The enormous amount of money spent on health care in the United States may be worth it, Harvard researchers suggest. Their new study, published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, finds that the increases in health spending in the United States from 1960 to 2000 actually provided good value for the money. Newborns over this 40-year period gained almost seven years of life, and researchers estimate that the average was nearly $20,000 of spending per year of life gained — not a bad value. However, spending for people over age 65 was much higher for each year of life gained, averaging $145,000 per extra year by the end of the study period. The authors say that while the U.S. health care system is inefficient compared with those of some other countries, increased spending alone is not really a bad thing, and has had valuable benefits.
In a randomized trial of 156 people with severe, advanced Parkinson's disease, deep-brain stimulation, in which an electrical stimulator is implanted through brain surgery, was more effective than medication in managing the symptoms of the degenerative disease Patients in Germany who underwent deep-brain stimulation, had better mobility, better quality of life and better emotional well-being than those who took medication alone. However, one patient died during the brain surgery, and serious side effects were more common in the patients treated with the neurostimulator. But overall side effects were more common in the group taking medication. These results were published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Research on an outbreak of Marburg fever in the Congo in 1998 suggests that the virus may live in mines. Of the 154 cases, 52 were in male miners, and the majority of these men reported no contact with other infected people, which suggests they were infected in the mines, according to new research in the New England Journal of Medicine. The Marburg outbreak ended when the mines flooded, providing more evidence of a relationship between the virus and the mines. Marburg fever is rare but deadly: Eighty-three percent of the infected people in this study died.
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