(Press-News.org) RICHMOND, Va. (Nov. 3, 2023) — If pharmacists had a larger role in prescribing medications to control blood pressure, they could prevent more than 15 million heart attacks, nearly 8 million strokes and more than 4 million cases each of angina and heart failure in the U.S. over 30 years, according to a new Virginia Commonwealth University-led study.
The study, “Cost-Effectiveness of Pharmacist Prescribing for Managing Hypertension in the United States,” which published Friday in JAMA Network Open, details how pharmacists’ ability to treat patients with hypertension directly could have both a positive impact on Americans’ health and quality of life and a significant economic impact on the U.S. health care system. The study is among the first to explore the economics of pharmacist prescribing to improve blood pressure control.
The research team, led by corresponding author Dave Dixon, Pharm.D., of the VCU School of Pharmacy, found that the U.S. health care system could save more than $1.1 trillion over 30 years, a cost savings of $10,162 per patient. Moreover, the study’s authors found that over 30 years, patients could regain more than 30 million “quality-adjusted life years,” or years where their quality of life is significantly higher than it would have been if they were to have a health emergency.
Dixon, the Nancy L. and Ronald H. McFarlane Professor of Pharmacy and chair of the Department of Pharmacotherapy and Outcomes Science at the VCU School of Pharmacy, said these findings support measures that could increase access to care for millions across the country.
“Being that hypertension affects so many Americans – we’re talking about over 100 million people in the U.S. – I think the impact is tremendous because everybody knows somebody with high blood pressure,” said Dixon, who serves as a core faculty member and former director of the Center for Pharmacy Practice Innovation at the VCU School of Pharmacy. “It’s one of the leading causes of heart disease and kidney failure in the world.”
More than 95% of Americans live within 5 miles of a community pharmacy, a 2022 study in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association found. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, patients visit their community pharmacist 12 times more frequently than their primary care provider. As the U.S. faces a shortage of primary care professionals, Dixon said pharmacists could bridge that gap.
“Pharmacists’ role as health care providers tends to be underused in the community, and this is really about how pharmacists can provide for their communities in a way that improves access to care for hypertension,” said Dixon, who also serves as an affiliate professor of internal medicine in the Division of Cardiology at the VCU School of Medicine.
Most states currently give pharmacists prescribing privileges; however, current federal laws make it difficult for pharmacists to receive reimbursement for the clinical services they provide.
“Although pharmacists currently have some type of prescribing privileges in 49 states and Washington, D.C., they are not recognized as providers under the Social Security Act,” Dixon said. “This is one of the major barriers to implementing these life-saving – and cost-saving – measures for patients.”
The $1.1 trillion in health care savings over 30 years that Dixon and his team identified stem from preventive measures, such as educating patients on high blood pressure and prescribing antihypertensive medication, as well as from helping patients better manage their blood pressure. The ability to offer these services could mean a reduction in cardiovascular emergencies, which is crucial given the increasing mortality rates around hypertension. From 2010-19, there was a 23.1% increase in hypertension-related mortality, according to a 2022 study from the Journal of the American Heart Association.
It could also address poor outcomes for racial and ethnic minority groups, Dixon said. For individuals ages 35-64, Black patients had the highest rates of death due to hypertension of any racial or ethnic group in the U.S., according to a 2020 study in the journal Hypertension. As Dixon and his co-authors state in the study, “pharmacist-led interventions have been shown to significantly improve blood pressure control among Black individuals and individuals of racial and ethnic minoritized groups.”
The team of researchers who contributed to this study includes co-authors Karissa Johnston, Ph.D., of Broadstreet Health Economics and Outcomes Research in Canada; Julie Patterson, Pharm.D., Ph.D., of the National Pharmaceutical Council and formerly of the VCU School of Pharmacy; Carlo A. Marra, Pharm.D., Ph.D., of the School of Pharmacy at the University of Otago in New Zealand; and Ross T. Tsuyuki, Pharm.D., of the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Alberta in Canada.
END
Differences in health care expenditures between Black and white adults vary substantially with the local level of racial and economic integration, and tend to be low or nonexistent in highly integrated communities, according to a study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
For their study, the researchers compared health care expenditures for a nationally representative sample of Black and white adults in census tracts across the United States. They found that, at the same level of health, health ...
