Obesity in America

One of my students passed this along this evening, and I thought it was a pretty interesting tool for visualizing the obesity epidemic in America. You can watch how obesity spreads across the country, and rates increase in a given state versus the national average. Very neat, quite a clever and useful tool!

Cholesterol Drugs for Kids

A couple days ago, NPR Morning Edition had an interesting segment about increasing rates of high cholesterol among kids that come with the childhood obesity epidemic. This also means that doctors have to consider giving cholesterol drugs to kids. One of the doctors quoted in the story says that there isn't any data about what can happen from kids taking these drugs for 60-70 years, so a lot of doctors aren't too keen to prescribe cholesterol drugs to kids.

There are a number of interesting implications here... A lot of people already have a rather unfavorable opinion of DTC pharmaceutical advertising - how might those feelings change if companies start advertising these drugs as a solution for kids with high cholesterol? What about marketing the use of these sorts of drugs directly to the medical professionals, to convince them this isn't something they should be worried about? The pharma companies could certainly have a lot to gain by marketing these drugs as a solution to high cholesterol problems among kids... But I picture that not being particularly well-received by the FDA or parents.

Fewer Heart Attacks After Smoking Ban

eFluxMedia has an article reporting on a recent study by Indiana University that found a smoking ban resulted in fewer heart attacks for non-smokers. The actual article is available from the Journal of Drug Education, the abstract is here. This study could be great ammunition for advocates of city-wide and county-wide smoking bans.

Breast Cancer Intervention for Hispanic Women

I was just looking through the latest issue of Oncology Nursing Forum, and one article in particular caught my eye... Hall et al.¹ discuss an interesting test of a breast cancer intervention tailored to meet the needs of Hispanic women.

The research, guided by the Health Belief Model, demonstrated the efficacy of this particular intervention. That's good, since Hispanic women face a lot of disparities in terms of breast cancer. A few of the items discussed in the literature review were interesting, such as the fact that Hispanic women might view breast cancer as a punishment from God for immoral behavior.

I'd definitely have liked to know more about how this particular intervention (originally designed for African American women) was tailored to meet the needs and preferences of Hispanic women. That aside, it was an interesting article that further demonstrates the potential for customizing health messages to meet the expectations of a particular ethnicity to achieve more significant results.

¹Hall, C., Hall, J., Pfriemer, J., Wimberley, P., & Jones, C. (2007). Effects of a Culturally Sensitive Education Program on the Breast Cancer Knowledge and Beliefs of Hispanic Women. Oncology Nursing Forum, 34(6), 1195-1202.

"Informed" Consent

There's an article over at the American Medical News about problems related to informed consent for low literate patients. This particular sentence was particularly interesting:

According to a 2005 National Quality Forum report, between 60% and 70% of patients do not read or understand informed-consent documents and nearly half cannot recall the exact nature of the operation to be performed.

I'm not surprised that 60-70% of people don't read (much less understand) informed consent documents. Informed consent documents are so dense that I can't imagine anyone really getting much out of them in a lot of cases. I frequently feel that way when submitting new research studies to the IRB, as the required informed consent feels overly-complicated. (And my research isn't quite as invasive as surgery.) So this clearly isn't a problem that is only present in medicine.

The part that I did find slightly more surprising was the 50% that can't recall the exact nature of the operation to be performed. I would have thought (or perhaps only hoped) that communication from the entire healthcare team to patients would have at least made the nature of the surgery clear to patients. A surprising (and saddening, and fascinating) report.

Word of Mouth Marketing

There's an interesting article over at Advertising Age on word of mouth (WOM) marketing and its potential as a superior marketing tool. From the conclusion of the article:

Equally important to the success of word-of-mouth marketing may be the research suggesting it is more effective than other forms of advertising. For instance, a recent Nielsen Global Survey of over 26,000 people found that nearly 78% of respondents trusted "recommendations from consumers," a total 15% higher than the second-most credible source, newspapers. And this trust, according to Mr. Kivijarv, leads to more sales at the cash register.

"When you compare word-of-mouth as a strategy [to other methods], trusting a friend or influential person is the most determining factor when someone decides to purchase a product," he said.

This isn't exactly surprising, that people put more trust in the people they know over marketing messages. Given that, I think WOM could be an under-used tool in health communication campaigns. I know there are plenty of health promotion interventions that make use of peer leaders and other more trusted personal sources of information to spread a health message... But I'd be curious to see how many projects out there are started with an explicit agenda to generate WOM buzz.

Some of my students in class this semester have hinted at the potential for different elements in their campaigns to generate WOM, but that wasn't necessarily an explicit goal - and they didn't really highlight that as a potential strength of their campaign. (Looking back, they certainly could have... Something to talk about tomorrow in class, I suppose.)

Health Literacy and Pharmacists

The students in my health communication class are currently working on a couple campaigns to promote health literacy as an issue in Central Texas. I gave them freedom to approach the problem with whatever strategy they might view to be useful. One team has settled on pharmacists as their target, though their final campaign is still a few weeks away from completion.

I'm sure they'll be happy to know that they've chosen a promising strategy, given the headline from RWJ: AHRQ Creates Tools to Improve Pharmacy Care for Patients with Low Health Literacy.

It'll be interesting to see how well these tools are received and how much they help the situation. I haven't had an extended conversation with a pharmacist in quite a while, but I know my students are interviewing some for their project. It'll be interesting to hear what they dig up, and what the pharmacists they talk to might think of this new AHRQ initiative.

Patient-Centered Communication in Cancer Care: Promoting Healing and Reducing Suffering

This came across a couple different e-mail lists, so I figured I would pass it along to those who frequent this corner of the Internet... The National Cancer Institute (NCI) has released a new handbook called Patient-Centered Communication in Cancer Care (PDF version).

Given the quality of NCI's Pink Book, I'm pretty confident that this will be a great resource - both for health professionals working with patients that have cancer and health communication professionals.

On a completely unrelated note, the latest NIH podcast had an interesting note trying to recruit people into HIV vaccine studies. These types of studies need people that don't have HIV to participate in the trials. I can't imagine many tasks tougher than trying to convince people without HIV that they won't get HIV/AIDS as a result of helping in this sort of project... Sounds like an interesting challenge for a class exercise. (My students are going to hate me.)

Telehealth 2008 Conference

After posting about the KCHC in the last post, I figured I should mention Telehealth 2008, too. This is particularly the case since I'm on the International Program Committee for Telehealth 2008.

The conference will take place in Maryland from April 16-18, 2008. The deadline for conference submissions is December 1, 2007. For those interested in submitting something to Telehealth 2008, here is the call for papers.

It should be a great conference, definitely a good option for anyone with an interest in telemedicine and telehealth.