This month’s podcast features a round-up of this month’s blog posts and a summary of three articles recently published in the journal Medical Care.
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Transcript
Hello friends. Welcome to the Healthy Intersections Podcast for February 2023. This podcast is sponsored by the American Public Health Association’s Medical Care Section. I’m Greg Stevens, Associated Editor for the journal Medical Care and co-editor of The Medical Care Blog, both of which are also sponsored by The Medical Care Section. We’re glad you found your way to our podcast, and hope you’ll subscribe on your favorite podcast provider and at our website, themedicalcareblog.com
On today’s podcast, I’ll talk about a recent blog that we published earlier this month, and then share a heads-up about two recent articles published in the peer-reviewed journal.
Blog Roundup
First up is the post A Renewed Outlook on Substance Abuse Prevention by Elizabeth Adams, Kelli Komro and Erin Bonar. The authors are investigators who are part of the HEAL Prevention Cooperative, a collaborative of 10 research projects across the country funded by the Helping to End Addiction Long-term® Initiative. The authors describe how prevention is more powerful than treatment, and offer a snapshot of a series of studies that are testing out new, mostly digital, programs to reach young adults and stop addiction before it starts. The authors convincingly write, “Research underscores the power of prevention in getting ahead of – not trailing behind – the overdose crisis.”
Recent Articles in Medical Care
Next, let’s take a look at a few articles that are out this month in the journal Medical Care.
It no surprise to any readers of Medical Care that we spend more as a nation on treatment than on prevention. But it has always surprised me that funding for research on treatment rather than prevention follows that same trend. Dr. Luis Ganoza and colleagues published a great paper on the distribution of NIH funding to research on preventive health care delivery. This includes things like studying access, quality or costs of preventive care. The authors found that funding for these activities has comprised an increasing proportion of the NIH budget, but reaching a still extremely modest 15% of total dollars spent by NIH. Most of that went into research on HIV, cancer and substance abuse.
Another important study by Rachel Ranney and colleagues looked at whether veterans who had symptoms of PTSD were getting treatment. These adults were compared to people with PTSD symptoms who weren’t veterans. Although less than half of both groups receive any treatment, the study found that veterans were more likely to get care than non-veterans (44% compared just 14%). This suggests that VA coverage was strongly associated with getting care (including getting either medication therapy or psychotherapy). The authors remind us, however, that most people who are likely suffering from PTSD, including veterans, are still not receiving treatment.
A final article buy Brendan Saloner and colleague examines one of the possible reasons for a spike in deaths due to opioids that was observed during the pandemic. The authors examined whether patients stopped using buprenorphine, an opioid itself that is prescribed to help treat opioid use disorder. The authors found that in 2020 about 14% of patients being treated discontinued their use of burprenorphine. Compared to patients with a primary care physician prescriber, patients who were cared for in pain medicine and by PAs or NPs (regardless of specialty) were more likely to discontinue treatment. This suggest perhaps that there are places where policy or clinical interventions could be used to help keep patients in treatment.
That it’s for this edition of the podcast. Remember that our blog posts can be read for free, and that you can access the peer-reviewed articles over at Medical Care. And please don’t forget to share this great work with your colleagues.
Thanks again for listening to the Healthy Intersections podcast.
Gregory Stevens