Thank you for advertising

Alan Mathios, the Rebecca Q . and James C. Morgan Dean of the College of Human Ecology, was a guest on the National Public Radio show On the Media to talk about the benefits of advertisements for prescription medicines.

Mathios – along with Policy Analysis and Mangement faculty members Rosemary Avery, Don Kenkel and Dean Lillard – found that merely seeing ads for smoking cessation products significantly increases smokers’ chances of quitting – even if they never use the product.

Listen to what Mathios has to say by clicking below:

And read more about the study by clicking here.

Tags: advertising, economics, In the News, Merck, PAM, pharmaceutical industry, smoking cessation
October 2nd, 2009  |  No Comments »

The Economics of Obesity

Approximately one-third of adults in the U.S. are considered obese – a number that has more than doubled in the past twenty years. This trend certainly has a major impact on health and the U.S. health care system, but it also comes inot play when thinking about the labor market, income and socioeconomic status.

John Cawely, associate professor in Policy Analysis and Management, is an economist who studies these issues. You can hear him discuss his finding on the economics of obesity in this video interview produced by Cornell’s Cybertower.

CyberTower is Cornell Adult University’s instant portal to teaching and learning resources. It features video lectures, interviews, and research—all online and for free.

Tags: economics, obesity, PAM, weight-loss
October 1st, 2009  |  1 Comment »

The quest to lose: Who’s taking weight-loss medicine

More than 72 million Americans are obese – a public health crisis that leads to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. For decades, pharmaceutical companies have been working on medicines that will encourage weight loss. However, little is known about the use of anti-obesity drugs.

Associate Professor John Cawley, along with John Rizzo, conducted the first-even study to investigate the utilization of these medicines. Their work yields one particularly surprising result: Nearly 32 percent of people taking prescription weight-loss medicine do not meet medical criteria for their use. At the same time, almost 99 percent who are approved to take these medicines do not take them.

African-Americans are one-third less likely to use anti-obesity drugs, even though obesity rates are high among them.

• Women are twice as likely to use anti-obesity drugs compared to men.
• The probability of using anti-obesity drugs falls significantly after age 65.
• People with prescription drug coverage are 49 percent more likely to use prescription weight-loss medicines.
• Those who dropout of high school are significantly less likely to use weight-loss medicines.

The study was published in Advances in Health Economics and Health Services Research in 2007.

Tags: economics, Merck, obesity, PAM, weight-loss
September 30th, 2009  |  No Comments »

Undergraduates get in on the action

Researchers in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management have examined 20 years of advertising in 27 of the most-read American magazines with the help of undergraduate research assistants. In the process, they created the Smoking-Cessation Advertisements archive.

 All the print advertisements for smoking-cessation products, tobacco products, and smoking-related Public Service Advertisements that appeared from 1985 to 2005 are included in the archive. Working in a lab in Martha Van Rensselaer Hall on the Cornell campus, student teams made more than 86,000 digital images of advertisements from magazines. The archive occupies 1 terabyte (one trillion bytes) of computer memory.

 With print ads complete, the researchers have turned to examining and archiving television ads.

 “Last summer, I spent 40 hours a week for three straight weeks watching Public Service Announcements about smoking,” said Matthew Eisenberg ’09, who managed undergraduate researchers working on the project. “They’re full of horrible images, like people speaking in a raspy voice and smoking through a hole in their throat. I watched ads like that back-to-back. I don’t know what they’ll mean to other people, but I can tell you one thing: they certainly had an effect on me!”

You can learn more about Eisenberg’s experience as an undergraduate research by watching this:

Tags: advertising, economics, Merck, PAM, pharmaceutical industry, Undergraduate
September 30th, 2009  |  No Comments »

Unraveling Medicare Part D

In its first two years, the Medicare Part D drug benefit improved senior citizens’ access to prescriptions medications and reduced the amount of money they spend on prescription drugs, according to research by Kosali Simon, assistant professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management. Yet, there are many challenges that seniors face in understanding the complex set of choices available to them.

 Simon, a health economist, has analyzed the government benefit since its inception, and is continuing to evaluate how it impacts seniors’ access to prescription drugs. Her research is also helping senior citizens in New York and across the country to navigate the program’s myriad of choices.

The program – called Cornell University Resource Education for Medicare Part D or CURxED – offers clear, unbiased information to help eligible residents choose which Medicare drug plan is best for them. In New York alone, more than three million eligible residents have to choose from 50 different plans, all with different drug prices, deductibles, premiums and pharmacy networks.

“What’s clear is these are difficult choices that seniors need help with,” Simon said. “What we wanted to do is make sure we’re not replicating resources that are already out there. We’ve consistently found there is no other resource like this.”

The core of the program is a set of thick, white binders filled with lists of prices for nearly every prescription medicine available in the U.S. Out of pocket prices for different medications is basic information that consumers need to see when making plan choices.

For more information about the program, go to http://curxed.human.cornell.edu/.

September 30th, 2009  |  No Comments »

Study finds cancer drugs are worth it

The cost of colorectal cancer drugs has skyrocketed in recent years, but a Human Ecology study finds that when you consider improved longevity and quality of life, the price is worth it. The study was conducted by Sean Nicholson and Claudio Lucarelli, both faculty members in Policy Analysis and Management.

Nicholson and Lucarelli used four methods to compare the costs and benefits of newer chemotherapy medications against older, cheaper medications. They found that the new drugs improve survival rates by almost 100 percent, and patients taking the newer drugs often experience fewer side effects. Their working paper was issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research in July.

You can read more about the study in a story published in the Cornell Chronicle.

September 29th, 2009  |  1 Comment »

In other research news…

Researchers across the College are working on topics including health care policy, nutrition for low-income families, apparel design and sustainable materials.

• Biochemist Shu-Bing Qian, a professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences, has won a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the accumulation of misfolded proteins in cells, a leading cause of neurodegenerative disorders and other human diseases. Qian and colleagues aim to engineer an enzyme that tags proteins to be destroyed to investigate protein aggregation and neurodegeneration. The grant is a New Innovator Award, given for “highly innovative projects that have the potential for unusually high impact.”
• The research of  Richard Burkhauser and Kosali Simon, faculty members in Policy Analysis and Mangement, was cited in a Wall Street Journal lead editorial about a proposal that would raise taxes for businesses that don’t provide health insurance.
• A new grant from the National Science Foundation will support 30 graduate students, including several fiber science students, working in the Cornell Center for Materials Research on the development of materials to advance sustainable living.
• Working conditions like irregular work schedules, long hours and job dissatisfaction of parents in low-income families significantly impact family food choices, reports a new study by Nutrition Professor Carole Devine.
• Apparel Design Professor Susan Ashdown and a class of 10 apparel design students set up a study that used the College’s 3-D body scanner to assess the fit and wear of Nike running garments. 
• Matthew Belmonte, assistant professor of human development, developed a suite of video games to help make new discoveries about the physiological and behavioral features of autism.
• Professors Wendy Williams and Steve Ceci, both in the Department of Human Development, received $1.4 million from the National Institutes of Health to establish the Cornell Institute for Women in Science. The money will fund a series of studies that aim to assess and reduce gender bias in recruitment, mentorship and evaluation in science, technology, engineering and math fields.

Tags: apparel design, biochemistry, economics, health care, In the News, NIH, Nike, NSF, nutrition, PAM, research, Undergraduate
September 22nd, 2009  |  No Comments »