What You Need to Know

​​​​​​How climate change may affect your health, why we need new defenses against C. diff and UTIs, and why some researchers focus on preventing cancer rather than curing it

It is said that nothing is more certain than death and taxes, but while taxes are on our mind every year come April 15, most of us avoid confronting mortality, even when we need to. But Dr. Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal, suggests that introducing palliative care early in treatment for a terminal illness can be beneficial, because it opens up an important discussion: not about what the end of a person’s life might look like, but about how good the days leading up to it can be.

The focus then becomes not only extending a patient’s life, but improving the quality of their life, day to day, while they undergo treatment. He now asks his patients, “What does a good day look like?” Gawande, palliative care movement pioneer Dr. Ira Byock, and artist Candy Chang offer a few different ideas and resources to introduce that essential question and continue the conversation about end-of-life care with sensitivity and compassion.

When you’re feeling down, help is only a phone call away, only now it can be even closer—right there on your phone itself. Patients with depression and anxiety can use an app or a computer program to manage their mental health issues via therapy exercises, reminders, and checklists that are tailored to their symptoms and guide them through crises. The app also keeps them in touch with their doctor, who can assign them tasks and receive alerts when they don’t keep up with their activities—and even offer proactive interventions when necessary.

A research study published last month in JAMA Network Open, “Suicide Among Older Adults Living In or Transitioning to Residential Long-Term Care, 2003 to 2015,” concludes that lawmakers and medical professionals must curtail suicide risk in adults over age 55 living in—or considering a move to— long-term care (LTC) facilities by providing for their emotional and psychoso- cial needs.

The study examined data collected from police and medical examiner reports on 47,759 suicide deaths from 2003–15. More than 1,000 suicides occurred in LTC, including those living in facilities or transitioning in or out of them. Lead researcher Briana Mezuk, of the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, says that although there are many tools and techniques to promote the emotional well-being of older adults, they aren’t being fully used—and offering more mental health interventions could help decrease the suicide risk of this vulnerable population.

Anyone who suffers from seasonal allergies knows how much the envi- ronment affects your health, but a small number of doctors are beginning to bring the controversial topic of climate change into that conversation with their patients. Consider what happens to your allergies when temperatures rise—plants flower earlier and produce more pollen, and ragweed lasts longer into the fall—climate change is nothing to sneeze at.

In fact, the World Health Organization named climate change “the greatest health challenge of the 21st century.” It’s also the most difficult to overcome, especially for patients who can’t prevent it; they can only attempt to man- age its impact on their conditions. Michael Howard, a 57-year-old patient with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), moved from Florida to Boston to avoid high humidity. But now thanks to climate change, he’s facing hot and humid summers once again, and facing the prospect of staying indoors more and carrying portable oxygen. Mary Heafy’s asthma is worse than it ever has been, with no relief in sight, but all she can do is take stronger medication, install more air filters, and wear masks.

While it may be uncomfortable or difficult to discuss climate change with all patients, the doctors who have been willing to do so agree that this is more than a political issue—it’s a public health issue. And perhaps the conversation around climate change itself needs to change in order to make it more accept- able for doctors to address the matter head-on with their patients.

Clostridioides difficile (C. diff) continues to live up to its name: it’s not only difficult to identify, but also more difficult to get rid of than we thought. A study published this month in Applied and Environmental Microbiology shows that the bacteria is able to grow on surgical gowns and stainless steel even after they have been properly disinfected, suggesting C. diff spores are be- coming resistant to long-standing hygienic practices. Stainless steel instru- ments and vinyl floors retained C. diff spores even after being treated with a recommended disinfectant for 10 minutes. Surgical gowns were also found to retain spores; thus, appropriately using and discarding single-use dispos- able isolation gowns is essential to infection prevention. Hospitals should use multifaceted prevention strategies, including hand hygiene and antimicrobial stewardship, to protect against C. diff.

As more bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, urinary tract infections (UTIs) are becoming harder to treat, turning one of the most common and easily treatable conditions into one of the most dangerous—especially for oth- erwise healthy people. This poses a particular threat to elderly patients, for whom UTIs already often can be deadly—and women, for whom UTIs are an everyday occurrence.

One solution is obviously better antibiotic stewardship, to slow bacteria’s growing resistance to them, but another need is to develop affordable diag- nostic tools that would enable doctors to quickly diagnose UTIs and prescribe the correct drug, without getting an expensive culture and waiting days for the lab results. Although little data on deaths from UTIs have been tracked on a national level, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is becoming concerned about the implications of antibiotic resistance on UTIs and plans to expand its research, before it becomes too late and we lose our last lines of defense against bacterial infections.

 

Spine surgeons Dr. Vladimir Sinkov, New Hampshire Orthopaedic Center (Nashua); Dr. Issada Thongtrangan, Minimally Invasive Spine (Phoenix); and Dr. Brian R. Gantwerker, Craniospinal Center of Los Angeles, share their non-ne- gotiable patient safety rules with Anuja Vaidya of Becker’s Spine Review.

One rule, from Dr. Thongtrangan: “I always encourage my staff to speak out, and everyone is empowered and expected to stop and question when things just don’t seem right.”

An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure, but so far little research has been done in identifying the environmental triggers for cancer— things like pollution, carcinogenic chemicals, and even obesity and urbaniza- tion. However, the scientists who gathered in June at the American Association for Cancer Research’s conference Environmental Carcinogenesis: Potential Pathway to Cancer Prevention are confident that more research in this over- looked and underfunded area could prevent around a fifth of cancers—according to a 2015 paper, “Assessing the Carcinogenic Potential of Low-Dose Exposures to Chemical Mixtures in the Environment: The Challenge Ahead.”

Meaningful progress in advancing this work requires leveraging new technologies such as robotics and DNA sequencing to find the “genetic fingerprints of exposure,” as well as redefining the word carcinogen itself, to broaden its meaning to any substance that stimulates growth of malignant cells or induce inflammation, regardless of whether it damages DNA. Bolstering this research would also demand significant investment in funding and resources, and a paradigm shift on cancer to strike a better balance between treating it and preventing it. But such focused efforts could help people better protect themselves against the environmental causes of cancer and stop more cancers before they start.​