Word: breasted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...HEDIS, with its emphasis on preventive care, is easy to manipulate. When cholesterol tests became a key criterion, HMOs scrambled to offer the tests--often with no follow-up on the patients' results. Most experts agree that it is much more useful for a patient to know the breast-cancer survival rate in a given plan than to know whether it offers free mammograms...
Still, in the absence of outcome studies that assess a plan's track record for a particular condition--breast cancer, diabetes, depression--consumers can only make a more educated guess. "We have this vanilla health-care system that is supposed to provide quality care for all types of people and for all types of ailments," says David Lansky, president of the Foundation for Accountability, "but when it comes to people being able to assess which plan is best for them, it's very difficult...
...Malbon and his colleagues were convinced that they had made a momentous discovery. So they held a press conference at New York City's Grand Hyatt Hotel to announce it. What they had found, Malbon told reporters last week, was an enzyme that acts as the master switch for breast cancer, a disease that kills 44,000 women in the U.S. each year. "This gives us a new diagnostic tool and a new therapeutic strategy," maintained Malbon, a pharmacologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook...
...does it? What the SUNY team found was that some breast-cancer cells contain elevated levels of enzymes known as mitogen-activated protein kinases. The problem is, MAP kinases are elevated in many dividing cells. Finding high levels in breast tumors, as Princeton University molecular biologist Arnold Levine dryly observes, hardly comes as a surprise...
Beyond that, the SUNY study, which is described in the April issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, is very small. Malbon and his team measured enzyme abundance in the breast cells of just 30 women, 11 of whom had undergone surgery to remove suspicious tumors. Cells taken from the tumors, later shown to be cancerous, contained MAP-kinase levels 5 to 20 times as high as those in normal breast cells. But other researchers argue that you would have to examine a lot more patients before drawing any firm conclusions...