Read article – Quotes Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin, both professors of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, medicine, and community and family medicine, about findings released by Amarin Corp. for Vascepa, its preventive medicine for people at risk of heart disease. Amarin Corp claimed that Vascepa caused a 25 percent relative risk reduction for deaths related to heart attacks, strokes, and other conditions, but the particulars of the scientific study on which this claim was based remain a mystery.

Read article – Article quotes Lisa Schwartz, professor of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, medicine, and community and family medicine, about cancer screenings. It is a popular notion that frequent cancer screenings saves lives, but is there a downside to these tests? A team of researchers believe that the impact of cancer screening tests is not as beneficial as previously thought and in some cases can result in an over diagnosis of cancer. “If the chance of dying from a cancer is small to begin with, there isn’t that much risk to reduce,” Schwartz said. “So the effect of even a good screening test has to be small in absolute terms.”

Read article – Patients with sclerosis assigned to a fibroproliferative subset, who are typically unresponsive to immunosuppressive drugs such as abatacept or mycophenolate mofetil, benefited from hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, according to Michael Whitfield, PhD, of the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

Read article – Quotes Anne Hoen, assistant professor of epidemiology, biomedical data science, and of microbiology and immunology, in an article about how Evolve Biosystems has developed a prototype screening test that can identify if an infant has low levels of bifidobacteria, which is crucial for an infant’s immune health.

Read article – Quotes Keith Paulsen, professor of radiology and of surgery, and the Robert A. Pritzker Professor of Biomedical Engineering, about how he and colleagues at Dartmouth are simultaneously studying four breast cancer screening techniques: NIR, MIS, EIS, and MRE. If one or more of these methods are found to be promising, scientists might look into integrating the technologies into a single tool. “We’re excited about the possibilities, but there’s a lot to be worked out,” says Paulsen.

Read article – Quotes Lisa Schwartz, professor of medicine, community and family medicine, and of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, who worked with colleagues from The Dartmouth Institute, Harvard Medical School, and the American Board of Internal Medicine in Philadelphia, to examine the financial ties between pharmaceutical and medical device companies and physicians. “What the survey revealed is that while financial industry ties have fallen some over the past decade, a majority of doctors still reported them,” says Schwartz. “This is particularly concerning when you consider that free samples, which are among the most common financial tie reported, have been linked to the prescribing of high-cost brand-name drugs over lower-cost generic alternatives.”

Read article – A review of the posthumously published The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist by Ben Barres, MED ’79, who died of cancer earlier this year. “An unstoppable force of nature, unfazed by headwinds, managing to will all of us onwards and upwards: this was Ben Barres. A highly influential neurobiologist and advocate for women in science, Barres lived an unusually interesting life. He was an openly transgender faculty member at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, and a pioneer in understanding the functions of glia — the most abundant and mysterious cells in the brain,” says the reviewer. “Whether by design or accident, along the way he also became a hero for people from gender and sexual minorities (LGBT+ people), and for early-career scientists generally.”

Read article – Cites a JAMA Viewpoint post coauthored by Jonathan Skinner, the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor in Economics and professor of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, in an article about how job growth in healthcare may be contributing to rising costs.

Read article – Quotes Lisa Schwartz, professor of medicine, community and family medicine, and of The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, about the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ (ACOG) recommendations in 2017 to advise women to start screening for breast cancer no later than age 50 but with the choice to begin sooner, in their 40s. (Picked up by MSN.)

Read article – Continued coverage of comments by Adrienne Faerber, a lecturer at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, about the Trump administration’s announcement that it will require drugmakers to reveal the list prices of their medicines in television ads.