Med Updates by E-mail

A couple days ago I saw the news that the FDA was checking into a possible link between Singulair and some mental health concerns. Just yesterday, I got this note from RWJ about doctors receiving medicine updates via e-mail.

This is obviously a great use of technology to address a health problem, namely getting information about a medicine recall/concern into the hands of doctors as quickly as possible. It's nice to see technology being used to solve an actual problem, as opposed to the all-too-common model of looking for a problem that can be solved with a new/fun technology. Here's hoping the iHealthAlliance has great success with this new project.

Folic Acid for Men, Too

Sometimes getting the word out to women considering becoming pregnant about the importance of folic acid can be a challenge, which is even more challenging when it comes to unplanned pregnancies. In terms of campaign development, there could be some good news afoot, though - dads-to-be can benefit from folic acid.

While there likely would be some hurdles to overcome in terms of convincing men that their diet could impact the eventual health of their children, it might make it easier to develop campaigns (geared more around general health, perhaps?) that could hopefully hit either the mom-to-bed or the dad-to-be.

Fantastic Voyage Inside a Cell

I just thought this was very cool, and I'll use almost any excuse to post something from TED. TED is filled with a ton of amazing talks, including a number related to health that are all pretty interesting. Good stuff.

More Expensive Placebos Bring More Relief

I saw this covered in a few different places, but The New York Times had a story about researchers discovering that patients find more expensive placebos to be more effective than cheaper placebos. The implications for marketing are obviously clear, as this could be one reason more expensive prescription drugs are more popular if patients think they work better. It also speaks to one reason that branded drugs can compete against generic competition that is chemically identical.

The actual JAMA article is online here, I feel like I'm going to be bringing this up the next time I discuss pharma marketing/advertising in class... It could also make for an interesting discussion on the ethics of marketing drugs, where part of the potential effect of the drug is purely psychological and based on how much someone (or their insurance) paid for the prescription. Is it necessarily unethical to charge more for a medication when paying extra will make patients feel better?

NCI Fellowship in Health Communication and Informatics

From NCI...

The Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch (HCIRB) is accepting Cancer Research Training Award (CRTA) applicants for a Paid Fellowship Opportunity.

HCIRB contributes to the reduction in death and suffering due to cancer by supporting research and development of a seamless health communication and informatics infrastructure. Through internal and extramural programs, the Branch supports basic and translational research across the cancer continuum. This CRTA fellowship offers outstanding training opportunities in health communication. The CRTA fellow will be a welcomed member of a team of passionate scientists, psychologists, and health communication researchers. Appropriate to the fellow’s interests, participation and leadership opportunities are offered in Information Technology projects, marketing and dissemination, health trends survey design and analysis, peer-reviewed journal articles, and travel to national meetings and conferences.

For more information about this fellowship opportunity, click here.

Health Communication in the 21st Century

A little earlier this evening I finished reading Health Communication in the 21st Century, by Wright, Sparks, and O'Hair. I think it was one of the last books I had in my pile of holiday reading, as I alternated between health communication and advertising books. Looking back, I wish I had read this a little sooner...

I'd have to say that overall this is a valuable book to have on the bookshelf for any health communication researcher or educator. The authors do a great job providing an overview of a huge range of health communication topics. So while a few sections were a little redundant for me just because of the work I've done the last 6-7 years (telemedicine, health literacy, etc.), most sections were perfect as reviews or introductions to topics I'm less familiar with. As an example, the authors do a great job discussing the literature surrounding doctor-patient communication and the delivery of bad news; I have an undergrad student working on a project related to this, and I'll definitely be passing along this book to help him supplement his reading and literature review.

Health Communication in the 21st Century will be useful to a wide range of individuals, from those looking for a book to use as a text for a general health communication course to researchers who like to have some good, quick reference books in the office. It's definitely worth a read.

Medicine 2.0 Congress

Yesterday I received an e-mail about a new conference series titled Medicine 2.0 Congress. From their website:

Medicine 2.0™ is an international conference on Web 2.0 applications in health and medicine, organized and co-sponsored by the Journal of Medical Internet Research, the International Medical Informatics Association, the Centre for Global eHealth Innovation, CHIRAD, and a number of other sponsoring organizations.

The deadline for abstracts and panel proposals in May 2, 2008, for more information head to the Medicine 2.0 Congress website. The call for proposals is online here. It looks like this will be a great mix of academics and medical professionals, it should be a good conference.

Two Unrelated Reports

Two different news items popped up in the last day or two...

The first was a finding that ethnic minorities are more likely to have rate their healthcare as fair/poor and report a negative interaction with a doctor (RWJ summary, Health Affairs full text). I don't know how surprising this is to anyone who has done research in this area, of course. The IOM has a great report summarizing health disparities in its book Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. It includes research on how interpersonal, cultural, and institutional factors lead to health disparities, as well as directions for policy and research to work on eliminating these disparities.

The other article I found to be interesting was over at Advertising Age, reporting on a children's hospital that is coming under fire after accepting donations from major corporations - resulting in the Abercrombie & Fitch Emergency Department and Trauma Center. As hospitals and other healthcare providers come under increasing pressures to reduce costs and raise funds, is this more likely to happen? And I have to wonder what the backlash would (or wouldn't) be if there was a tighter link between the center/department being branded and the company doing the advertising... Perhaps a more logical link between the two wouldn't cause quite the uproar that this is?

Active Living Research Call for Proposals Released

For those with an interest in childhood obesity research and interventions, I thought this notice from RWJ would be useful to post...

