Three sentenced in $4.8M Kentucky addiction clinic fraud; U.S. leads the world in years lived in poor health; calorie apps are lowballing meals — Morning Medical Update

Three sentenced in $4.8M Kentucky addiction clinic fraud

The medical director, CEO and billing manager of Kentucky Addiction Centers were convicted at trial last year.

Michael Bregenzer, 53, of Houston, was sentenced July 24 to 48 months in prison for his role in a scheme that fraudulently billed Medicare and Kentucky Medicaid more than $4.8 million through Kentucky Addiction Centers, a chain of opioid treatment clinics in Winchester, Paducah, Paintsville and London, Kentucky. Bregenzer was the company's CEO. Medical director José Alzadon, M.D., 62, was sentenced to 60 months in February, and billing manager Barbie Vanhoose, 63, was sentenced to 24 months in January.

Prosecutors said the three billed for services that were never provided or that were upcoded to more expensive levels, and billed under the name of Alzadon's father, who had not seen the patients involved. They also used the father's DEA registration number and electronic prescribing token to issue Suboxone prescriptions, according to the Justice Department. All three were convicted at trial in March 2025 and were ordered to pay $812,881.09 in restitution.

U.S. leads the world in years lived in poor health

A Global Burden of Disease analysis found the gap between lifespan and healthspan widened in 203 of 204 countries.

People are living longer but spending more of those years in poor health, according to a Global Burden of Disease analysis published in The Lancet Public Health. The global morbidity gap, or life expectancy minus healthy life expectancy, widened from 8.8 years in 1990 to 10.7 years in 2023, with point estimates showing an increase in 203 of 204 countries and territories.

The United States had the widest national gap at 14 years, followed by Australia at 13.9 and Canada at 13.7. Women averaged 12.1 years in poor health, compared with 9.3 years for men. Musculoskeletal disorders, led by low back pain, were the largest single contributor, followed by mental disorders, sense organ diseases, unintentional injuries and other non-communicable diseases, which together accounted for 57.4% of unhealthy years.

The authors cautioned that uncertainty intervals overlap between time points, so the conclusions rest on the consistency of trends across locations rather than statistically significant country-level changes.

Calorie-tracking apps are lowballing meals

Four photo-based apps undercounted calories by about a third against meals weighed in a research kitchen.

Photo-based calorie-tracking apps that use artificial intelligence to identify food and estimate portion sizes underestimated the calories in meals by roughly a third, researchers reported at NUTRITION 2026, the American Society for Nutrition's annual meeting.

Investigators at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases ran standardized photos of 102 meals through MyFitnessPal, LoseIt!, CalAI and Appediet. The meals were prepared in a metabolic kitchen where ingredients were weighed to the nearest 0.1 gram. All four apps undercounted by about 250 to 345 calories per meal and missed roughly 30 grams of fat. Aaron Hengist, a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the institute, said patients who do not adjust portions or enter food amounts manually should take the results "with a grain of salt."

An early look at more than 200 additional meals suggests the apps struggle most with high-fat ketogenic meals. The findings are preliminary and have not undergone peer review.