[MSNBC, Thomson Reuters] According to a signal from the electronic tag around his ankle, Nenad Borojevic last left his apartment building at 6.25 p.m. on January 10. It was the festive season in Serbia; the capital was enjoying the lull between Orthodox Christmas and New Year.

Police said Borojevic, a doctor, headed to Kosutnjak park, a popular [...]

Over the course of a year two out of every 1,000 people will rack up $100,000 or more in medical bills. These are the “high cost patients” who make insurance premiums go up and bedevil policy makers. These are people who are really sick.
The conventional wisdom is that with better prevention, wellness, care-coordination, insurance reforms, [...]

[mercurynews.com] Raising the prospect of a world without birth defects, a Stanford-created blood test that can detect Down syndrome and two other major genetic defects very early in a woman’s pregnancy will be available next week.

The simple blood test spares women the risk and heartache of later and more invasive tests like amniocentesis.
But it has startling [...]

[NYT] Profits at pharmaceutical companies have been declining or showing little growth for the last year as austerity measures across Europe lead to cuts in health care spending. Some analysts say this trend could continue until at least 2014.
Budget cuts mean that many European governments are not willing to pay as much for pills. But [...]

[Juliana Bunim, UCSF] The ability to anticipate future events allows us to plan and exert control over our lives, but it may also contribute to stress-related increased risk for the diseases of aging, according to a study by UCSF researchers.
In a study of 50 women, about half of them caring for relatives with dementia, the [...]

[Plos One] What determines success on Wall Street? This study examined if genes affecting dopamine levels of professional traders were associated with their career tenure. Sixty professional Wall Street traders were genotyped and compared to a control group who did not trade stocks. We found that distinct alleles of the dopamine receptor 4 promoter (DRD4P) and [...]

[ABC News] If you were at higher risk for developing a condition like Alzheimer’s disease or breast cancer, would you want to know about it?
With rapid advances in genome sequencing, researchers are learning more about people’s susceptibility to certain diseases, and a host of ethical questions about whether people are entitled to information yielded by their genes [...]

[By Andrew Jack and Kerin Hope, FT.com] Antonis Karokis’ medicines business is being squeezed by price cuts and unpaid hospital debts. But he is stoical – after all, he enjoyed the years of excess when Greece was an unusually large market for drugs.
“There were no controls on spending in the past, the whole system favoured [...]

[Geoffrey Rogow, WSJ] —Marijn Dekkers, head of German drug-and-chemicals giant Bayer AG, says consumers don’t give pharmaceuticals enough credit.
The outspoken chairman of the board of management—the German equivalent of CEO—says patients often thank doctors and nurses but not the companies that made the medicines that helped cure them.

Bayer’s Marijn Dekkers, shown in Sydney last month, [...]

[Denis Campbell, Guardian] Patients could be kept alive solely so they can become organ donors, hearts could be retrieved from newborn babies for the first time, and body parts could be taken from high-risk donors as part of an urgent medical and ethical revolution to ease Britain’s chronic shortage of organs, doctors’ leaders say .

Hearts [...]