Call Made for Memory Screening
Congress should develop a national dementia screening policy, the Alzheimer's Foundation of America said in a report. “Our nation must elevate age-related health issues to a high priority, and memory screenings need to be a critical part of that discussion,” Dr. Richard E. Powers, chairman of the foundation's medical advisors, said in a statement. He coauthored the report, which supports memory screening while acknowledging ethical, pragmatic, and theoretical issues surrounding such testing. The report said that 5- to 10-minute screening tests don't in themselves establish a diagnosis and so shouldn't have adverse consequences. The national policy could create a panel of experts and consumers tasked with recommending when physicians should do screening. The report also called for more medical school training in dementia. “This is a real world problem of escalating proportions,” said Dr. Powers.
MS Research Made Strides in 2008
Researchers made a number of significant advances in both clinical and laboratory studies last year that could boost the understanding and treatment of multiple sclerosis, said the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. There are currently more than 130 clinical trials in MS underway around the world, including at least a dozen late-phase clinical trials for new therapies, the society said. For example, Acorda Therapeutics Inc. is expected to soon seek approval of the drug Fampridine-SR (4-aminopyridine) to treat mobility issues in MS. The drug was helped improve walking speed in a clinical trial of 240 patients with all types of MS. Also in 2008, at least three phase II trials showed drugs' capacity to treat relapsing-remitting MS, said the society. It also began discussions with several pharmaceutical companies about fast-tracking novel therapies and testing existing drugs against MS.
Obama Picks Science Team
President Obama has begun assembling his team of key science and technology advisers. Last month, he tapped three well-known scientists for top jobs in the administration, including Dr. Harold Varmus as cochair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is a Nobel Prize winner who headed the National Institutes of Health under President Bill Clinton. Cochairing the council will be Eric Lander, Ph.D., one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project and a professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Medical School in Boston. The final cochair of the council will be John Holdren, Ph.D., who will also serve as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Dr. Holdren is director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Coalition Describes Ideal FDA Pick
The next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration should be a proven manager who can rise above politics, according to a coalition of a patient advocacy groups. The group of more than 30 organizations, including the ALS Association and the Parkinson's Action Network, wrote a letter to Health and Human Services secretary-designate Tom Daschle calling for the Obama administration to fill the FDA post quickly. Candidates for the job shouldn't be excluded because of ties to the pharmaceutical or device industries, the coalition advised. “Diverse experience, including that with an FDA-regulated industry, should be viewed as a positive qualification,” the letter said.
RAC Program Heavily Criticized
Medicare's effort to recover overpayments made to physicians and hospitals and to make good on underpayments—dubbed the Recovery Audit Contractor program—was lambasted by members of the Practicing Physicians Advisory Council. The program is currently on hold while the Government Accountability Office studies whether CMS has properly implemented it. During a demonstration project, however, RAC auditors found $1 billion in improper payments among $317 billion worth of claims, a CMS official reported to PPAC. As of July 2008, about 7% of those determinations were overturned on appeal. Once the program is restarted—expected by February—there will be limits on the number of years of claims an auditor can examine and how many records can be requested from practices of various sizes. Even with those plans, PPAC panelists recommended further limits and suggested that the CMS require auditors to reimburse providers for fulfilling records requests. PPACmembers said more information should be available on the appeals process.