MUST READS

A May 1, 2015 The Washington Post article profiled the impact of caregiving and how one caregiver got more serious about taking care of herself. According to the article, “Gini Nelson, 61, is a self-employed attorney in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Like a growing number of Americans, she and her sister care for their elderly mother, who is slowly deteriorating with Alzheimer’s disease.Between the time she spends caring for her mother and sister–who herself now has some serious health issues– and a heavy workload at her  job, Nelson found herself hopelessly behind. She was unable to keep up on maintenance on her 1950s house and behind in tons of tedious-but-necessary tasks to keep her life running. And she never made time to take care of her own health. “I’ve survived on a day-to-day basis for the last few months,” she said. “I’ve been utterly exhausted.”…Gini wanted to find time for a healthy personal life. “Now that I’m in my early 60s, I wonder — if not now, when will I develop better patterns and schedules?” she wondered. “To wait until full retirement would not be healthy, and it would be a waste of  living.” She initially wanted help finding time to nurture her full  emotional and spiritual well-being, but decided to boil it down to one goal. “I need exercise.” She had already resolved to get to the gym she’d been paying for three times a week. But going to the gym felt like work, so she never went.”

An April 30, 2015 The Guardian article highlighted the negative impact of gender gaps in clinical trial research. According to the article, “Female subjects have historically been excluded from toxicology or biomedical research, says Tamarra James-Todd, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. While progress has been made since 1993, when the National Institutes of Health mandated that women and minorities be included in any government-funded health research, there’s still a long way to go. In a 2014 report, researchers at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston chronicled the exclusion of women from health research and its impact on women’s health: “The science that informs medicine – including the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease – routinely fails to consider the crucial impact of sex and gender. This happens in the earliest stages of research, when females are excluded from animal and human studies or the sex of the animals isn’t stated in the published results. Once clinical trials begin, researchers frequently do not enroll adequate numbers of women or, when they do, fail to analyze or report data separately by sex. This hampers our ability to identify important differences that could benefit the health of all.””

POLICY & REGULATION 

A May 1, 2015 New York Times article reported on the FDA’s efforts to speed the drug approval process. According to the article, “You might expect these existing special programs to represent a small fraction of new and unusual drugs. But data from the Food and Drug Administration show that a majority of recent drug development has been in therapies that qualify for at least one of these programs. About a third of recently approved drugs qualify for two or more of five special approval programs.”

An April 30, 2015 The New York Times article reported on cutbacks to the latest version of the 21st Century Cures legislation introduced by Rep. Fed Upton (R-MI) and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO). According to the article, “The draft bill presented at a hearing in the House on Thursday represents a less aggressive streamlining of the drug approval process, critics of the earlier draft said, and seems to have secured strong bipartisan support…The bill’s supporters said it was a work in progress that had been assembled in one of the most collaborative, transparent processes Congress has seen in years. The sponsors held eight hearings and more than a dozen round-table meetings in districts across the country to gather comment.”

An April 30, 2015 Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News article reported that the 21st Century Cures Act discussion draft “that would give the NIH $10 billion in additional funds over the next five federal fiscal years.” According to the article, “The bill, dubbed the 21st Century Cures Act, would parcel out that $10 billion into annual $2 billion allocations to a new “NIH Innovation Fund” separate from annual appropriations. The discussion draft says the funds would have to be spent on priority areas that include funding young researchers—a longstanding challenge for which a new NIH program would be established…But in a statement yesterday, AAMC President and CEO Darrell G. Kirch, M.D., said the association was still reviewing the draft, and focused only praise on the extra NIH funding: “We are encouraged the committee leadership recognizes the critical importance of maintaining NIH as a national priority. NIH funded-research is essential if we are to continue to improve our nation’s health, sustain our leadership in medical research, and remain competitive in today’s global information and innovation-based economy,” Dr. Kirch said. “Research means hope for patients and families suffering from serious illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, depression, and Parkinson’s.””

RESEARCH, SCIENCE, AND TECHNOLOGY 

An April 30, 2015 Reuters article reported on the first results from President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative. According to the article, “The study, describing a way to manipulate a lab animal's brain circuitry accurately enough to turn behaviors both on and off, is the first to be published under President Barack Obama's 2013 BRAIN Initiative, which aims to advance neuroscience and develop therapies for brain disorders…If scientists are able do that for the circuitry involved in psychiatric or neurological disorders, it may lead to therapies. That approach reflects a shift away from linking such illnesses to "chemical imbalances" in the brain, instead tracing them to miswiring and misfiring in neuronal circuits.”