Closer Look
Certain mutations linked to racial disparities in breast cancer
Adobe
For all the advances in treating breast cancer in recent decades, Black patients still face worse outcomes than other patients. They are more likely to develop the most aggressive subtype — triple-negative — than white patients, and when they do, their outcomes are worse. Researchers studying the survival gap between racial and ethnic groups have cited different access to high-quality care, but a large new study in JAMA Network Open also finds biological differences in tumors.
Analyzing records of more than 107,000 patients, they found that ancestry correlates with key mutations that can shape the biology of certain tumors — and how they respond to treatments. Black patients tended to have worse responses to pre-surgical chemotherapy in nearly every subtype of breast cancer, but the disparity was most dramatic in hormone receptor-negative and HER2-positive tumors. And Black patients were more likely to have tumors with mutations associated with treatment resistance. STAT's Angus Chen has more.
drug pricingIn a switch, drug middlemen target generics In the often opaque world of drug pricing, prescription drug middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers have been blamed for wielding rebates that lead to higher list prices for drugs. But at a Senate Finance Committee hearing yesterday, new tactics came to light, including overcharging for generics. In the past generics had been spared while PBMs have been singled out for contributing to higher brand drug prices.
Now the nonprofit generic drug maker CivicaRx says that PBMs are responsible for hiking prices of specialty generics, too. Case in point: Civica makes the generic oral prostate cancer drug abiraterone, competing with several other companies, yet the average cost to Medicare Part D for a month's supply is $3,000. Civica sells the drug for around $160, but cannot get PBMs to buy abiraterone, CivicaScript President Gina Guinasso wrote to Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) before the hearing. STAT's John Wilkerson has more.
Public health
ED visits for gun injuries climbed each pandemic year There have been so many mass shootings in the U.S. it's become hard to count them, whether in schools like Monday's in Nashville or in a ballroom in California's Monterey Park earlier this year. A new CDC report tracking emergency visits for gunshot wounds says compared to 2019, such visits jumped 37% in 2020, 36% in 2021, and 20% in 2022. Weekly numbers of patients seeking care for gunshot wounds began to climb in March 2020, even as overall ED visits fell.
The researchers link firearm injuries to both the pandemic's sudden surge in that month, and the months and years that followed, when suicide and homicides involving guns rose substantially. ED visits also increased sharply in late May 2020, and stayed high the rest of the year. While the authors didn't explore a cause, they note the spike coincided with the public outcry after the May 25 murder of George Floyd, changes in some states' Covid-19 prevention strategies, and reported increases in some types of crime. The Associated Press has more.
No comments