FHI's Week in Review - 4/8/19 - Cancer Risk and Cyber Security Risk Both on the Rise

Volume VI, Issue 14

April 8, 2019

Medicaid expansion tied to fewer heart-related deaths, study finds

EurekAlert! reports on 4/5/19:

Counties in states that expanded Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act had fewer deaths annually from heart disease compared to areas that did not expand Medicaid, according to preliminary research presented at the American Heart Association's

Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Scientific Sessions 2019.

WIM

"This is one of the first large studies of its type to show that, with this round of Medicaid expansion, there might have been a population level mortality benefit for patients with cardiovascular disease," said Sameed Ahmed M. Khatana, MD, a fellow in Cardiovascular Disease at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Fake cancerous nodes in CT scans, created by malware, trick radiologists

Kim Zetter reports, for the Washington Post on April 3, that

researchers in Israel have developed malware exploiting

vulnerabilities in widely used CT and MRI scanning equipment to draw attention to serious security weaknesses in critical medical imaging equipment used for diagnosing conditions and the networks that transmit those images - vulnerabilities that could have potentially life-altering consequences if unaddressed.

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It's clear that for healthcare providers "cyber risk will become greater than your malpractice risk," according to Matt Gracey, CEO of Danna-Gracey in Delray Beach.

The carcinogen of excess weight

From a KevinMD post dated 4/1/19 and authored by J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, MD, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, American Cancer Society:

...research - which was published in the medical journal Lancet Public Health - looked at how incidence rates were changing for 30 cancers using data from 67 percent of the U.S. population. They looked at rates for 12 cancers that we know are linked to overweight and obesity, and for 18 other common cancers that are not. Of the 12 weight-related cancers, 6 - including multiple myeloma, colorectal, uterine, gallbladder, kidney and pancreatic cancers - have all shown significant increases in incidence among younger folks compared to past generations at the same age. In comparison, only 2 of 18 cancers not linked to excess body weight showed similar increases: certain cancers of the stomach and leukemia.

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According to Dr. Lichtnefeld:

The fact is, these warnings have not exactly received a lot of traction. The irony, of course, is the association between body weight cancer gets a fraction of the attention of other, much smaller risks. And as we all know, we as a society are getting larger, and are now dealing with all sorts of consequences. It's not just about cancer: It's also about hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, degenerative joint disease. The list goes on and on.