Jeannette Lee, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Biostatistics, presented at Jan. 13 Public Health Seminar. Her talk was entitled, “Risk Cancer among HIV-infected Adults.” Her interest in this area stems from her leadership of the AIDS-Associated Malignancies Clinical Trials Consortium Statistical Center, for which she wrote the original grant application 20 years ago and has been involved in ever since. In her talk, she described the shifts in cancer incidence rates among HIV-infected individuals, as that population has responded to drug therapies for HIV.
The incidence rates for three cancers commonly associated with AIDS and known as “AIDS-defining cancers” – Kaposi’s sarcoma, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and invasive cervical cancer – have declined dramatically since the introduction of highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) in 1995. However, as individuals with AIDS are now living longer, the incidence of some non-AIDS-defining cancers is on the rise. HIV-infected individuals remain at higher risk of cancer than the general population, mostly due to higher rates of lung cancer, anal cancer and Hodgkins lymphoma.
J. Mick Tilford, Ph.D., and Nalin Payakachat, BPharm, MSc, Ph.D., collaborated on an expert review entitled “Progress in measuring family spillover effects for economic evaluations,” which appeared this month in Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research. Dr. Tilford is a health economist who serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Fay W. Boozman College of Public Health at UAMS. Dr. Payakachat is an Associate Professor in the Division of Pharmaceutical Evaluation and Policy at UAMS.
Their article reviews research on how to measure quality of life effects on family members in economic terms associated with patient health conditions or health services. For example, treatment for prostate cancer may create health outcomes that adversely affect a partner’s quality of life. The authors point out that failure to include such “spillover” effects lead to inaccurate assessment of the costs and benefits of treatments.
The article also reviews current policy positions on the national level about whether or not to include spillover effects in economic evaluations of health services, including pharmaceutical drugs. These policy positions are currently being debated by a federal panel overseeing guidelines for conducting cost-effectiveness analysis in health and medicine.
COPH faculty and staff presentations at the 2014 APHA annual meeting
Yeary KH, Bryant K, Haynes T, Turner J, Smith J, Kuo D, Stewart MK, Ounpraseuth S, Williams SR, Harris K, Hudson B, Sullivan G. Community exchange of “best practices” to conduct a multi-level, mixed methods health assessment across two countries: Faith-Academic Initiative for Transforming Health (FAITH) in the Delta.
Turner J, Smith J, Bryant K, Haynes T, Kuo D, Stewart MK, Harris K, Williams SR, Huff A, Sullivan G, Yeary KH. Community Building Community: The distinct benefits of community partners building other communities’ capacity to conduct health research.