About The Study: A novel multicomponent intervention designed to target several barriers that prevent eligible patients from completing key steps toward receiving a kidney transplant did not significantly increase the rate of completed steps in this randomized clinical trial that included 20,375 patients from 26 chronic kidney disease programs. Improving access to transplantation remains a global priority that requires substantial effort.
Authors: Amit X. Garg, M.D., Ph.D., of McMaster ...
Researchers in Germany and the USA have produced the first theoretical demonstration that the magnetic state of an atomically thin material, α-RuCl3, can be controlled solely by placing it into an optical cavity. Crucially, the cavity vacuum fluctuations alone are sufficient to change the material’s magnetic order from a zigzag antiferromagnet into a ferromagnet. The team’s work has been published in npj Computational Materials.
A recent theme in material physics research has been the use of intense laser light to modify the properties ...
Developing new ways to break and reform chemical bonds is one of the main tasks of basic chemical research. “When a bond in a charged molecule is broken, the result is often a chemically ‘aggressive’ fragment, which we call a reactive fragment. These fragments are difficult to control using established methods of chemical synthesis. You can think of them as untamed beasts that attack anything in their path. In a mass spectrometer, there are many ways to break certain bonds and generate fragments,” says Dr Warneke, describing the processes in mass spectrometers. According ...
(Boston)—Carryl P. Navalta, PhD, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, has received a two-year, $476,194 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for his research, “Project EDUCATE” (Education to Deliver and Utilize Child and Adolescent Treatment Effectively).
Project EDUCATE will identify and train mental health counseling students. The student trainees will be placed in community-based facilities in the greater Boston area that serve medically underserved children, adolescents and young adults with diverse race or ethnicity, culture, language and service needs.
“The ...
SAN ANTONIO — November 3, 2023 —New images captured by NASA’s Lucy spacecraft confirmed that the small main belt asteroid Dinkinesh is a binary, two asteroids that orbit a common center of mass. The SwRI-led mission will now fly by 11 asteroids in its 12-year mission to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. Dinkinesh was meant to be the first asteroid that Lucy flew by but ended up being the first two.
“Dinkinesh really did live up to its name; this is marvelous,” said Lucy Principal Investigator Dr. Hal Levison, of SwRI’s ...
Philadelphia, PA (November 3, 2023) — The results of numerous high-impact clinical trials that could affect kidney-related medical care will be presented in-person at ASN Kidney Week 2023 November 1–November 5.
In patients with IgA nephropathy, the IgA protein accumulates and damages the filtering part of the kidney, or glomerulus. Endothelin and angiotensin II contribute to the pathogenesis of this condition through different pathways. The phase 3 PROTECT trial compared sparsentan, a dual endothelin and angiotensin II receptor blocker, with irbesartan, an angiotensin II ...
COLUMBUS, Ohio – A species of exotic tick arrived in Ohio in 2021 in such huge numbers that their feeding frenzy on a southeastern farm left three cattle dead of what researchers believe was severe blood loss.
The scientists from The Ohio State University have reported in the Journal of Medical Entomology on the state’s first known established population of Asian longhorned ticks, and are now conducting research focused on monitoring and managing these pests.
So far, these ticks are not deemed to be a threat to human health. They tend to favor large livestock ...
By analyzing data from the Harvard Implicit Association Test—a widely accepted measure of a person’s attitudes toward people based on characteristics like race, gender, and sexuality—researchers find that healthcare professionals, and in particular nurses, are more biased against transgender people than are people who are not healthcare professionals. A questionnaire administered before and after the test shows that healthcare professionals are less likely to know transgender people personally and that nurses are more likely to conflate sex and gender identity. These results are reported November 3 in the journal Heliyon.
The Implicit Association Test works by asking participants ...
About The Study: The findings of this study of 414,000 respondents to the 2021 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey suggest that e-cigarette use remained common during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among young adults ages 18 to 24 (18% prevalence). Notably, 71.5% of individuals ages 18 to 20 who reported current e-cigarette use had never used combustible cigarettes. These results underscore the rationale for the implementation and enforcement of public health policies tailored to young adults.
Authors: Michael J. Blaha, M.D., M.P.H., of the Johns Hopkins ...
