, and postpartum hemorrhage products, the FDA said.
The unapproved drugs made by the company included: De-Congestine Sustained Release Capsules; GFN 1200/DM 60/PSE 60 Extended-Release Tablets; Rhinacon A Tablets; Sudal 12 Chewable Tablets; Histex PD 12 Suspension; Atuss HX CIII; Ergotrate Tablets; and Hyoscyamine Sulfate Time-Release Capsules.
Consumers who have used any PharmaFab products should talk with their doctor, the FDA said.
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Primary-Care Doctor Visits Less Costly
In 2004, primary-care doctors (general practice, family medicine, internal medicine, and pediatricians) accounted for nearly half of all 967.3 million doctor visits in the United States, but totaled only 30 percent of the $152 billion spent on office-based doctor care.
The remaining 70 percent of the $152 billion was spent on specialty care, says the latest News and Numbers from the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
The agency also found that the average cost of a visit to the doctor's office was $155, but there were wide variations depending on the type of doctor. The average cost for primary-care doctors was about $100, compared with $232 for a cardiologist, $210 for an orthopedist, and $206 for an ophthalmologist.
Other findings:
- Private insurance paid for 48 percent of doctor office visits, Medicare paid for 21 percent, and 14 percent was paid out-of-pocket by patients and families.
- On average, patients paid 20 percent of total expenses out-of-pocket when seeing a primary-care doctor, compared with 16 percent for an orthopedist visit, 13 percent for a cardiologist visit, and about 25 percent when seeing dermatologists, psychiatrists and ophthalmologists.
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FDA Probing Data on Antipsychotic Drug Zyprexa
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is investigating whether Eli Lilly & Company provided accurate data about the safety of the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, The New York Times reported.
Concerns about the drug's link to diabetes and weight gain have contributed to a 50 percent decline in the number of Zyprexa prescriptions written in the United States since 2003.
The FDA wants to find out more about a Feb. 2000 Lilly document that noted that patients taking Zyprexa in clinical trials had a 3.5 times greater risk of developing high blood sugar than people who didn't take the drug. That document was not given to the FDA, The Times reported.
A few months later, Lilly submitted data to the FDA showing similar blood sugar levels in patients who took Zyprexa and in those who didn't take the drug.
The FDA told The Times that it's still looking into the matter and has not yet decided whether to take any action against Lilly.
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Improve Disabled People's Access to Health Coverage: Report
Outdated regulations often hinder disabled Americans' access to health care coverage and assistive devices, concludes a new report by the Institute of Medicine.
Congress and the appropriate federal agencies need to improve decision making about what and who Medicare and Medicaid will cover in order to eliminate waiting periods for qualified disabled people to receive Medicare coverage, the report said.
In addition, the federal government needs to ease restrictions that prevent disabled people from getting assistive services and technologies that help promote independence and participation in work and other activities outside the home.
Currrently, at least one in seven Americans (40 million) have physical mobility, sensory or other impairments or limitations, the report said.
"The number of Americans who have disabilities will grow significantly in the next 30 years as the baby boom generation enters late life. If one considers people who now are disabled, those likely to develop a future disability, and people who are or will be affected by the disabilities of family members or others close to them, it becomes clear that disability will eventually affect the lives of most Americans," Alan M. Jette, director of the Health and Disability Research Institute, Boston University School of Public Health, and chair of the committee that wrote the report, said in a prepared statement.
"Increasingly, scientific evidence reveals that disability results, in large part, from actions society and individuals take. The sobering reality, however, is that over the past two decades, far too little progress has been made in adopting major public policy and practice advances to reduce disability in America," Jette said.
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Hospice Inspections Lagging in Some States
A U.S. federal report released Tuesday found that some Medicare hospice programs had not been checked by state inspectors for many years and were long past their date for certification, the Associated Press reported.
The report was issued by the inspector general's office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Hospices give care to terminally-ill patients. The report looked at data on 2,537 Medicare hospice providers across the country and found that 14 percent were past due for certification. On average, they hadn't been checked for nine years.
Three states -- California, Illinois and Michigan -- accounted for 41 percent of the past-due certifications, the AP reported.
Inspections by state officials are the federal government's main way of monitoring the quality of care in Medicare-funded hospices. In 2004, Medicare payments to hospices that were overdue for inspection averaged $2.7 million each.
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