Nick Stucky, MD, PhD, continued his discussion of his team’s findings on rates of prescription of oral minoxidil following the publication of an article by The New York Times, noting the biggest implications of the findings.¹

Stucky is vice president of research at Truveta, working also as a physician-scientist and bioengineer. Additionally, he is known for being a start-up founder, faculty teaching, and having been research director.

After having described the findings, Stucky in this interview segment first described the study’s limitations in general.

“One thing is that we get data from our member healthcare systems, so they provide care to a certain population,” he explained. “We have 17% of the US healthcare daily delivered care within our dataset, so it's quite large. But there are always potential biases if you're not actually surveying the whole US population.”

Stucky also added that there may be a skew toward insured patients, for example. He added that there were certain questions by reviewers regarding whether the article led to increased prescribing for all hair loss medications.

“And so we added kind of a control arm…which was another hair loss medication that wasn't mentioned in that article,” Stucky explained, adding that this group had no changes in prescribing.

He then highlighted some of the biggest implications from his team’s findings, noting that they did not know for sure whether the article had a direct impact on the providers or the patients who read the single media publication.

“But yes, I mean, I think it definitely says that we're all human, and we all are sort of influenced by our environment,” Stucky said. “And certainly, this indicates that either practitioners or patients can be profoundly impacted in terms of how they interact with the healthcare system, by a single article.”

Additionally, Stucky mentioned that he believes there are other important implications for his team’s findings.

“I think many providers probably had concerns about whether it was safe, whether there'd be any adverse effects, but those had mostly been put to rest by these handful of studies that have come out,” he said. “But nobody was aware of them and so by, in this case, a New York Times article, but really any other media that we're consuming, we can learn really valuable (insights).”

The interview segment’s quotes were edited for clarity. For more information on the research described here, view the full video above.

References

1. ^{Smith T. Spike in Media Coverage Linked to Immediate Uptick in Prescribing Increases for Minoxidil. HCPLive. May 10, 2023. https://www.hcplive.com/view/spike-media-coverage-linked-immediate-uptick-prescribing-increases-for-minoxidil.}