Category: Geriatrics

REGISTER NOW! Aligning Policy and People: Why the Time is Right to Transform Advanced Care

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

hands_Ingram Publishing_slideJune 21, 2016, 9am – 1pm

Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East (2036), Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Register now!

Description

Please join us for the inaugural event of the Project on Advanced Care and Health Policy, a collaboration between the Coalition for Advanced Care (C-TAC) and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. This conference will feature policymakers, thought leaders, family caregivers, clinicians, consumer advocates, and others working to identify the timely, practical, and actionable opportunities to transform care for people with advanced illness nearing end-of-life.

Confirmed Speakers

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REGISTER NOW: Aligning Policy and People: Why the Time is Right to Transform Advanced Care

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff 2 Comments

hands_Ingram Publishing_slideJune 21, 2016, 9am – 1pm

Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East (2036), Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA

This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Register now!

Description

Please join us for the inaugural event of the Project on Advanced Care and Health Policy, a collaboration between the Coalition for Advanced Care (C-TAC) and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. This conference will feature policymakers, thought leaders, family caregivers, clinicians, consumer advocates, and others working to identify the timely, practical, and actionable opportunities to transform care for people with advanced illness nearing end-of-life.

Confirmed Speakers

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Is It Immoral for Me to Dictate an Accelerated Death for My Future Demented Self?

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by Norman L. Cantor

I am obsessed with avoiding severe dementia. As a person who has always valued intellectual function, the prospect of lingering in a dysfunctional cognitive state is distasteful — an intolerable indignity. For me, such mental debilitation soils the remembrances to be left with my survivors and undermines the life narrative as a vibrant, thinking, and articulate figure that I assiduously cultivated. (Burdening others is also a distasteful prospect, but it is the vision of intolerable indignity that drives my planning of how to respond to a diagnosis of progressive dementia such as Alzheimers).

My initial plan was to engineer my own demise while still competent to do so. My sketch of methodologies and my preferred course (stopping eating and drinking) appear at: https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2015/04/16/my-plan-to-avoid-the-ravages-of-extreme-dementia/. The obvious hazard in that plan is cutting short a still vibrant and satisfactory existence.

An alternative strategy would be to allow myself to decline into incompetency, but beforehand to dictate, in an advance directive, rejection of future life-sustaining medical interventions. This strategy would probably work as applied to serious maladies such as kidney disease, lethal cancer, or congestive heart failure. The disturbing issue then becomes timing. The onset of such serious maladies is fortuitous and years of lingering in dementia might precede my demise.

A further alternative would be to seek to accelerate my post-competence demise by declining not only major medical interventions such as mechanical respirators or dialysis, but also more simplistic items like antibiotics, antiarrhythmics, and artificial nutrition and hydration. My envisioned scenario is that infection would occur early (via urinary tract, skin, or pneumonia) and that this condition, left untreated, would precipitate my death. (My advance instructions would allow palliative but not curative measures.)

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Bioethicist Art Caplan: Why a New Alzheimer’s Drug Isn’t A No-Brainer

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A new piece by contributor Art Caplan on NBC News:

Biogen, a Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech company, announced last week that early tests of their new drug aducanumab, a monoclonal antibody, had shown impressive results in treating those with early stage Alzheimer’s disease. The drug significantly reduced the amyloid plaque buildup in the brain that is associated with Alzheimer’s.

In a very early stage safety test aducanumab slowed the cognitive decline and dementia associated with Alzheimer’s in people. On the Mini Mental Status Exam, a widely used measure of cognitive function, people at risk of Alzheimer’s who got a placebo lost around 3 points over a year. But those who got the lowest dose of aducanumab worsened by just two points and those who got a higher dose lost less than a point.

Biogen was so excited by the early results in 166 volunteers that it is going to try to go directly to a much bigger clinical trial of the drug. Wall Street was very excited too—Biogen’s stock price shot up 10 percent. […]

See the full article here.

AALS Call for Papers on the Unbefriended Elderly

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment
Call for Papers, AALS Joint Program
Section on Aging and the Law  ●  Section on Law, Medicine, and Health Care
2015 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
January 3, 2015 from 3:30 to 5:15 p.m.
Unbefriended Elderly: 
Making Medical Treatment Decisions for Patients without Surrogates

The AALS Section on Aging and the Law and the AALS Section on Law, Medicine, and Health Care are sponsoring a joint program at the January 2015 Annual Meeting.  The program will consider many of the issues faced by elders, doctors, and the health care and social services systems when making medical treatment decisions for those incapacitated patients and residents who have no reasonably available legally authorized decision maker.

