Tag: Mortality

“Chasing My Cure”: A Book Review

Dec 16, 2019

By CHADI NABHAN, MD, MBA, FACP

Have you thought about your own mortality?

Who hasn’t, given the frequency of seeing death and grief depicted in the media or through real life encounters with friends, relatives, neighbors, or patients? These incidents trigger uncomfortable and sometimes uneasy thoughts of how we might personally deal with potential illness and disease. The same thoughts are soon displaced by the busyness of living.

Despite dealing with the death of his mother from a brain tumor, we learn David Fajgenbaum was healthy, living life to its fullest, and a future doctor in the making. He may have thought about his own mortality as he grieved the death of his mother, but likely never imagined anything dire would happen to him. Fajgenbaum was pushing forward on several fronts, including leading a non-for-profit organization for grieving college students, symbolically named “Actively Moving Forward” or “AMF” after his mother’s initials, all while first playing college football and then attending medical school. By all accounts, this was a vigorous young man, meticulous about his diet and physicality. When he became ill, it was a blunt reminder that life is unpredictable.

In his book “Chasing my Cure”, Dr. Fajgenbaum takes us back to the time when he first got ill. He vividly describes his physical symptoms and various scans which detected his enlarged nodes. Interestingly, we learn how long he was in denial of these symptoms, thereby delaying medical attention in favor of studying. This neglect of self-care highlights part of his personality, but also represents the pressure and expectations placed upon a majority of medical students.

An Open Letter to Sheryl Sandberg

May 10, 2015• 1

By KATIE HAFNER

My heart aches for you, even more because the same thing happened to me. You will get through it. But you never will get past it.

I was so very sorry to hear about your husband’s death. You must be inundated with condolence letters and here I am, adding one more to the pile.

I write from a position of knowing, which makes me unspeakably sad for you. My own husband, Matthew Lyon, died in 2002, while on a business trip. He died suddenly, on a treadmill in the gym of a Seattle hotel. He was 45. Our daughter was eight.

Nobody plans for this. We would all go insane if we did. Because we live life as if we have time.

Here is what I can tell you: From now until forever — a forever your husband will not get to share with you, which contributes to the pain of this — you will question everything you thought was true about your life. Your trust in everyone’s ability to get from A to B without incident will never be the same. We all know that nothing is certain, but we know it in a vague, theoretical, I’ll-think-hard-about-that-tomorrow way. You now know it as established fact, and this changes the way you see everything.Continue reading…

Being Gawande

Dec 5, 2014• 11

ROBERT WACHTER, MD

“I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them.” So begins Being Mortal, Atul Gawande’s fourth and most ambitious book.

All of Gawande’s prior books – Complications, Better, and The Checklist Manifesto – were beautifully crafted, lyrical, and fascinating, and all were bestsellers that helped cement his reputation as the preeminent physician-writer of our time. Each blended Gawande’s personal experience as a practicing surgeon with his prodigious skills as an author and journalist. They took readers behind the curtain of the hospital and the operating room, revealing much about some very important matters, like medical training, quality improvement, patient safety, and health policy.

But they were only partly revealing of Gawande himself. He told us what we needed to know about his thoughts and biases in order to make his points, but no more. Being Mortal is Gawande’s most personal book, and as such it reaches a level of poignancy that surpasses the others. Mind you, it’s not an easy read, it’s a bit dull in the early going before it hits its stride, and it has an attitude: Gawande’s indictment of modern medicine’s approach to aging and dying is pointed and withering. But, even more than his other books, this one matters deeply.

A Second Look at the Link Between Obesity and Mortality

Aug 9, 2013• 24

By Lua Wilkinson

A controversial study published earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that overweight people have significantly lower mortality risk than normal weight individuals, and slightly obese people have the same mortality risk as normal weight individuals.

This meta-analysis, headed by statistician Katherine Flegal, Ph.D., at the National Center for Health Statistics, looked at almost 100 studies that included 3 million people and over 270,000 deaths. They concluded that while overweight and slightly obese appears protective against early mortality, those with a body mass index (BMI) over 35 have a clear increase in risk of early death. The conclusions of this meta-analysis are consistent with other observations of lower mortality among overweight and moderately obese patients.

Many public health practitioners are concerned with the ways these findings are being presented to the public. Virginia Hughes in Nature explains “some public-health experts fear…that people could take that message as a general endorsement of weight gain.” Health practitioners are understandably in disagreement how best to translate these findings into policy, bringing up the utility of BMI in assessing risk in the first place.

