Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

1. Sweet Problem Child of Mine 

A psychiatrist, writing in The Guardian, takes stock of why ADHD diagnoses are rising. Of the many reasons he identifies, there is one that suggests a new way to think about youth mental health:  

Antisocial behaviour and delinquency – running away from home, drinking, smoking and taking drugs, property damage and theft – once the archetype of the “problem child”, have become less common. Psychiatrists euphemistically label this kind of behaviour “externalising”; an outward expression of inner distress. At the same time, “internalising” conditions, such as anxiety, low mood and self-harm, have increased, a trend that intensified during the pandemic. As the way children express their problems becomes more internalised, child and adolescent psychiatry has had to change as well.  

2. This Is Africa  

At long last, new Alzheimer’s treatments have arrived – for some. Assuming treatments are even accessible, it's an open question on how well they're work with African patients. To answer the question and advance an Afro-centric innovation agenda, Nature hosted the first-ever Future of Dementia in Africa conference, supported by The Davos Alzheimer’s Collaborative. The need is urgent: 

One analysis found a negligible effect from the gene APOE4—a major genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease in people of European descent—in a cohort of nearly 1,200 individuals…Professor Njideka Okubadejo from the University of Lagos said, "Disease genetics are not uniform across populations and it is crucial that genetic research extends beyond European populations so we can develop more effective treatments. In order to achieve this goal, genetic research must also be more inclusive and accessible to more researchers." 

3.  Mothers Against Deceptive Data 

Maternal deaths in the U.S. shot above those in other G7 countries… according to the data. But the data buried something deeper. Asimov Press, a nerdy blog, takes a skeptical look at charts and data, and it reminds us that clean graphs may hide messy truths. On maternal mortality, for example: 

As U.S. states gradually introduced the pregnancy checkbox and implemented the new International Classification of Disease definition, rates of maternal death appeared to rise. So, it seems that the upward trend in the graph doesn’t come from changes in the actual death rate but from changes in what counts as a maternal death, to begin with. None of this is indicated in the charts, which plot smooth lines without any gaps or discontinuities…The pre-1994 definition of maternal deaths seems reasonable enough, but it led to an undercounting of deaths plausibly affected by pregnancy. The new pregnancy checkbox systems, on the other hand, seem to overestimate maternal deaths.  

4. The Envious Pancreas

“Pancreatic cancer does not have patient advocates because they all die,” says Julie Fleshman, chief executive of the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network. The FT examines the market of treatments and finds stunning disparity: 

Almost half of the 2,143 trials launched last year focused on breast, lung and blood cancer, while just under 8 per cent were studying pancreatic cancer treatments, according to data provider IQVIA. Pancreatic cancer research benefited from just $317 in public and philanthropic funding per death globally between 2016 and 2020, compared with nearly $3,600 of grant money per death for breast cancer, according to a Lancet study published last year.

5. A Wiser Pfizer? 

Did Pfizer whiff on GLP-1s three decades ago? Jeffery Flier shares his perspective of what happened – and paints a damning picture. Is Flier’s piece revisionist history from an aggrieved scientist? Or a true tale of one of the greatest missed opportunities in pharmaceutical history? Here’s Flier’s case: 

Pfizer stated that continuation of the project would require us to identify a route for GLP-1 administration other than injection, such as trans-nasal or transcutaneous. The MetaBio team and the founders vigorously disagreed with Pfizer's view that an injectable GLP-1 analogue would never be worth developing, but our arguments had no effect. Based on knowledge at the time about trans-nasal and transcutaneous delivery of peptides like GLP-1, and the short half-life of the protein, we considered it extremely unlikely that either approach could be successfully developed. We nevertheless undertook efforts to develop these modalities, and they were predictably unsuccessful.