There are three confirmed panelists for this program:

(1)  Ellen Fox, MD, former Chief Officer for Ethics in Health Care, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

(2) Professor Lawrence A. Frolik, University of Pittsburgh School of Law

(3) Erica Wood, JD, Assistant Director, ABA Commission on Law and Aging

Two additional panelists will be selected through this call for papers.  Either paper proposals or completed papers are acceptable for submission.  Selected panelists may receive an offer for publication from the Journal of International Aging, Law & Policy, a joint publication of Stetson University College of Law and AARP.  The Journal is interested in papers that have an international or comparative component.  Acceptance of a publication offer is not a condition for serving as a panelist.  There is no formal requirement as to length of the proposal or final paper.  Preference will be given to papers that offer novel scholarly insights on the panel topic.  A paper may have already been accepted for publication as long as it will not be published prior to the Annual Meeting.

A successful proposal may focus on the broader legal, medical, or social aspects of making medical treatment decisions for patients without surrogates.  Also welcome are proposals that focus on ways to prevent patients from becoming unbefriended in the first place.  This could include analysis of: (a) broader default surrogate laws, (b) better advance care planning, or (c) more effective public guardianship procedures.  Narrative pieces concerning the administrative and regulatory issues presented will also be considered.

Paper proposals will be reviewed by a committee of law professors from both AALS sections.

Please submit your paper or proposal by Friday, August 31, 2014 at 5:00 p.m.  Please send it BOTH to Mark Bauer (Chair, AALS Section on Aging and the Law), Stetson University College of Law, mbauer at law.stetson.edu; and to Thaddeus Pope (Chair-Elect, Section on Law, Medicine, and Health Care), Hamline University School of Law, tpope01 at hamline.edu.

Biomarker Epistemology, Cognitive Decline, and Alzheimer’s Disease

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By Matthew L Baum

This past Sunday, a group of researchers reported in the journal, Nature Medicine, a preliminary technique that uses variation in blood levels of 10 fats to predict the likelihood that elderly individuals would develop mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer’s Disease in the following 2-3 years. The sample size was small and the results may not generalize beyond the narrow age-range and demographics of the study group (i.e. the assay is far from ready for “prime time”), but the study is an important first step towards a lower cost (vs PET imaging) and less invasive (vs spinal tap) predictive biomarker of cognitive decline*. Its publication has also triggered a flurry of discussion on possible ethical ramifications of this sort of blood biomarker. I will not attempt to address these ethical issues specifically here. Rather, I seek to highlight that how ethically troubling one views the technology to be may depend partly on the sort of knowledge one thinks these biomarkers reveal (applied epistemology at its best).

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Capsule Endoscopy Instead of Colonoscopy? The FDA Approves the PillCam COLON

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By Jonathan J. Darrow

In January, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of the PillCam COLON 2 as a minimally-invasive means of viewing the colon, a development that is sure to be welcomed by U.S. patients who currently undergo an estimated 14 million colonoscopies each year.  While the approval represents a major step forward, the PillCam is unlikely to supplant current procedures just yet.

The colon has traditionally been examined via optical colonoscopy, a procedure perceived by many to be uncomfortable and embarrassing that involves insertion through the rectum of a 5-6 foot long flexible tube as part of an examination that can take 30 to 60 minutes. Air must be pumped in through the rectum in a process called “insufflation.” Sedatives and pain medication are generally used to help relieve discomfort. In contrast, the PillCam COLON contains a power source, light source, and two tiny cameras encapsulated in an easy-to-swallow pill that produces no pain or even sensation as it moves through the colon. Reflecting the absence of discomfort, one report from a clinical researcher noted that a few patients have insisted on X-rays to confirm that the device had passed in their stool (FDA Consumer). The pill takes about 30,000 pictures before passing naturally from the body, which usually occurs before the end of its 10-hour battery life.

The safety record of capsule endoscopy, the category to which the PillCam COLON belongs, so far appears to compare favorably with the alternatives. Capsule endoscopy may be less likely to produce accidental colonic perforations or other serious complications, which occur in less than 1% of traditional colonoscopies despite the best efforts of the treating physician. Tears of the colon wall can in turn “rapidly progress to peritonitis and sepsis, carrying significant morbidity and mortality.” (Adam J. Hanson et al., Laparoscopic Repair of Colonoscopic Perforations: Indications and Guidelines, 11 J. Gastrointest. Surg. 655, 655 (2007)). Splenic injury or other serious complications also occur rarely with optical colonoscopies. Unlike “virtual colonoscopy,” which uses computed tomography (CT) to peer into the body, capsule endoscopy does not involve bombarding the body with radiation. A leading study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reported no serious adverse events among 320 subjects given the PillCam COLON, and concluded that use of the device was “a safe method of visualizing the colonic mucosa through colon fluids without the need for sedation or insufflation.” Read More

