- This Week in Managed Care: May 24, 2019 (ajmc.com)
Laura Joszt, Managing Editor at The American Journal of Managed Care. Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network
- Study Finds a Lack of Deprescribing is Harmful and Expensive (drugtopics.com)Preventive drugs in the last year of life of older adults with cancer: Is there room for deprescribing? (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
A new study from Sweden is suggesting that many older adults with cancer are being prescribed preventive medications at the end of their lives that may harm their quality of life while providing questionable clinical benefits. The problem may stem from inadequate deprescribing...The study...online in Cancer, found that deprescribing strategies need to be more widely adopted to help reduce the burden of drugs that have limited clinical benefit near the end of life...The goal of palliative care is to reduce symptoms and maximize the quality of life, but sometimes what is used as palliative treatment decreases quality of life and that’s troubling...READ MORE
- May 17 Pharmacy Week in Review: Preventing Allergens From Building Up, Use of Chemotherapy Expected to Increase
- Pharma TV ads get groovy with ’70s rock soundtrack proliferation (fiercepharma.com)
Pharma TV ads have been breaking out their boogie shoes lately. A handful of branded drug ads currently on the air are using popular ‘70s light rock songs to accompany their treatment messages, both to aid recall and to reach older audiences with music from their youth...Music can be a powerful emotional and memory device in advertising...Music can conjure up fond (and not-so-fond) memories. Just think about how most people learn the alphabet by using the familiar song to help them remember it. And who hasn’t had an earworm pop lyric stuck in their head all day?...For pharma companies, the familiar, upbeat and bouncy ‘70s tunes quickly grab attention with the audience they’re likely intended for. Songs from the ‘70s and ‘80s...are often targeted at a specific group of older consumers who grew up on those songs...READ MORE
- May 24 Pharmacy Week in Review: FDA Approves Nasal Option for Treating Seizure Clusters in Adolescents, Whale Genomics Studied for Cancer Research (pharmacytimes.com)
Laura Joszt, Managing Editor at The American Journal of Managed Care, welcome to the Pharmacy Times News Network, Pharmacy Week in Review.
- GSK and Novartis liniment marketing misled Australian consumers: court (reuters.com)
The Australian subsidiaries of British drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline and Swiss drugmaker Novartis misled customers and broke the law by promoting identical liniments as though they could treat specific ills, an Australian court found...The court said the companies admitted marketing Voltaren Osteo Gel as a treatment for osteoarthritis-related pain when its ingredients were the same as a cheaper Voltaren product, Emulgel...Judge Bromwich is yet to set a fine but the maximum penalty is the higher of A$10 million ($7 million), triple the benefit earned from the misleading conduct or - if that cannot be determined - a tenth of the annual turnover of the company in question...READ MORE
- Five more U.S. states sue OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma over opioid epidemic (reuters.com)
Five U.S. states...filed lawsuits accusing Purdue Pharma LP of illegally marketing and selling opioids, escalating the wave of litigation over a nationwide abuse epidemic...Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, West Virginia and Wisconsin joined 39 states to file lawsuits targeting Purdue Pharma and its leaders, including former president Richard Sackler and his family...Officials accused Purdue Pharma of repeatedly making false and deceptive claims that opioids...were safe for a wide range of patients seeking to reduce pain...READ MORE
- Novartis CEO calls for new drug payment model ahead of Zolgensma launch (fiercepharma.com)Novartis CEO plans gene therapy price 'far lower' than $4 million to $5 million range (reuters.com)
Novartis is looking to launch spinal muscular atrophy gene therapy Zolgensma this year. But the possibility of a price tag as high as $5 million has already sparked controversy. To prepare for the pricey rollout, CEO Vas Narasimhan is now calling for changes to the U.S. drug payment system...For chronic diseases, current healthcare systems are made in a “pay-as-you-go model,” but not for single-treatment therapies that could potentially cure them. And that makes new models for evaluating the benefits of such treatments and for payment necessary...“[W]e need new economic models to determine exactly how much value [a cure] represents” when compared with the cost and suffering saved from longtime chronic care...READ MORE
- This Week in Managed Care: May 17, 2019 (ajmc.com)
Samantha DiGrande, Welcome to This Week in Managed Care from the Managed Markets News Network
- Opioids crisis has spread beyond United States: OECD (reuters.com)
Opioid use has reached crisis proportions not only in the United States but also in Canada and some European countries, as prescription opioid painkillers have become much more common, the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development)...said... nearly 400,000 people died of overdoses between 1999 and 2017...The Paris-based policy forum said deaths linked to opioid use were also rising sharply in Sweden, Norway, Ireland, and England and Wales...Canada reported more than 10,000 opioid-related deaths between January 2016 and September 2018, with rates increasing from 8.4 per 100,000 people to 11.8 over the period...Between 2011 and 2016, opioid-related deaths rose more than 20% in 25 member countries...READ MORE