Demen­tia Care Cost Is Pro­jected to Dou­ble by 2040 (The New York Times):

“The most rig­or­ous study to date of how much it costs to care for Amer­i­cans with demen­tia found that the finan­cial bur­den is at least as high as that of heart dis­ease or can­cer, and is prob­a­bly higher. And both the costs and the num­ber of peo­ple with demen­tia will more than dou­ble within 30 years, sky­rock­et­ing at a rate that rarely occurs with a chronic disease…The RAND results show that nearly 15 per­cent of peo­ple aged 71 or older, about 3.8 mil­lion peo­ple, have demen­tia. By 2040, the authors said, that num­ber will bal­loon Read the rest of this entry »

What Medicare Will Cover Even if You’re Not Likely to Get Bet­ter (The New York Times):

“Should the fed­eral gov­ern­ment cover the costs of many kinds of treat­ments for patients who aren’t going to get any bet­ter? It didn’t, for many years. But after the set­tle­ment of a land­mark class-action this week, Medicare will soon Read the rest of this entry »

The annual well­ness visit: An oppor­tu­nity to improve rev­enue and patient care (PhysBizTech):

“Medicare recently intro­duced the Annual Well­ness Visit (AWV) to keep Medicare ben­e­fi­cia­ries healthy, or help Medicare ben­e­fi­cia­ries become health­ier, by pro­mot­ing pos­i­tive health habits and a healthy lifestyle. Unlike Read the rest of this entry »

(Editor’s Note: this is Part 3 of the new 3-part series writ­ten by Dr. Evian Gor­don draw­ing from his par­tic­i­pa­tion at the Per­son­al­ized Med­i­cine World Con­gress on Jan­u­ary, 23, 2012 at Stan­ford University.)

Work­ing with Health Care Indus­try Stake­hold­ers: Clin­i­cians, Pharma/Biotech, Pay­ers, PBMs, Lawyers, Medicare, FDA

Clin­i­cians seek clear val­i­dated “rules of thumb” that can be eas­ily imple­mented and fit into their work­flow and reim­burse­ment regime. Many are explor­ing “Clin­i­cal Deci­sion Sup­port (CDS)” tools on the web and solu­tions linked to “Elec­tronic Health Records” (EHR’s). CDC and EHR’s are seed­ing the ground for clin­i­cians to adopt robust Bio­mark­ers that are shown to be unam­bigu­ously clin­i­cally relevant.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the pres­i­dent and med­ical direc­tor of the Alzheimer’s Research and Pre­ven­tion Foun­da­tion (ARPF), it’s my job to stay on top of advances in the field of Alzheimer’s research. Recently, a num­ber of arti­cles in the med­ical lit­er­a­ture have caught my atten­tion. They are focused on a par­tic­u­lar ques­tion that con­cerns most Baby Boomers like me: “Is mem­ory loss just a nor­mal part of aging?” Read the rest of this entry »

Wel­come to Grand Rounds, the weekly col­lec­tion of best health and med­ical blog posts. This week we invite you to enjoy a broad range of insights, tips, and first-hand sto­ries, pre­sented as a Q&A con­ver­sa­tion with blog­gers will­ing to answer, below, a total of 22 good questions.

On Health and Med­i­cine

1. What can one-word pre­scrip­tions deliver
2. How does food pro­cess­ing change food´s nutri­tional value
3. Can diet Increases Risk of ADHD
4. Is alco­holism an illness
5. What´s bet­ter: steady dete­ri­o­ra­tion over 10 years, or symp­tom-free life for 9 years fol­lowed by rapid dete­ri­o­ra­tion in year 10

On Patient Life

1. As we talk about wellness…what about devel­op­ing self-compassion
2. Can patients with chronic pain still live a full life
3. What is the patient-doctor eti­quette for using Face­book and Twitter
4. Should patients in an ideal world con­tract directly with their doctors
5. What are patient advo­cates focus­ing on these days

On Health Care pro­fes­sion­als Read the rest of this entry »

As you have prob­a­bly seen, the Cog­ni­tive Health and Brain Fit­ness field is rapidly evolv­ing, so let me high­light some of the main recent devel­op­ments affect­ing the field:

1) Pub­lic pol­icy ini­tia­tives:
– The Gov­ern­ment of Ontario, Canada, announced a $10m invest­ment in Bay­crest Research Cen­ter to help develop and com­mer­cial­ize brain fit­ness tech­nolo­gies. This $10m invest­ment was matched with an addi­tional $10m by local investors.
– In the US, The Paul Well­stone and Pete Domenici Men­tal Health Par­ity and Addic­tion Equity Act of 2008 was signed into law, included in the recently-approved eco­nomic bailout bill. The pas­sage of this law has sig­nif­i­cant impli­ca­tions for health­care providers and tech­nol­ogy ven­dors alike.

2) Com­put­er­ized Cog­ni­tive Assess­ments Used by the US Mil­i­tary:
The US Army launched a new pol­icy requir­ing cog­ni­tive screen­ings of all sol­diers before deploy­ment (in order to bet­ter diag­nose poten­tial prob­lems such as PTSD and TBI upon return). ANAM was the selected com­put­er­ized bat­tery of tests.

3) Ven­ture & Angel Fundrais­ing for Cog­ni­tive Train­ing com­pa­nies:
A num­ber of devel­op­ers have raised money. Cog­niFit received $5m (from Milk Cap­i­tal), Lumos Labs $3m (First­Mark Cap­i­tal –pre­vi­ously called Pequot Ventures-, Nor­west Ven­ture Part­ners), Sci­en­tific Brain Train­ing $1.5m (issued shares), Viv­ity Labs $1m (undis­closed angel investors), This is, of course, on top of the Feb­ru­ary $10.6 invest­ment in Dakim (Galen Part­ners) that we already included in our mar­ket report.

4) Major Ini­tia­tives by Insur­ance Com­pa­nies:
– All­state launched a large-scale research project to mea­sure impact of Posit Sci­ence InSight (visual pro­cess­ing train­ing) on dri­ver safety for adults over 50.
– OptumHealth announced a 3-year, $18m agree­ment with Brain Resource to offer web-based cog­ni­tive assess­ments as part of clin­i­cians’ deci­sion sup­port sys­tems.
– Humana decided not to renew its agree­ment with Posit Sci­ence to offer Posit’s audi­tory pro­cess­ing train­ing pro­gram to Medicare members.

5) New Research:
– In a sig­nif­i­cant new study, a team from the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan pub­lished a high-quality paper in the Pro­ceed­ings of the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences show­ing how com­put­er­ized work­ing mem­ory train­ing can gen­er­al­ize and improve fluid intel­li­gence (one of the domains that tends to decline with age).
– Learn­ing and Teach­ing Scot­land released an inter­nal study show­ing how Nin­tendo Brain Train­ing can help children’s math and con­cen­tra­tion skills. The study gained sig­nif­i­cant media atten­tion, despite the fact it hasn’t been pub­lished in a respected journal.

Note: This is an excerpt from the 6-Month Mar­ket Update we will  release later this month, cov­er­ing the many impor­tant devel­op­ments that have occurred since we launched the inau­gural Brain Fit­ness Mar­ket Report in March this year. This spe­cial report will be avail­able exclu­sively for our Pre­mium Research Spon­sors.