Daily Rounds: Spending Up, Again; Childhood Memories; Lucky Health; Lung Cells Revealed

You Really Are Paying A Lot More For Health Care : Shots - Health Blog : NPR "First, a tidbit that sort of passes for good news. Last year, health costs rose by 7.3 percent, which is the slowest rate of increase in more than a decade. By comparison, though, the Consumer Price Index rose only about 1.5 percent last year. Now the bad news: Even at that relatively slow rate, the overall increase in the amount of money required to cover a typical family of four in a preferred provider organization was $1,319 in 2011 — the highest figure in the more than 50 years Milliman has been doing this study. Who paid the freight? Employers kicked in just under half, or $641, with employees paying the rest either in the form of higher premiums or larger cost-sharing." (npr.org)

Children's earliest memories change as they age, study finds (The Los Angeles Times) "By quizzing small children about the first events they remember — a cousin misbehaving, a trip to a grocery store, a mother's bribe of red and green licorice — researchers have discovered that the earliest memories of children shift as they get older, and don't solidify into the first memories carried throughout life until about age 10. The research, published Wednesday in the journal Child Development, could help psychologists better understand how people construct the life stories that help us understand ourselves."

Health and the Luck of the Draw - NYTimes.com "As a primary care doctor I assiduously defer to the rational, exhorting to my patients about the solid clinical data that support certain medical treatments — aspirin to prevent heart attacks, vaccines to prevent measles and influenza, Pap smears to detect cervical cancer. Yet I have to admit that random, irrational, unplanned events can often have greater effects on overall health." (ell.blogs.nytimes.com)

Study finds lung stem cells, likely to generate debate - The Boston Globe "In a provocative new finding, researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital report they have discovered human lung stem cells, which they say can give rise to the many different types of cells in the lung and ultimately may hold the potential to regenerate and repair damaged lung tissue in patients. The results, published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine, challenge the current understanding of how the lung develops and will probably generate significant debate and skepticism within the field. Many scientists did not expect that a single human lung stem cell would give rise to all the many cell types found in the lung." (boston.com)