A new law that renews and extends user-fee arrangements for drug and device approvals also aims to speed effective new therapies to patients and the market.

The Affordable Care Act mandates changes in payment policies for Medicare postacute care services intended to contain spending in the long run and help ensure the program’s financial sustainability. In addition to reducing annual payment increases to providers under the existing prospective payment systems, the act calls for demonstration projects of bundled payment, accountable care organizations, and other strategies to promote care coordination and reduce spending. Experience with the adoption of Medicare prospective payment systems in postacute care settings approximately a decade ago suggests that current reforms could, but need not necessarily, produce such undesirable effects as decreased access for less profitable patients, poorer patient outcomes, and only short-lived curbs on spending. Policy makers will need to be vigilant in monitoring the impact of the Affordable Care Act reforms and be prepared to amend policies as necessary to ensure that the reforms exert persistent controls on spending without compromising the delivery of patient-appropriate postacute services.

For an average of six years after undergoing gastric bypass surgery, severely obese patients not only lost a lot of weight, but also showed frequent remission and lower incidence of type 2 diabetes, plus lower rates of high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol, and other cardiovascular risk factors, compared with a control group of similar patients who did not have the surgery. These were the findings of a JAMA study published on 19 September, that was led by researchers from the University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, in the US.

Although the federal government’s 1996 reform of welfare brought some improvements for the nation’s poor, it also may have made extremely poor Americans worse off, new research shows. The reforms radically changed cash assistance – what most Americans think of as ‘welfare’ – by imposing lifetime limits on the receipt of aid and requiring recipients to work.

New research adds to the growing body of evidence suggesting that there’s a link between allergies and reduced risk of a serious type of cancer that starts in the brain. This study suggests the reduced risk is stronger among women than men, although men with certain allergy profiles also have a lower tumor risk.

Has a summer cold or mold allergy stuffed up your nose and dampened your sense of smell? We take it for granted that once our nostrils clear, our sniffers will dependably rebound and alert us to a lurking neighborhood skunk or a caramel corn shop ahead. That dependability is no accident.

Drugs prescribed to treat anxiety, depression and insomnia may increase patients’ risk of being involved in motor vehicle accidents, according to a recent study, published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. Based on the findings, the researchers suggested doctors should consider advising patients not to drive while taking these drugs.

Shortly after the Hubble Space Telescope went into orbit in 1990 it was discovered that the craft had blurred vision. Fortunately, Space Shuttle astronauts were able to remedy the problem a few years later with supplemental optics.

Princeton University researchers have found, A mysterious region deep in the human brain could be where we sort through the onslaught of stimuli from the outside world and focus on the information most important to our behavior and survival.

Work stress, job satisfaction and health problems due to high stress have more to do with genes than you might think, according to research by Timothy Judge, professor of management at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. This information has been published two days after a separate study suggesting that work stress increases an employee’s risk of heart attack by 23%.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has charged Miles Kimball Company in Wisconsin with disability discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. An employee who is deaf was denied her requested reasonable accommodation for a sign language interpreter and then fired. The company has agreed to provide training to its employees about disability discrimination.

President Barak Obama announced on April 9th 2013, that he will ask for $100 million in his fiscal 2014 budget next week to sponsor the first year of the “BRAIN Initiative”, a bold, new 10-year research effort to advance our understanding of the human brain and uncover new ways to treat, prevent and cure brain disorders like autism, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s.

Osteoporosis, or reduced bone mineral density (BMD), is defined by an absolute decrease in total bone mass, caused mostly by an imbalance between osteoclastic bone resorption and osteoblastic bone formation. Reduced BMD often co-occurs with alcoholism.

Cancer of the oesophagus is becoming more common in Europe and North America. Around 7,800 people in the UK are diagnosed each year. The exact causes of this cancer aren’t fully understood. It appears to be more common in people who have long-term acid reflux (backflow of stomach acid into the oesophagus).

Over the past decade, more than two million Americans have deployed to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan where they were routinely exposed to life-threatening events. Such traumas may result in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition marked by intrusive thoughts and memories of traumatic experiences.

Researchers at The Scripps Research Institute have found new links between a protein that controls our urge to eat and brain cells involved in the development of alcoholism. The discovery points to new possibilities for designing drugs to treat alcoholism and other addictions.