May 27th, 2022 - NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A new system for allocating liver allografts in the United States, implemented in 2020, has been associated with procurement-related delays but has had no adverse impact on early transplant outcomes, a new study shows. To assess the effect of Liver Acuity Circle Allocation (AC), researchers compared data from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) o...

May 27th, 2022 - Roughly 3% of adults in the general population of The Netherlands have microalbuminuria or macroalbuminuria, and in nearly two thirds of this subgroup — roughly 2% of the general population — kidney disease had previously gone unidentified, based on screening results in a study of about 15,000 adults. "This is the first study to prospectively investigate population screening for albuminuria," s...

May 27th, 2022 - Transcatheter implants designed to alleviate high left atrial (LA) pressures — which, as a possible way to treat heart failure (HF) once seemed like a long shot — are emerging as new stars of heart failure research. Clinical trial results have been mixed but also seem to have dispelled most doubts about whether interatrial shunt devices may eventually prove an effective treatment for HF. That w...

May 27th, 2022 - Scientists have identified a new disease in a ground-breaking discovery that could help patients with unexplained liver and kidney problems. Experts at Newcastle University, UK, have established the inherited condition, called TULP3-related ciliopathy that causes kidney and liver failure in children and adults. There are numerous reasons for kidney and liver organ failure, which if left untreat...

May 26th, 2022 - Severe airway injuries are a “not infrequent” consequence after children swallow button batteries, which are commonly found in many household electronics, according to a systematic review published online in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery. Most literature has focused on esophageal injury, but “the direct apposition of the esophagus to the trachea and recurrent laryngeal nerves also pla.

May 26th, 2022 - NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - In a single center's 20-year experience with pancreatic islet cell transplantation, patients with sustained graft survival were more likely to have had combination treatment with anakinra plus etanercept (one or more infusions) and a BETA-2 score of 15 or higher - reflecting insulin independence - within one year, researchers say. "Our findings with anakinra plus eta...

May 26th, 2022 - Jeffrey S. Weber, MD, PhD, looks ahead to the upcoming ASCO conference, in which he anticipates a convergence of updates on previously published studies — studies that collectively produced a necessary "plateau" or consolidation of data and generated successive investigations that have, in turn, produced new elevations. Whether the topic is advances on neoadjuvant regimens, the latest data on s...

May 26th, 2022 - States that mandated cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and automated external defibrillator (AED) education in high schools had higher rates of bystander CPR for an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest than those that did not, a retrospective cohort study suggests. Overall, the rate of bystander CPR after an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest was 40.7%, with a lower number of cardiac arrests receiving ...

May 26th, 2022 - Sildenafil (Viagra, Pfizer), a phosphodieterase-5 (PDE-5) inhibitor and a pulmonary-selective vasodilator, may reduce mortality in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), compared with placebo or standard of care but it does not reduce hospitalizations or acute exacerbations from the disorder, a small meta-analysis suggests. "There have only been four trials investigating sildenafil ...

May 26th, 2022 - Takotsubo syndrome occurs much more frequently in women than it does in men, but men are much more likely to die from it, according to the results of a new study. In an analysis of almost 2,500 patients with Takotsubo syndrome (TSS) who were enrolled in an international registry, men, who made up just 11% of the sample, had significantly higher rates of cardiogenic shock and were more than twic...

May 26th, 2022 - Severe airway injuries are a "not infrequent" consequence after children swallow button batteries, which are commonly found in many household electronics, according to a systematic review published online in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery. Most literature has focused on esophageal injury, but "the direct apposition of the esophagus to the trachea and recurrent laryngeal nerves also pla...

May 26th, 2022 - NEW YORK, NY -- Nurse expertise includes the ability to pick up cues about patients’ health from subtle changes in behavior and appearance, but these observations often get missed or under-analyzed within the electronic health record (EHR). The CONCERN initiative, a multi-hospital system effort led by Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC), will leverage that expertise with artificia...

May 26th, 2022 - Just one in three patients with gout in the UK received preventative medication within a year of diagnosis, new research has found. The study is published today in The Lancet Regional Health - Europe journal by researchers from King’s College London and with funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), the research partner of the NHS, public health and social care. G...

May 25th, 2022 - Takotsubo syndrome occurs much more frequently in women than it does in men, but men are much more likely to die from it, according to the results of a new study. In an analysis of almost 2,500 patients with Takotsubo syndrome (TSS) who were enrolled in an international registry, men, who made up just 11% of the sample, had significantly higher rates of cardiogenic shock and were more than twic.

May 25th, 2022 - The first in-human trials of a no-implant approach to interatrial shunting to alleviate heart failure symptoms have shown a signal that the procedure reduces peak exercise wedge pressure in recipients a month afterward, according to early trial results. Colin M.

May 25th, 2022 - New York (Reuters Health) - Variceal embolization during transjugular intrahepatic portosystemic shunt (TIPS) placement does not reduce patients' risk of recurrent variceal bleeding, new data show. Dr. Yong Lv et al from the Xijing Hospital of Infectious Diseases, Xi'an, China and colleagues randomly assigned 134 adults with liver cirrhosis and gastro-esophageal bleeding to undergo either TIPS ...

May 25th, 2022 - The first in-human trials of a no-implant approach to interatrial shunting to alleviate heart failure symptoms have shown a signal that the procedure reduces peak exercise wedge pressure in recipients a month afterward, according to early trial results. Colin M. Barker, MD, reported 30-day results of 31 patients who had no-implant interatrial shunting for heart failure across three studies, at ...

May 25th, 2022 - One of the University of Pittsburgh’s most storied startups, ALung Technologies Inc., has achieved its highest business goal—acquisition by a major company. ALung is now part of LivaNova, a global medical technology company headquartered in London. LivaNova was a minority investor in ALung for two years, and it purchased full equity in ALung in May 2022. The acquisition comes six months after A...

May 25th, 2022 - Talicia’s efficacy and safety profile evaluated in patients with H. pylori infection and diabetes mellitus, a large and challenging patient population associated with sub-optimal outcomes with clarithromycin-based H. pylori eradication therapy -- Physiologically based pharmacokinetic modeling study of Talicia evaluated intragastric antibiotic exposure, which is critical for successful H. pylori...

May 25th, 2022 - Los Angeles, May 25, 2022 --Lactation Lab, which offers the most scientifically advanced breast milk testing available, has announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), has granted the company Breakthrough Device designation for its latest device Emily’s Care Nourish Test System that tests and provides a nutritional analysis of breast milk. This first-of-its-kind breast-mil...