Oct 15th, 2021 - OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Nebraska's attorney general said Friday that he won't seek disciplinary action against doctors who prescribe controversial, off-label drugs to treat and prevent coronavirus infections, as long as they get informed consent from patients and don't engage in misconduct. The office of Attorney General Doug Peterson released a legal opinion saying it didn't see data to justify leg...

Oct 14th, 2021 - Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, Minister of Health Luiz Henrique Mandetta called attention in São Paulo, Brazil, to an alarming number of deaths among elderly persons in a private healthcare setting. Sixteen days later, Mandetta resigned, refusing to endorse President Jair Bolsonaro’s promotion of miracle cures for COVID-19 and denial of the need for physical distancing and mask wearing. Now...

Oct 12th, 2021 - The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has especially affected kidney transplant (KT) recipients, who are more vulnerable than the general population because of their immunosuppressive status and added comorbidities. The purpose of this study was to determine risk factors related to infection and mortality from COVID-19 in KT recipients. The study included 113 stable KT recipients who...

Oct 11th, 2021 - Robert A. Harrington, MD: This is Bob Harrington from Stanford University on Medscape Cardiology and theheart.org. During the course of COVID, we've tried to talk about some of the science that's going on and some of the other things people might be doing, like writing to relieve some of the stress of COVID. Perhaps one of the most important topics of COVID is what we're going to discuss today:...

Oct 7th, 2021 - We collected a multi-centric retrospective dataset of patients (N = 213) who were admitted to ten hospitals in Czech Republic and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 during the early phases of the pandemic in March-October 2020. The dataset contains baseline patient characteristics, breathing support required, pharmacological treatment received and multiple markers on daily resolution. Patients in t...

Oct 6th, 2021 - Adam M. Brufsky, MD, PhD The rapidly evolving coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has sparked questions pertaining to the immunopathology of the virus, said Adam M. Brufsky, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine and associate chief in the Division of Hematology/Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. A recent paper published in the Journal of Medical Virology aims to begin to ...

Oct 6th, 2021 - Brian I. Rini, MD A plethora of new challenges have arrived in routine cancer care amid the COVID-19 pandemic for oncologists, including but not limited to halts in clinical trial development, limited uses of immunotherapy, and rapidly changing procedures and evolving data, explained Brian I. Rini, MD. What was true last week might not be true now, said Rini of how quickly policies in clinica...

Oct 6th, 2021 - Patients with cancer who are then diagnosed with novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) is marked by substantial hospitalization rates and severe outcomes, according to findings from a study out of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. As of April 10, 2020, patients with cancer comprised 8.4% of the 9385 reported COVID-19 deaths reported in New York. However, investigators noted a knowledge gap a...

Oct 6th, 2021 - The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues to impact the care of patients with metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) and other cancers in a multitude of ways, according to Toni K. Choueiri, MD, but those working in the field of oncology are rising up to the challenge by learning as much as possible about the virus to make the best treatment decisions possible for their patients. Among...

Oct 6th, 2021 - This has been an interesting and complex year in the realm of clinical trials. The results of multiple COVID-19 studies provide a remarkably powerful testimony to support well-designed, well-conducted trials and highlight the importance of interpreted investigative studies in optimizing the health of our society. Within the hierarchy of clinical trials, phase 3 randomized studies remain the gol...

Oct 4th, 2021 - To identify potential predictors of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy (C19-VH) in adults with immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMID). A total of 1000 IMID patients were enrolled in this web-based cross-sectional study. A standardised and self-administered survey was designed by members of the Brazilian Society of Rheumatology Steering Committee for Infectious and Endemic diseases and distributed...

Oct 2nd, 2021 - Effective therapies for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are urgently needed. Maladaptive hyperinflammation and excessive cytokine release underlie the disease severity, with antiinflammatory and cytokine inhibiting agents expected to exert therapeutic effects. A major present challenge is identification of appropriate phase of the illness for a given intervention to yield optimum outcomes. ...

Oct 1st, 2021 - Treatment with the investigational oral antiviral molnupiravir cut the risk of hospitalization and death in half for at-risk COVID-19 patients, manufacturer Merck said on Friday. An interim analysis of the multinational phase III MOVe-OUT trial found that among 775 higher-risk non-hospitalized COVID-19 patients, 7.3% of those taking molnupiravir were hospitalized or died through day 29 from ran...

Sep 29th, 2021 - The novel coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) represents a major public health problem and it is key to find a treatment that reduces mortality. Our objective was to estimate whether treatment with 400 mg/day of Hydroxychloroquine for 10 days reduces in-hospital mortality in subjects with severe respiratory disease due to COVID-19 compared with placebo. A double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlle...

Sep 29th, 2021 - BRASILIA (Reuters) - A Brazilian hospital chain tested unproven drugs on elderly COVID-19 patients without their knowledge as part of an effort to validate President Jair Bolsonaro's preferred 'miracle cure,' a lawyer for whistleblowing doctors told senators on Tuesday. At least nine people died of COVID-19 during the trials at the Prevent Senior hospital chain from March to April 2020, but the...

Sep 27th, 2021 - Note that some links may require registration or subscription. Pfizer will ask for authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine in kids ages 5-11 in "days, not weeks," the company's CEO, Albert Bourla, said. (CNN) The World Health Organization has assembled a new team of scientists to study the origins of COVID-19. (Wall Street Journal) The 2021 Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award went to ...

Sep 23rd, 2021 - BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's Health Minister Marcelo Queiroga tested positive for COVID-19 hours after accompanying President Jair Bolsonaro to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, the government said. Queiroga will remain in New York in quarantine, the government's communications office said. "The minister is doing well," the statement said. It added that the rest of th...

Sep 22nd, 2021 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. Hi. I'm Art Caplan at the Division of Medical Ethics at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. I've been tracking — with some amazement, anger, and upset — the outbreak of interest in using ivermectin, a deworming medicine made by Merck, as a treatment for COVID-19. Very recently, there was a patient at Amita Health Resurrection Medical...

Sep 19th, 2021 - Acute respiratory distress syndrome is an important clinical presentation of respiratory complications caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, a novel coronavirus responsible for the ongoing pandemic. The disease is poorly understood, and immunopathogenesis is constantly evolving. Cytokine release syndrome remains central to pathology of coronavirus disease 2019. Antivirals, ...

Sep 18th, 2021 - Currently, there is no formally accepted pharmacological treatment for COVID-19. We included COVID-19 outpatients of a Peruvian primary care center from Lima, Peru, who were treated between April 30 - September 30, 2020, with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin. Logistic regression was applied to determine factors associated with case-fatality rate. A total of 1265 COVID-19 patients with an ave...