Dec 1st, 2022 - Patients with lean non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) had a higher risk for liver-related mortality, a meta-analysis found. (Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology) For patients with lateral abdominal hernias, robotic surgical repair was not only a safe alternative to open surgery but was also tied with a significantly shorter length of stay and fewer complications. (Hernia) Sticking t...

Dec 1st, 2022 - Note that some links may require subscriptions. One estimate has long COVID costing the U.S. economy $3.7 trillion. (CNBC) The FDA is considering a new strategy for blood donation that may include screening gay and bisexual men for individual risks. (CNN) Responding to criticism, ProPublica says it stands by its controversial investigation (published with Vanity Fair) that pins COVID-19's origi...

Dec 1st, 2022 - The debate over whether or not to test for DPYD gene variants before administering fluoropyrimidine (FP) chemotherapy has erupted again among experts in the United States, where such testing is not recommended at present, unlike in Europe. Testing for DPYD variants and subsequent dose adjustment should be offered to US patients who are due to receive fluoropyrimidine chemotherapy, says Daniel L...

Dec 1st, 2022 - Tamoxifen treatment for premenopausal women with breast cancer is independently associated with an increased risk of endometrial cancer and other uterine diseases, according to findings from a large retrospective study of Korean women. After adjusting for multiple confounding variables, tamoxifen users had an almost fourfold increased risk of endometrial cancer compared with nonusers. Overall, ...

Nov 30th, 2022 - Note that some links may require subscriptions. All four monks at a Buddhist temple in central Thailand were defrocked after testing positive for methamphetamine use. (CBS News) New York City will begin involuntarily hospitalizing its homeless mentally ill residents, Mayor Eric Adams (D) said. (New York Times) A Minnesota woman lost part of her peripheral vision and inadvertently put her family...

Nov 30th, 2022 - (Reuters) -AstraZeneca will acquire biotechnology company Neogene Therapeutics for up to $320 million, the London-listed drugmaker said on Tuesday, seeking to build its pipeline of cell-based cancer treatments. Though AstraZeneca's oncology portfolio accounted for more than a third of the company's revenue last year, it does not have an approved cell-based cancer therapy and is behind rivals su...

Nov 30th, 2022 - Diagnoses of late-stage colorectal cancer (CRC) increased substantially during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a review of almost 18,000 patients at 81 medical centers in Italy. There was an increase in locally advanced cancers during the first year of the pandemic in 2020, but this was followed by "a more definitive increase [in] advanced cases," particularly metastatic disease, in the sec...

Nov 30th, 2022 - Individuals with a primary melanoma may be more likely to develop a second primary melanoma if they have certain characteristics, a new study suggests. In a cohort study of more than 38,000 patients, those diagnosed with a second primary melanoma were significantly more likely to have a "nevus-prone" phenotype and a high polygenic risk score for melanoma. Notably, the researchers also found onl...

Nov 30th, 2022 - Latinx individuals have a lower overall risk of melanoma than non-Latinx Whites (NLW), but they are more likely to be diagnosed with advanced disease, and experience greater mortality. A new qualitative study of Latinx and low-income NLW individuals in California has revealed some of the socioeconomic and community factors that may play a role in preventing early access to care. Thicker melanom...

Nov 30th, 2022 - During a routine visit to the Good Samaritan Clinic in Morganton, North Carolina, in 2018, Herbert Buff casually mentioned that he sometimes had trouble breathing. He was 55 years old and a decades-long smoker. So the doctor recommended that Buff schedule time on a 35-foot-long bus operated by the Levine Cancer Institute that would roll through town later that week offering free lung-cancer scr...

Nov 30th, 2022 - More patients with granulomatosis with polyangiitis (GPA) were in remission at 6 months if they had received rituximab (Rituxan) rather than cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan) as induction therapy, according to a target trial emulation performed by the French Vasculitis Study Group (FVSG). Remission, which was defined as a score of zero on the validated Birmingham Vasculitis Activity Score (BVAS) and u...

Nov 29th, 2022 - Metastasis-directed therapy (MDT) in selected patients with recurrent oligometastatic prostate cancer led to PSA responses in a majority of patients and delayed initiation of hormonal therapy by 18 months, a retrospective study showed. Overall, 77 of 124 patients had PSA declines of more than 50% with surgery or stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT). In particular, surgery led to PSA respo...

Nov 29th, 2022 - Note that some links may require subscriptions. Correction: A previous version of this article included a Mayo Clinic projection of an 80% increase in COVID cases in the next 2 weeks. Due to a glitch in the health system's data, Mayo said this estimate was not accurate. Most U.S. COVID deaths are occurring in older adults, with 9 out of 10 fatalities in people age 65 and up. (Washington Post) A...

Nov 29th, 2022 - Every three minutes in America, a person loses all or part of a limb due to their diabetes. Every. Three. Minutes. Robert A. Gabbay, MD, PhD Five-year mortality numbers for individuals undergoing a diabetes-related amputation rival those of many forms of cancer. Tragically, your odds of suffering from limb loss can come down to the color of your skin, your gender, your educational level, where ...

Nov 29th, 2022 - Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I'm Dr F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine. If you've watched this space over the years, you'll know that I'm not the biggest proponent of vitamin D supplementation. My basic gripe is that you've got all these observational studies linking lower levels of vitamin D to everything from dementia to falls to...

Nov 29th, 2022 - Researchers published the study covered in this summary on Research Square as a preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed. Key Takeaways Adults not receiving glucose-lowering drugs showed a stepwise, increasing risk of developing atrial fibrillation (AFib) that tracked with increasing levels of A1c from 5.8% to 7.6% (40 to 60 mmol/mol). Patients with new-onset diabetes had a similar risk of ...

Nov 29th, 2022 - In advanced and metastatic melanoma patients, fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) from healthy donors in advance of anti–PD-1 immunotherapy led to a 75% clinical benefit rate, defined as complete response, partial response, or stable disease that lasted 6 months or longer. The results come from a small, single arm phase 1 study whose primary endpoint was safety. "We know that the gut microbiome h...

Nov 29th, 2022 - Atezolizumab (Tecentriq) is no longer approved in the United States for use in certain patients with bladder or urinary tract cancer. The drug is an anti-PD-L1 inhibitor immunotherapy, and continues to be approved for use in lung and liver cancer and melanoma. The manufacturer, Genentech, announced that it was voluntarily withdrawing the US indication for atezolizumab that covered its use in  a...

Nov 29th, 2022 - A new collaborative position paper on radiation exposure during pregnancy states that pregnant women can safely work in an ionizing radiation environment if exposure to the fetus does not exceed certain dose thresholds. The position paper aims to "avoid discouraging" women from pursuing careers in interventional cardiology/electrophysiology (IC/EP) and to "dismantle" a barrier that says, "activ...

Nov 29th, 2022 - After reading a paper published in The Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England last March, Andrew Thomas, an orthopedic surgeon in the UK, noticed that it was very similar to an article published the previous December in another journal. He wrote a letter to the editor of Annals, notifying the journal of the similarity between its paper, "The possible effect of different types of ven...