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There have long been safety questions — and lawsuits — over whether bone-building drugs like Merck’s Fosamax can actually increase the chance of femur fractures. Today, the FDA said it was going to take another look at the safety issues.

Last we heard of Fablyn, an experimental bone drug for the treatment of postmenopausal women, U.S. regulators were holding off on approval after FDA staff and outside reviewers raised concerns and Pfizer, the pill’s maker, was shopping it around to other companies.

Author and cancer surgeon Atul Gawande talks about the role of the humble checklist in managing complexity and what incentives may work in health care now that it’s being reformed. Kristen Gerencher reports.

Go here to read the rest:  Checklists, Complexity and Health Reform/a>

Older people are more likely than younger people to need expensive medical care. So should they pay higher premiums for health insurance to reflect their higher health costs? If so, how much more?

On the individual market, people in their 50s can now pay five or six times as much as twentysomethings, according to a story in this morning’s WSJ on the whole age/premiums issue.

For a 75-year-old with high blood pressure, the risk of death or serious disability resulting from a fall is just as high as the risk of death or serious disability caused by a stroke. But a generation ago, doctors thought of falling as an inevitable risk, not something they could do anything to prevent as part of caring for patients.

The number of people living with memory-robbing Alzheimer’s disease grew 10% globally between 2005 and 2009 to 35 million, according to a report today by U.K.-based Alzheimer’s Disease International.

And, mostly because people are living longer, this number is expected to continue climbing to 115.4 million in 2050, according to the report, which surveyed nations around the world.

Here’s some of the news this morning from the health care debate:

Some of the elderly growing increasingly worried that an overhaul will come at a cost to Medicare, even though President Obama has repeatedly said that it will not, according to the New York Times.

Most people who are 55 and older take one or more prescription drugs that may affect their ability to drive safely — but most of them are unaware of the risks, according to a new survey.

There’s a lot of research about how the Mediterannean Diet is good for you in all kinds of ways. But does it fend off cognitive decline and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s? A study published a few years back suggested it does; two more studies, published today in JAMA return to the subject with conflicting results.

Sarah Palin made headlines when she used the phrase “death panel” in a statement on the national health-care debate.

That was just the latest in what’s become an ongoing series of comments that may spring from a provision in one of the big health bills introduced this year. (Read it for yourself on p. 424 of the bill.)