Put On Notice: A Justice Department official told a gathering of lawyers yesterday that the Obama administration will “vigorously” scrutinize health-insurance industry mergers in order to maintain a competitive market and help keep premiums down, the Associated Press reports. The department’s antitrust chief said hospital mergers that might stifle competition will also be subject to investigation.
Seeing Differences Early: Studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, are giving researchers a glimpse of how the brains of autistic children differ from those without the condition, the WSJ reports. Research presented last week showed that different brain patterns could be observed in autistic children as young as 14 months when listening to bedtime stories, a finding that might eventually lead to earlier diagnosis.
Stop! In the Name of Evidence: More careful scrutiny of orders for imaging tests like MRIs seems to reduce the number of scans ordered for reasons not supported by science, NPR’s Shots Blog reports. A study published in Radiology found that a software system that gave a score to orders depending on their usefulness and encouraged doctors, rather than support staff, to submit those orders reduced the proportion of low-scoring tests.
C. Diff Can Float: Research from the U.K. shows that the dangerous bacterium Clostridium difficile can travel through the air, though it’s infectious only after it lands on a surface and is touched by someone, the New York Times reports. C. diff is increasingly a hospital hazard, but a U.S. expert says measures taken in this country are sufficient to address the airborne dispersal of the germ and that handwashing is the best way to guard against it.