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Dear Colleagues,

Wellcome are delighted to announce the launch of our Workplace Mental Health 2021 Request for Proposals.

Businesses all over the world are increasingly thinking about how they can most effectively support the mental health of their staff, even more so in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, despite growing interest and investment in workplace mental health, we still have so much to learn about what works.

In 2020, we asked ten global research teams to review the evidence behind a sample of promising approaches for preventing anxiety and depression in the workplace, focusing on younger workers. The research spanned a broad range of approaches ranging from employee autonomy to breaking up excessive sitting to financial wellbeing interventions. You can read a summary of the findings from this commission on our website.

Now we are looking to commission up to 20 research teams to review the evidence behind other … Read the rest

6 ways the FDA’s approval of Aduhelm does more harm than good (STAT News):

Like many people, I was shocked when the Food and Drug Administration ignored the advice of its neurological drugs advisory panel and broadly approved Biogen’s new drug, Aduhelm, even for populations never included in the clinical trials to assess the drug.

I am not a casual bystander to this controversial decision. I am a physician who has been treating people with Alzheimer’s since 1982; an early researcher into the biology of amyloid, the brain protein that Aduhelm targets; someone with a strong personal family history of dementia … As I formulate my responses to my own patients, here are six recurring themes:

1. Pull of desperation
2. Elbowing aside existing treatments
3. Amyloid reduction alone is no help
4. An uninterpretable trial
5. Trials and labeling disconnect
6. Cost and equity issues

Bottom line. The FDA’s approval of Aduhelm raises more

ICER Issues Statement on the FDA’s Approval of Aducanumab for Alzheimer’s Disease (Institute for Clinical and Economic Review):

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) believes that the FDA, in approving aducanumab (Aduhelm™, Biogen) for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease, has failed in its responsibility to protect patients and families from unproven treatments with known harms.

Our review of the evidence was concordant with that of many independent experts: current evidence is insufficient to demonstrate that aducanumab benefits patients. The avenue forward has seemed clear: another study would be needed to reduce the substantial uncertainty about the drug’s effectiveness, a requirement of even greater priority because of the drug’s common and potentially serious side effects.

However, instead of waiting for such a trial, the FDA chose to move the goalposts and approve aducanumab based on the surrogate outcome of removing amyloid from the brain rather than the patient-centered outcome

People who retire early suffer from accelerated cognitive decline and may even encounter early onset of dementia, according to a new economic study (Note: opens PDF) I conducted with my doctoral student Alan Adelman.

To establish that finding, we examined the effects of a rural pension program China introduced in 2009 that provided people who participated with a stable income if they stopped working after the official retirement age of 60. We found that people who participated in the program and retired within one or two years experienced a cognitive decline equivalent to a drop in general intelligence of 1.7% relative to the general population. This drop is equivalent to about three IQ points and could make it harder for someone to adhere to a medication schedule or conduct financial planning. The largest negative effect was in what is called “delayed recall,” which measures a person’s ability to remember something … Read the rest