Health-care spending attributable to modifiable risk factors in the USA: an economic attribution analysis

“The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recognised public health programmes that reduced deaths from coronary heart disease and stroke and prevented deaths from smoking as two of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century, both championed by robust evidence connecting these risks to reductions in healthy life expectancy. [..] To our knowledge, no study links a comprehensive set of modifiable risk factors to health-care spending by condition. [..] To address this research gap, we estimated US health-care spending attributable to 84 modifiable risk factors in 2016, with the latest data available. We included behavioural risks, … Read More

Meals As Medicine: Feed The Hungry To Treat The Tuberculosis Pandemic

“Annually, about 10 million people develop TB, and an estimated 1.5 million die from their disease, which makes it the leading infectious killer worldwide, even in the time of COVID-19. [..] Key factors can significantly increase an individual’s risk. In particular, 2.3 million cases of TB were worldwide attributable to undernutrition in 2018: That’s one in five cases. By comparison, 1.2 million cases were attributable to HIV and 0.8 million cases to diabetes—risk factors that receive considerably more attention and funding. Undernutrition blunts the function of the immune system and increases the risk for TB so much so that it … Read More

Mapping the Brain Effects of Hearing Loss: The Matter of White Matter

“Described as the “greatest global challenge for health and social care in the 21st century,” dementia is a debilitating disease that affects about 50 million individuals worldwide, a number projected to triple by 2050. Given the limited efficacy of current dementia treatments, society stands to benefit tremendously from public health prevention strategies. Hearing loss (HL) has been recently shown to be a treatable risk factor for dementia. [..] Clinicians may be tempted to use the known independent association between HL and cognition to justify HL treatment (eg, hearing aids) to prevent age-related cognitive deficits. While appropriate management of HL is … Read More