Homepage Round-up: EHR Company Pays Huge Settlement; Poverty Linked to Pediatric Suicide; and More

In this week’s edition of DocWire’s Homepage round-up: Electronic health records company pays a substantial settlement after admitting to kick-back scheme; study finds a link between exercise addiction and eating disorders; children living in poor areas incur a higher risk of suicide; and unhealthy food choices increase the risk of death.

Practice Fusion Inc. (Practice Fusion), a San Francisco-based health information technology (IT) developer, will pay $145 million to resolve criminal and civil investigations after admitting to soliciting and receiving kickbacks from a major opioid company in exchange for using its EHR software to influence physician prescribing of opioid pain medications.

There exists a strong correlation between exercise addiction and eating disorders, according to the findings of a study published in the journal Eating and Weight Disorders. In this systematic review study, researchers combed through major databases and grey literature from inception to March 4, 2019. They identified nine studies reporting prevalence of exercise addiction with and without indicated eating disorders in 2,140 adults. According to the results of the study, 1,732 participants did not show indicated eating disorders and 408 had indicated eating disorders.

Children living in high poverty areas are at an increased risk of suicide, according to a new study which appeared in JAMA Pediatrics. In a retrospective, cross-sectional study, between January 2007 and December 2016, researchers examined suicides among 20,982 US youths between the ages of 5 and 19 using International Statistical Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification codes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Compressed Mortality File. “The findings suggest that higher county-level poverty concentration is associated with increased suicide rates among youths aged 5 to 19 years,” the research authors wrote of the results.

The findings of a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine show that low-carb and low-fat diets are not problematic in and of themselves – instead, the unhealthy food choices people make on those diets is linked with a higher rate of mortality. In this prospective cohort study, researchers assessed 37,233 adults from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which took place between 1999 and 2014. The research authors wrote that: “In this study, overall low-carb-diet and low-fat-diet scores were not associated with total mortality. Unhealthy low-carb-diet and low-fat-diet scores were associated with higher total mortality, whereas healthy low-carb-diet and low-fat-diet scores were associated with lower total mortality.”