12 Jul Where Hope Isn’t Just A Billboard: 5 States Changing The Game In Addiction Care
Posted at 17:24h
in addiction-treatment
[caption id="attachment_69514" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Photo by SHVETS production[/caption]
It’s easy to lose faith in the way America handles addiction. We’ve seen enough billboards screaming about “Hope” while people keep dying, families keep breaking, and small towns get hollowed out by fentanyl and meth. But look closer, and you’ll find places actually rolling up their sleeves, doing the messy work of keeping people alive, and helping them find a way back to themselves. It’s not perfect, but it’s real progress, and it’s happening in states you might not expect.
Oregon’s Bold Bet On Decriminalization
When Oregon voted to decriminalize small amounts of drugs, people either clapped or gasped. But what’s happened since is worth a pause. Instead of funneling people into courts and jails, Oregon is steering them toward health assessments and services. It’s not some overnight miracle. It’s slow, gritty, and controversial. Yet outreach workers say they’re finally seeing people come back again and again, asking for help when they’re ready, instead of getting tossed in jail and spit back onto the street with more trauma and less support. Is it messy? Yes. But so was the old system, and at least this one tries to leave space for a human being to step forward when they can.
Dr. Campanella[/caption]
Gabriele Campanella, PhD
Assistant Professor
Windreich Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Lung cancer is the most lethal cancer in the US. Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is the most common form of lung cancer with an incidence of over 100k per year in the US. EGFR mutations are common driver mutations in LUAD, and importantly, these mutations can be targeted by TKI therapy, which has high response rates. Because of this, EGFR testing via NGS (Next Generation Sequencing) is considered mandatory by guidelines for any LUAD diagnosis.
In high-resource settings, rapid EGFR testing is done while waiting for confirmation via NGS. This is because NGS takes about 2 weeks on average, while the rapid testing has a median TAT of 2 days. Early treatment decisions could be made based on the rapid test results. Rapid tests have some important drawbacks, most notably, it exhausts tissue. In lung cancer, tissue is scarce in the first place, and up to 25% of cases, after rapid testing there is not enough tissue for NGS. In those circumstances, patients have to be biopsied again, which adds unnecessary risk for the patient. Even worse, in some cases, the NGS is never done. A non-tissue-exhaustive computational biomarker could be used instead of the tissue-based rapid test.
