“At some point, it is what many of us experience in our lives as the physician-child paradox. You hold out hope for the best possible outcome, but when the data and your parent are staring you in the face, it is hard to deny the odds and experience. [..] At the end of the day, the look of defeat remained on his face. He had been a good sport, but the outcome was not going to change. Either he or fate had decided it. I could not tell. “I love you,” he said. “I love you, too, Dad,” I replied. … Read More
“Akido Labs is using artificial intelligence to bring medical care to the streets of New York. The Los Angeles-based healthcare provider has created an AI doctor that suggests diagnoses and treatments based on patients’ symptoms and medical histories. A human doctor approves, modifies or rejects the recommendations. Now Akido is bringing this technology, ScopeAI, to ride-share drivers in New York through a partnership with two groups that can help it connect with these workers: the Independent Drivers Guild, an advocacy group, and Workers Benefit Fund, which works with labor unions and policy leaders to provide health and other benefits to … Read More
“The COLONPREV trial—published online in The Lancet—is, therefore, a landmark study. It is the first randomised controlled trial to compare colorectal cancer deaths in people screened with the two most commonly used methods: colonoscopy and faecal immunochemical test (FIT), an antibody-based test for haemoglobin, indicative of blood in the stool. The study finds that invitation to biennial FIT-based screening is non-inferior to invitation to one-time colonoscopy in terms of colorectal cancer mortality at 10 years. These results build on the NordICC trial, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which showed that invitation to colonoscopy reduced colorectal cancer risk … Read More
“[Green] I was really surprised to learn that tuberculosis is the deadliest infectious disease in the world. Even though I cared about global health, I would have bet my life that it was malaria or H.I.V., because those diseases get so much more attention. They still don’t get nearly enough attention, it must be said; people don’t pay enough attention in the rich world to problems in the global South. [..] It’s not easy to cure, but neither was my brother’s cancer. My brother had cancer a couple of years ago; it cost about 150 times more to cure than … Read More
“The tobacco and ultra-processed food industries exemplify the detrimental effects of corporate influence on public health. For decades, tobacco companies lobbied aggressively against health regulations, contributing to millions of preventable deaths worldwide. Despite still causing more than 8 million tobacco-related deaths annually, the tobacco industry now claims through its public-relations campaigns and selective science that it focuses on “harm reduction”, particularly by selling new products such as e-cigarettes. These tactics allow the industry to argue that it deserves a seat at the policy table, all while shifting to new types of addictive and harmful products, targeting youth, and continuing to oppose tobacco … Read More
“in the past two years, Web of Science, an influential index of scholarly literature, delisted at least four high-volume journals for not meeting quality standards and placed four more on hold while it investigates their work. These are some of the latest signs of scientists’ mounting concern over the quality of research. Altogether, editors at nearly 40 journals have quit in the past decade over differences with their publishers, according to the website Retraction Watch. [..] Scientific journals were once mostly produced by scholarly societies that circulated periodicals or meeting summaries for scientists who couldn’t attend their events. Some—including the … Read More
A research group assessed plasma proteins between 1997 and 1999 from over 6200 middle-aged (45-69 years) individuals. They followed these people for 20 years and tracked 45 age-related diseases and multi-morbidity. They used SomaScan version 4.0 and 4.1. In addition to proteins for overall organismal age, they had clusters of proteins for arteries, brain, heart, immune system, intestine, kidney, liver, lung and pancreas. “[Results] Over 123 712 person-years of observation (mean follow-up 19·8 years [SD 3·6]), and after excluding disease cases at or before baseline, higher organ age gaps were associated with an elevated risk of 32 out of the 45 … Read More
“We compared public-access naloxone strategies using more than 14 000 cases of opioid poisoning in Metro Vancouver over a 6-year period. We found that the 647 take-home naloxone sites were within a 3-minute walk to more than one-third of all opioid poisonings and had high coverage efficiency (Table 2) [the top five location categories for coverage efficiency were: government office, take-home naloxone site, convenience store, retail store and pharmacy]. In addition to existing operations that distribute take-home naloxone kits, which are likely taken elsewhere, take-home naloxone site locations appear generally well-aligned with where opioid poisonings occur, so they are also … Read More
“In more than two decades of research into how leaders’ decision-making has an impact on organizational success, I’ve uncovered a surprising insight: The most effective leaders aren’t the ones who seem to have all the answers. The most-effective leaders are those who question themselves. [..] Such ambivalence helps in several ways. Internal conflict helps us adapt to complex situations by forcing us to seek out more information and consider alternatives. Managers who don’t see everything as either positive or negative seek out expertise from others, incorporating that knowledge more than less-ambivalent leaders. It makes them more receptive to competing or … Read More
“My takeaway from my work with organizations as they grapple with artificial intelligence is that not only do most companies not need an AI strategy, but they shouldn’t have one at all. Going down that road will be, at best, a distraction. [..] Much of it comes down to data. Poor data quality—incomplete, biased or unstructured—affects AI performance in the same way it can have an impact on any other technology. If you don’t have good data, you can have great strategic intent, but you won’t be able to execute it. The strategy will simply divert attention from what the … Read More