The Severe Asthma Program at Boston Children’s Hospital provides care to children and young adults with severe persistent asthma who have difficulty with disease management or chronic systemic steroid use. “We’ve developed a one-stop shop for the highest risk, highest cost, highest morbidity population of pediatric asthma,” says pulmonologist Jonathan Gaffin, MD, MMSc, who conceived of the program after witnessing hundreds of patients crossing between Boston Children’s Division of Pulmonary Respiratory Diseases and Division of Allergy and Immunology. …Read More
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This edition of Paper Trail focuses on the link between sedentary behaviors and BMI in young dancers, lifestyle-based tools to detect cardiovascular diseases in young adults, asthma prevention and management and more.
Allergists and business analysts alike agree that the EpiPen (an epinephrine auto-injector manufactured by Pennsylvania-based Mylan, Inc.) has evolved into the go-to medication to reverse the harmful effects of anaphylaxis.
But as Bloomberg News analyst Cynthia Koons writes, while Mylan’s marketing strategy—based on a public awareness campaign about childhood allergies—led to a surge in demand, it also fueled a surge in pricing. Since 2007 (the year Mylan purchased the drug brand from Merck KGaA), Koons says, EpiPen wholesale prices have risen approximately 400 percent.
The price jump is hitting patients directly. The single-dose, wholesale cost was $57 during the late 2000s. Today, after insurance discounts, a twin-pack (the injectors are only sold in twin packs) has a $415 price tag:
“[W]hile EpiPen has given countless parents a sense of security that their children can go out in the world safely, the device’s soaring price—up 32 percent in the past year alone—has forced some families to make difficult choices in order to afford the life-saving medicine. The price increases are among the biggest of any top-selling brand drug, according to DRX, a unit of Connecture that tracks drug pricing.”
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