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Thursday, October 28, 2004The second misconception about prices has to do with their importance in driving up over-all drug costs. In one three-year period in the mid-nineteen-nineties, for example, the amount of money spent in the United States on asthma medication increased by almost a hundred per cent. But none of that was due to an increase in the price of asthma drugs. It was largely the result of an increase in the prevalence of usage—that is, in the number of people who were given a diagnosis of the disease and who then bought drugs to treat it. Part of that hundred-per-cent increase was also the result of a change in what’s known as the intensity of drug use: in the mid-nineties, doctors were becoming far more aggressive in their attempts to prevent asthma attacks, and in those three years people with asthma went from filling about nine prescriptions a year to filling fourteen prescriptions a year. Last year, asthma costs jumped again, by twenty-six per cent, and price inflation played a role. But, once again, the big factor was prevalence. And this time around there was also a change in what’s called the therapeutic mix; in an attempt to fight the disease more effectively, physicians are switching many of their patients to newer, better, and more expensive drugs, like Merck’s Singulair. Asthma is not an isolated case. In 2003, the amount that Americans spent on cholesterol-lowering drugs rose 23.8 per cent, and similar increases are forecast for the next few years. Why the increase? Well, the baby boomers are aging, and so are at greater risk for heart attacks. The incidence of obesity is increasing. In 2002, the National Institutes of Health lowered the thresholds for when people with high cholesterol ought to start taking drugs like Lipitor and Mevacor. In combination, those factors are having an enormous impact on both the prevalence and the intensity of cholesterol treatment. All told, prescription-drug spending in the United States rose 9.1 per cent last year. Only three of those percentage points were due to price increases, however, which means that inflation was about the same in the drug sector as it was in the over-all economy. Angell’s book and almost every other account of the prescription-drug crisis take it for granted that cost increases are evidence of how we’ve been cheated by the industry. In fact, drug expenditures are rising rapidly in the United States not so much because we’re being charged more for prescription drugs but because more people are taking more medications in more expensive combinations. It’s not price that matters; it’s volume. That's true! And why are we prescribing more and more drugs to treat lower and lower thresholds for disease? Because the medical journal editors don't do their jobs: Here is a classic case of the kind of thing that bedevils the American health system—dubious findings that, without careful evaluation, have the potential to drive up costs. But whose fault is it? It’s hard to blame Pravachol’s manufacturer, Bristol-Myers Squibb. The study’s principal objective was to look at Pravachol’s effectiveness in fighting heart attacks; the company was simply using that patient population to make a secondary observation about strokes. In any case, Bristol-Myers didn’t write up the results. A group of cardiologists from New Zealand and Australia did, and they hardly tried to hide Pravachol’s shortcomings in women and older people. All those data are presented in a large chart on the study’s third page. What’s wrong is the context in which the study’s findings are presented. The abstract at the beginning ought to have been rewritten. The conclusion needs a much clearer explanation of how the findings add to our understanding of stroke prevention. There is no accompanying commentary that points out the extreme cost-ineffectiveness of Pravachol as a stroke medication—and all those are faults of the medical journal’s editorial staff. In the end, the fight to keep drug spending under control is principally a matter of information, of proper communication among everyone who prescribes and pays for and ultimately uses drugs about what works and what doesn’t, and what makes economic sense and what doesn’t—and medical journals play a critical role in this process. As Abramson writes: "When I finished analyzing the article and understood that the title didn’t tell the whole story, that the findings were not statistically significant, and that Pravachol appeared to cause more strokes in the population at greater risk, it felt like a violation of the trust that doctors (including me) place in the research published in respected medical journals." The journal in which the Pravachol article appeared, incidentally, was The New England Journal of Medicine. And its editor at the time the paper was accepted for publication? Dr. Marcia Angell. Physician, heal thyself. Amen, brother. And stop press-releasing those dubious findings to the nation's newspapers! UPDATE: That last quote in the New Yorker article was from the new book Overdosed America : The Broken Promise of American Medicine, which I happen to be reading at the moment. It's nice to see an academic addressing these issues. And it looks like his ideas are starting to get the attention of the mainstream press. UPDATE II: More on the Gladwell piece at MedRants who noticed the article much earlier than I did. posted by Sydney on 10/28/2004 07:27:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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