News from OMHA Appellants Forum: Statistical Sampling Coming, Backlog Growing

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Yesterday the HHS Office of Medicare Hearings and Appeals (OMHA) held a forum for appellants affected by its decision, which I blogged about last month, to hold off on assigning incoming appeals to ALJs while they work to clear a large backlog.  I was able to go, and enjoyed every minute.  This issue has received its share of attention in the news (Washington Post here, National Review online here), as well as controversy (see here and here), but I have not yet seen an article discussing some of the policy developments that came out of yesterday’s forum.  So I am going to play journalist for a minute, rather than academic, and share yesterday’s developments.  There were a lot of them: Read More

Live Blogging from FDA in the 21st Century Conference, Panel 1: FDA in a Changing World

I. Glenn Cohen Leave a comment

[This is off-the-cuff live blogging, so apologies for any errors, typos, etc]

Panel 1: FDA in a Changing World: Lewis Grossman, Ted Ruger, Barbara Evans, moderated by Holly Fernandez Lynch

Lewis Grossman, FDA in the Age of the Empowered Consumer

Begins his analysis by comparing a hypothetical consumer in 1960 and today.

Consumer was passive. Today’s consumer is active, more unmediated choice, more direct citizen involvement.

Why the change? 1970 was the decade of advocacy, culminating in 1972 Patient’s Bill of Rights from AMA. Central them was informed consent and thus complete information from physician.

1998 saw disruption of WebMd and now even more disrupted by web search technology which is how most patients get there info.

Food: 1966, recipe standards. Relatively little variety and consumer choice. Very little info on  nutrition, “batman white bread.” Turning point was 1969 White House conference that led to more choice and more info.

Health clams as the portal where 1st Amendment law entered into FDA law. The image of the intelligent consumer who need not be shielded from information.

Changes in standard by which FDA decided if something was misleading. Until 2002 unsure if reasonable or gullible consumer standard. In 2002 for food FDA chose the reasonable consumer standard.

Liberal and conservatives got scrambled on these matters in interesting ways.

Also a revolution in advertising, leading to revolution of patient’s relationship to his or her drugs.

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Twitter Round-Up (3/31-4/6)

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By Casey Thomson

This week’s slightly belated round-up concerns palliative care across cultures, the threat and problems of over-prescribing, and Big Pharma’s failure to create prices with the patient in mind. Read on for more from this week’s round-up.

  • Alex Smith (@AlexSmithMD) retweeted a piece on the lessons learned by Dr. Vvjeyanthi “V.J.” Periyakoil on how to approach palliative care for patients from a variety of backgrounds in ways that both extend life and fulfill the desires of the patient (in particular, reducing pain). (4/3)
  • Alex Smith (@AlexSmithMD) also retweeted an opinion piece in the NYT about the growing trend towards self- and over-medication, and the problems of overextending definitions of medical ‘conditions.’ As the piece’s author summarized: “The D.S.M. would do well to recognize that a broken heart is not a medical condition, and that medication is ill-suited to repair some tears.” (4/3)
  • Daniel Goldberg (@prof_goldberg) retweeted a link on two new wrongful death lawsuits against the NFL, which claim that the NFL withheld knowledge of the risks associated with concussions from players, that have been added to the string of other brain injury lawsuits filed against the league. (4/3)
  • Daniel Goldberg (@prof_goldberg) additionally retweeted a blog post on the striking results of a new study comparing male and female mortality amongst counties in the United States. While male mortality increased in only 34% of counties from 1992-1996 to 2002-2006, female mortality increased in 42.8%. This brings up questions concerning the cause of this demographic and largely geographic inequality, and what such a differential could mean on the health of dependents (children). (4/3)
  • Daniel Goldberg (@prof_goldberg) posted another article that put the recent New York “True Cost” campaign in historical context. The article called the campaign a “modern manifestation of…anxieties about the ‘contagion’ of working class and poor communities,” comparing it to the World War II-era venereal disease campaigns and the case of Typhoid Mary as all moralizing weapons aiming to instill shame rather than promote actual solutions to public health concerns. (4/4)
  • Arthur Caplan (@ArthurCaplan) linked to his own discussion of the problem with Novartis and India, noting that emphasis has been wrongly placed on patents when the concern should be on pharma’s hesitancy to create a pricing strategy that can provide medications for those who cannot afford huge prices. This unwillingness to do so, he claims, is violating a moral obligation. (4/4)