News briefs

Sepsis can result in a doubling of cancer care costs

Health economics research led by the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and the University of Melbourne has found sepsis can double the costs of cancer care. The study, published in PLoS One, used Canadian data to track the impact of the overall use of public health services by more than 75 000 cancer patients with sepsis over 5 years. The researchers estimated the short and long term costs of their care. For example, the additional cost of caring for a patient with a solid tumour who developed sepsis was more than CA$60 000 over 5 years, and over CA$75 000 for a patient with blood cancer. "By quantifying the economic burden of sepsis in cancer patients we have an indication of the extent of the costs associated with sepsis, and this can be used to better align resources for more efficient care of our patients," said lead author and health economist Dr Michelle Tew. "While it was using Canadian data, the similarities between our health care systems, occurrence of cancer and treatment strategies, means we believe these results are also valuable to the Australian context," said senior co‐author Professor Andrew Morris, an infectious disease physician at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada.

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0255107

Breathe easy: improving inhaler effectiveness

Patients using dry powder inhalers to deliver medicine to their lungs need to breathe in at a “goldilocks” rate that is not too fast or too slow, and the drug particles need to be very fine (around 1 µm) to be most effective, Australian research published in Physics of Fluids shows. A dry powder inhaler is a handheld device where the patient breathes in through the inhaler to deliver medicine directly to the lungs, unlike a “metred dose inhaler” or “puffer”, which delivers aerosolised medicine from a pressurised canister. Researchers from the University of Technology Sydney and the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad, India, used computational fluid dynamics to model how drugs are delivered to the human respiratory tract via a dry powder inhaler. They examined three different drug particle sizes (1, 5 and 10 µm), and three different inhalation rates (low, moderate and high), to determine how inhalers can be improved. The study found that finer drug particles of around 1 µm are better able to travel further into the lungs than larger particle sizes. They also found that the optimal inhalation rate that delivers the maximum amount of drug particles into the deeper airways of the lungs is one that is not too high or too low. “At higher flow rates, more of the drug particles are deposited in the upper airways as they are more likely to impact with the walls of the airway,” said the researchers. “However, at lower flow rates there is not enough momentum to carry the drug particles to the deeper regions of the lungs.” This information will be important for designers of new dry powder inhalers, as well as for pharmacists wanting to improve drug formulations for delivery through these devices, the authors concluded.

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0053980