Walter Willett, chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, told National Public Radio that “this study is really a pile of rubbish, and no one should waste their time reading it.” He argues that weight and BMI remain only one measure of health risk, and that practitioners need to look at the individual’s habits and lifestyle taken as a whole.

Unscience

Jan 7, 2013• 1

By David Katz, MD

According to a widely circulated op-ed in the New York Times by Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado with whom I don’t believe I have ever managed to agree on anything, our “fear” of fat — namely, epidemic obesity — is, in a word, absurd. Prof. Campos is the author of a book entitled The Obesity Myth, and has established something of a cottage industry for some time contending that the fuss we make about epidemic obesity is all some government-manufactured conspiracy theory, or a confabulation serving the interests of the weight-loss-pharmaceutical complex.

In this instance, the op-ed was reacting to a meta-analysis, published last week in JAMA, and itself the subject of extensive media attention, indicating that mortality rates go up as obesity gets severe, but that mild obesity and overweight are actually associated with lower overall mortality than so-called “healthy” weight. This study — debunked for important deficiencies by many leading scientists around the country, and with important limitations acknowledged by its own authors — was treated by Prof. Campos as if a third tablet on the summit of Mount Sinai.

We’ll get into the details of the meta-anlysis shortly, but first I’d like to say: Treating science like a ping-pong ball is what’s absurd, and what scares the hell out of me. Treating any one study as if its findings annihilate the gradual, hard-earned accumulation of evidence over decades is absurd, and scares the hell out of me. Iconoclasts who get lots of attention just by refuting the conventional wisdom, and who are occasionally and importantly right, but far more often wrong — are often rather absurd, and scare the hell out of me.

And so does the obesity epidemic.

The Boy Who Lived

Dec 28, 2011• 44

[youtube width=”475″ height=”300″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmlTHfVaU9o[/youtube]

YouTube: Hundreds of thousands of Internet users downloaded a shockingly powerful viral YouTube clip made by an Austin teenager shortly before his death. Eighteen year old Ben Breedlove, who suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, died on Christmas day.

See Also: This Is My Story (Part 2) The second part of Ben’s story.

And: Los Angeles Times story on Breedlove, refutes charges video is a hoax.

Nurse Staffing, Patient Mortality, And a Lady Named Louise

Mar 23, 2011• 12

By BOB WACHTER

How many nurses does it take to care for a hospitalized patient? No, that’s not a bad version of a light bulb joke; it’s a serious question, with thousands of lives and billions of dollars resting on the answer. Several studies (such as here and here) published over the last decade have shown that having more nurses per patient is associated with fewer complications and lower mortality. It makes sense.

Yet these studies have been criticized on several grounds. First, they examined staffing levels for hospitals as a whole, not at the level of individual units. Secondly, they compared well-staffed hospitals against poorly staffed ones, raising the possibility that staffing levels were a mere marker for other aspects of quality such as leadership commitment or funding. Finally, they based their findings on average patient load, failing to take into account patient turnover.

Last week’s NEJM contains the best study to date on this crucial issue. It examined nearly 200,000 admissions to 43 units in a “high quality hospital.” While the authors don’t name the hospital, they do tell us that the institution is a US News top rated medical center, has achieved nursing “Magnet” status, and, during the study period, had a mortality rate nearly 40 percent below that predicted for its case-mix. In other words, it was no laggard.

As one could guess from its pedigree and outcomes, the hospital’s approach to nurse staffing was not stingy. Of 176,000 nursing shifts during the study period, only 16 percent were significantly below the established target (the targets are presumably based on patient volume and acuity, but are not well described in the paper). The authors found that patients who experienced a single understaffed shift had a 2 percent higher mortality rate than ones who didn’t. Each additional understaffed shift carried a similar, and additive, risk. This means that the one-in-three patients who experienced three such shifts during their hospital stay had a 6 percent higher mortality than the few patients who didn’t experience any. If the FDA discovered that a new medication was associated with a 2 percent excess mortality rate, you can bet that the agency would withdraw it from the market faster than you could say “Sidney Wolfe.”

The effects of high patient turnover were even more striking. Exposure to a shift with unusually high turnover (7 percent of all shifts met this definition) was associated with a 4 percent increased odds of death. Apparently, patient turnover – admissions, discharges, and transfers – is to hospital units and nurses as takeoffs and landings are to airplanes and flight crews: a single 5-hour flight (one takeoff/landing) is far less stressful, and much safer, than five hour-long flights (5 takeoffs/landings).Continue reading…