[Economic crisis and disparities in spending, supply, and use of public and private health services in Brazil from 2011 to 2019].

This study sought to analyze the repercussions of the economic crisis on the public and private sectors of the Brazilian health system and perform a trend analysis of economic and care indicators, based on secondary data from official public sources related to spending, the economic performance of health plans and insurance, and the supply and use of services. The results showed stagnation of public spending on health, as well as reduction of per capita public spending and of access to public health services. On the contrary, in a context of falling income and employment, health plans retained customers, increased revenues, profits, and their care production.

[Financialization, accumulation, and shareholding changes in companies and corporate groups in the Brazilian health sector].

This study aims to analyze the shareholding dimension of changes in companies and corporate groups in the Brazilian health sector from 2008 to 2017. The idea was to understand the strategies of accumulation in a context of financialization, defined as a systemic pattern of wealth in contemporary capitalism. The shareholding changes were submitted to descriptive and exploratory analysis based on different sources.

[From community pharmacies to big pharmacy chains: private provision of medicines, health system, and financialization of the Brazilian retail pharmacy market].

The provision of medicines in Brazil is marked by the predominance of private expenditures and supply in pharmacies and by the historically liberal regulation of retail drug sales. The first two decades of the 21st century witnessed the expansion and concentration of the retail pharmaceutical sector and growing financialization of the health sector. The article analyzes the characteristics of financialization of Brazilian retail pharmaceutical companies, considering the following three crosscutting dimensions: ownership structure, financial/accounting, and political.

[Financialization of the health sector in Brazil: theoretical and methodological challenges to the investigation of companies and business groups].

The article describes the history of the response to the theoretical and methodological challenges in research on companies and corporate groups in the Brazilian health sector that reorganized their shareholding structures, diversified their activities, and expanded their financial operations. Such movements in corporate concentration and expansion were analyzed with an approach to the frame of reference for financialization in contemporary capitalism in the analysis of selected companies and corporate groups. Corporate strategies were classified in three dimensions: shareholding, financial, and accounting structure and influence on the public agenda and the respective indicators orienting the organization of information from diverse sources for companies and corporate groups from 2008 and 2017.

Controversial aspects of the concept of health needs and their impact on the accessibility of medicine and health services.

This article aimed to present the problems related to accessibility of health services by re-reading four case studies which illustrate the different dimensions of the definition of health needs and their impact on the accessibility of medicine and health services. The theoretical model of Vargas-Peláez et al.1, which allows a better understanding of the complexity of the definition of health needs and its impact on the demand for medicines and services, was adopted to re-read the case studies on the prices of patented medicines, the models of public provision, hemodynamic services, and prescription of anxiolytics.

Impact of probiotic supplementation on mortality of induced 1,2-dimethylhydrazine carcinogenesis in a mouse model.

Rationale: Probiotic bacterial strains have been increasingly used in clinical practice as many health benefits result from their use. However, severe side effects such as bacteremia and fungemia have been reported in inmunocompromised patients and those with chronic disease.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to report the impact of probiotic supplementation on the mortality of mice undergoing carcinogenesis induction with 1,2-dimethylhydrazine (DMH).