Published in:
01-12-2009 | Letter to the Editor
Do New Drugs Save Lives?
Author:
Frank R. Lichtenberg, PhD
Published in:
Journal of General Internal Medicine
|
Issue 12/2009
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Excerpt
To the Editors:—Dean Baker and Adriane Fugh-Berman have published a critique of a study I performed in 2007 entitled “Why has longevity increased more in some states than in others?”
1. One of the conclusions I drew from that study was that medical innovation accounts for a substantial portion of recent increases in U.S. life expectancy. Baker and Fugh-Berman claim that my study was subject to a number of major methodological flaws. Many of their claims pertain to the role of infant mortality; the definition of drug vintage; the issue of age adjustment; and the appropriateness of controlling for AIDS, obesity, and smoking in the analysis of longevity. …