Your brain waves are a hot commodity

The ideas and innovators shaping health care

Oct 07, 2024 View in browser   By Ruth Reader, Daniel Payne, Carmen Paun and Erin Schumaker AROUND THE NATION In California, that data is now protected. | AP Consumer brain data is now protected under California law. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature last week makes it the second state, after Colorado, to recognize its citizens’ privacy rights over their brain waves. Colorado included that right in a broader privacy law in April. The new California law says companies like Muse, which makes a headband that analyzes brain activity to help people focus and sleep better, can’t sell or share the data they collect without consent. Californians can also request that companies that collect brain data delete theirs. Why it matters: Muse is far from alone in the brain data industry. Another company, EMOTIV, sells a headband that analyzes electrical activity in customers’ brains and has collected more than 100 million minutes of brain activity. Companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink are building brain-computer interfaces that allow people to type without using their fingers. Such data isn’t protected under federal law. The health data privacy law, HIPAA, applies only to health care providers and insurers and their vendors. What’s next? Brain privacy advocates are pushing more jurisdictions to enact brain privacy laws. The Neurorights Foundation, a New York City-based group co-founded by Columbia biological sciences professor Rafael Yuste, has successfully lobbied legislators in Chile to pass constitutional amendments that protect brain data and activity and persuaded a Brazilian state, Río Grande do Sul, to incorporate neural data protections into its constitution. He also helped promote the California and Colorado laws. Yuste worries companies could one day use brain data to interfere with our thinking. Yuste is lobbying more state lawmakers: “We have a lot of pots in the fire,” Yuste said. WELCOME TO FUTURE PULSE Paris | Jeffrey Diaz This is where we explore the ideas and innovators shaping health care. Climate change is redrawing borders. Italy and Switzerland are redefining a small part of their dividing line after one of the glaciers in the area partially melted, the Washington Post reports. Share any thoughts, news, tips and feedback with Carmen Paun at cpaun@politico.com, Daniel Payne at dpayne@politico.com, Ruth Reader at rreader@politico.com, or Erin Schumaker at eschumaker@politico.com. Send tips securely through SecureDrop, Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp.  THE REGULATORS Palm says AI is on her radar. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The use of artificial intelligence in the health care sector is forecasted to grow exponentially over the next few years. The Department of Health and Human Services is still figuring out how to regulate it. Our Chelsea Cirruzzo spoke with HHS Deputy Secretary Andrea Palm, one of the agency’s leaders on AI policy, about where things stand. Palm said last month that HHS would release a new AI strategy by January and work on creating an AI safety plan with assurance labs to vet tools used in health care. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. What does the agency think about assurance labs and vetting health care AI?  We are exploring all of our options currently to think about how we most effectively ensure the responsible use of AI in the health care space, whether it’s FDA-regulated or more broadly. FDA has a particular piece of the health care ecosystem: The way they think about it needs to inform other parts of this department. We need to be a unified family of agencies, such that the ways in which we interact with the health care sector are not redundant, duplicative, overlapping, conflicting, etc. POLITICO has reported on the many ways HHS uses AI. Which tools have been the most meaningful?  One of the things I think is particularly cool is an NIH pilot to match potential patients with clinical trials. You're a patient out there; how do you know what you might be eligible for? As a doctor, how do you know what might be available for your patients? And this AI tool is a way to help start to sift through that in a more efficient way, so that we are better able to capture patients who would benefit from a trial. How might HHS be limited on policy it can propose? One very concrete example is things that fall outside of the definition of medical device. Who else might have authority within the department to enter into that space? And if we don’t have [authority], what do we do about that? Those are the first-order things that we are working on now so that we can put the whole puzzle together. THE LAB More light therapy could help people with depression, a study found. | Anton Fomkin/Flickr Fluorescent lights could help more people with depression. That’s according to a new review of studies by Brazilian researchers published in JAMA Psychiatry. Bright light therapy — which typically involves exposing a patient to 10,000-lux white light for 30 minutes or more — has long been used for some sleep disorders and seasonal depression. But the review suggests it should be used more broadly. The researchers analyzed 11 studies involving a total of more than 800 patients and found that patients treated with bright light therapy, which is often used alongside other therapies, had significantly higher remission rates and fewer symptoms of depression. The light mimics natural sunlight and is thought to influence brain chemicals linked to mood and sleep, thereby improving symptoms of depression. The response rate to treatment that included light therapy was 40 percent, well above the 23 percent response rate of the control group. Why it matters: Depressive disorders are a major health challenge worldwide and considered a leading cause of disability. Providers, patients and policymakers are looking for new treatments, especially as young people tend to have more mental health issues than earlier generations did. Bright light therapy is also relatively inexpensive compared with other treatments and can be easily added to ongoing treatment regimens.   Follow us on Twitter Carmen Paun @carmenpaun Daniel Payne @_daniel_payne Ruth Reader @RuthReader Erin Schumaker @erinlschumaker   Follow us

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