Active Living Research is a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This call for proposals is the first to reflect a new emphasis for Active Living Research. The program will now focus on supporting research to inform policy and environmental strategies for increasing physical activity among children and adolescents, decreasing their sedentary behaviors and preventing obesity. Findings are expected to advance RWJF’s efforts to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic by 2015.

RWJF will place special emphasis on strategies with the potential to reach racial/ethnic populations and children living in low-income communities who are at highest risk for obesity. Proposed studies must address one of the topics identified in the call for proposals.

Head to the RWJ website for more information about the Active Living Research call for proposals.

New Genetic Marker for Breast Cancer

A new genetic marker for breast cancer has been discovered, which shows that women with this particular DNA variation are 1.4 times more likely to develop breast cancer. While the increased likelihood isn't nearly as large as the BRCA genes, this is still a pretty big deal. The hope, of course, is that discovering a lot of these variations (all of which might not make a huge difference individually) could eventually lead us to a greater understanding of a person's true likelihood of developing breast cancer.

I especially enjoyed the interview with one of the investigators from this project on NPR Science Friday. One of the interesting themes of the interview was the difficulty doctors would have explaining this to patients, and why patients who have this particular variation wouldn't necessarily want to do anything about it (such as preventive surgery).

It's great that researchers continue to make progress in this area, but I imagine that one of the ongoing issues will be how best to communicate this information effectively to practicing physicians and their patients.

Health Education Online for Individuals with Low Health Literacy: Evaluation of the Diabetes and You Website

As someone who is willing to promote my own publications, another one study I was involved with was just published in the Journal of Technology in Human Services. The abstract is:

Health providers are challenged to find efficacious ways to provide health education to a population with diverse levels of health literacy. This project sought to test the effectiveness of a website (Diabetes and You) about Type II diabetes designed for non-diabetics with low health literacy. Research participants were observed as they viewed the Diabetes and You website, tested for diabetes knowledge before and after viewing the website, checked for functional health literacy, and interviewed to discover their perceptions of the website. Results indicate that users were engaged and interested in the website and particularly preferred the interactive risk assessment page. Users demonstrated an increase in knowledge about diabetes and its risks after viewing the website. Further research into the most effective ways of delivering health information online to this key target population is necessary to minimize the impact of health literacy.

This was actually pilot work that led to the study published last month (Interventions for Low Health Literate Audiences) in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

PEDs in Academia

I thought this article in The New York Times, titled Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?, was quite interesting and likely relevant to a lot of readers here. The issue it raises is whether or not the use of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs) in academia is ethical. This was interesting timing for me, as this concept was recently raised in an episode of NPR: Intelligence Squared on the use of steroid in professional sports.

One of the key differences, discussed in the article, is the fact that there is a core difference between sports and academia - sports is first and foremost about the competition while academia is (theoretically, at least) primarily about advancing knowledge for the betterment of all. Of course, as it becomes more and more challenging to get a faculty position and then achieve tenure, one has to wonder if the competitive side of academia might be understated...

Anyway, it's an interesting issue that I suspect will receive more and more attention as research starts to paint a picture of how common it is for faculty to use prescription drugs to help them succeed. Sitting in a coffee shop this morning, I think I'll just stick to caffeine as a PED.

Improving Cities to Improve Health

The more time I spend talking to public health professionals, the more interesting I find some of their city-wide projects - improving parks, creating more places for people to walk/play, etc. With that in mind, I thought this story from The New York Times about the City Council approving an increase in the number of fruit and vegetable stands in poor neighborhoods in NYC. I think this is a great strategy, similar to some efforts from the Austin Farmers' Market to send farmers directly to WIC clinics to make it easier for WIC clients to redeem farmers' market vouchers - everyone wins. While individual decisions like this might not seem like a big deal, I suppose, lots of efforts like this across a city could definitely make an impact on obesity and all of the related problems that come with obesity.

On a related note, I thought this RWJ report of the most and least walkable cities in the U.S. was interesting. The list includes:

10 Best U.S. Walking Cities of 2008

1. Cambridge, MA
2. New York, NY
3. Ann Arbor, MI
4. Chicago, IL
5. Washington, DC
6. San Francisco, CA
7. Honolulu, HI
8. Trenton, NJ
9. Boston, MA
10. Cincinnati, OH

10 Worst U.S. Walking Cities of 2008

1. Oklahoma City, OK
2. North Las Vegas, NV
3. Gadsden, AL
4. Davenport, IA
5. Mount Pleasant, SC
6. Enid, OK
7. Laredo, TX
8. Springdale, AR
9. Clarksville, TN
10. Lafayette, LAI

Unilver and P&G Market Ethics, Hispanic Fact Pack

There are two interesting tidbits over at Advertising Age that I think might be of interest...

The first is an article discussing how Unilever and P&G are working to use ethics as a marketing tool. Just as companies are using "being green" and ethical as tools to promote their brands, I have to imagine that this will quickly become a bigger and bigger deal in how companies that often don't have the greatest reputation for healthy foods (say, McDonald's) fight back against both competitors and critics. I have a student working on a project right now related to how McDonald's advertises itself in print media; she seems to come across a LOT of ads for salads and their healthier options, but there aren't all that many for the foods that most people probably think of first when they think McDonald's (Big Macs, etc.) and likely draw most people into the stores in the first place.

The second is their Hispanic Fact Pack, a new report on how Hispanics are using media, demographic trends among Hispanics, and some other useful information. While some of the material there is probably much more geared toward marketing and advertising professionals, some of the information (such as media usage) is likely to be quite relevant to health communication and promotion professionals.