first opinion
When did dementia treatment get so … exciting?
Molly Ferguson for STAT
Physician Jason Karlawish still remembers the first patient he diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. After prescribing a treatment, the patient went from miserably house-bound to happily walking the neighborhood with his wife. "The couple called me their miracle worker," Karlawish recalls.
But caring for people with dementia has never been that exciting, Karlawish explains in his latest First Opinion essay. Physicians have generally accepted that there's nothing to be done for dementia patients. That same perspective has kept the Penn Memory Center, where Karlawish works, from getting more than one or two fellowship applicants a year. But recently, something's changed. Last year, there were nine applicants to the program, and new patient requests have skyrocketed. The reason? Karlawish points to biomarker-based therapeutics. Read more about what that means, and why it's given him a renewed sense of hope for treating dementia. It's the third installment in his Neurotransmissions column.
policy
A new study proposes 'cost-neutral' food taxes
Around the country, states are considering new laws aimed at encouraging consumers to make healthy choices at the grocery store. Financial disincentives for sugary drinks in particular are a cornerstone of the Make America Healthy Again movement. But a new study in Ecological Economics proposes a slightly more complex tax system that takes into account the impact that different foods have on both our health and the climate.
Based on models of Swedish data, the study authors propose introducing taxes on things like sugary drinks, beef, lamb, pork, and processed meat. To offset those price increases, they recommend removing taxes from healthy items like fruit, vegetables, legumes, and whole grain products. This way, the final bill at the end of a grocery trip won't go up, they argue. Making these changes could prevent about 700 premature deaths each year in Sweden, the authors calculated, in addition to greatly reducing the country's climate footprint from food consumption.
Even if laws like this could be beneficial in the U.S. — the study authors believe the results are relevant for most other high-income countries — it would be very difficult to get the American public behind a tax on meat, as STAT's Sarah Todd pointed out to me. (Beef prices have been rising for other reasons lately, and last week President Trump suggested buying meat from Argentina could help lower the costs.)
No comments