Sep 29th, 2022 - Factors associated with an increased risk for long COVID include older age, a higher comorbidity burden, disease severity at the time of diagnosis, and unvaccinated status at initial onset of infection. These study findings were published in JAMA Network Open. Using data from the Veterans Affairs Corporate Data Warehouse and the COVID-19 Shared Data Resource, researchers conducted a retrospecti...

Sep 29th, 2022 - Vinod Chandran, MBBS, MD, DM, PhD Research on psoriatic arthritis (PsA) published over the past month has highlighted the effect of disease on patients and provided insights into clinical management. Because of the heterogeneous nature of PsA, assessing disease activity is difficult.

Sep 29th, 2022 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. Robert A. Harrington, MD: Hi. I'm Bob Harrington from Stanford University. I'm here in Barcelona at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) meeting. First, I have to say, wow, it's fantastic to be back at a live, face-to-face meeting, getting to see friends and colleagues from around the globe in addition to hearing about great science. While here, ...

Sep 29th, 2022 - WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced $8 billion in new private sector spending to fight hunger, including hundreds of millions of dollars for meals, after lawmakers failed to further extend pandemic-era nutrition supports like universal school meals and increased aid to food banks. The pledges were announced as part of a White House summit on Hunger, Nutrition a...

Sep 29th, 2022 - WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic toll of the opioid addiction and overdose crisis on the United States reached nearly $1.5 trillion in 2020 alone and is likely to grow, a congressional report seen by Reuters shows. Opioid-related deaths soared during the pandemic, including from the powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl, exacerbating an already tragic and co...

Sep 29th, 2022 - As the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the monkeypox (MPX) outbreak a global health emergency, a new wave of anti-LGBTQ+ vitriol crested alongside it. Now, the MPX backlash has been added to the ongoing circulation of medical misinformation associated with the COVID pandemic, both in the US and abroad. I'm an ID doc and I spend a large amount of my time with patients addressing misinfo...

Sep 29th, 2022 - While efficacy and quality-of-life outcomes are similar across commonly used treatments for endocrine-refractory or triple-negative metastatic breast cancer, the costs of these agents vary widely, a recent analysis reveals. Notably, the authors found that using standard chemotherapy agents in specific sequences can help reduce overall costs and improve the value of care. Given "razor thin" diff...

Sep 29th, 2022 - In keeping with the new trend for providing "living guidelines," the Global Initiative for Asthma (GINA) Scientific Committee released their latest update a few months ago. The push toward earlier initiation of inhaled corticosteroids (ICS) has dominated GINA updates since 2019, and the 2022 update is no exception. Given that we've relied on short-acting beta-agonists (SABAs) to treat mild dise...

Sep 29th, 2022 - Treatment with deuruxolitinib and ritlecitinib, two investigational Janus kinase (JAK) inhibitors, resulted in substantial regrowth of scalp hair for patients with alopecia areata (AA) in separate studies reported at the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology (EADV) 2022 Annual Meeting. In the THRIVE-AA1 study, the primary endpoint of a Severity of Alopecia Tool (SALT) score of ≤20 ― w...

Sep 29th, 2022 - The Ontario Medical Association (OMA) recommends increasing the supply of healthcare workers, reducing wait times, and expanding access to palliative care to address pressing issues in the healthcare system. To ease the burden on hospitals, the OMA proposes creating Integrated Ambulatory Centres for less complicated outpatient surgeries and procedures. As part of this measure, the association p...

Sep 29th, 2022 - A novel method of quantifying disease activity and severity in Crohn's disease that aims to be simpler and easier to use in clinical practice than the current standard appears to offer reliable and reproducible results, suggests a study of clinical trial data. The Simplified Endoscopic Mucosal Assessment for Crohn's Disease (SEMA-CD) was tested on ileocolonoscopy videos taken in more than 100 a...

Sep 29th, 2022 - Treatment of rheumatoid arthritis with olokizumab combined with methotrexate led to significantly more patients with improved signs and symptoms than did methotrexate plus placebo in circumstances where previous treatment with one or more tumor necrosis factor (TNF) inhibitors yielded inadequate responses, results from a phase 3 randomized trial show. At the week 12 primary endpoint, 40.6% of p...

Sep 29th, 2022 - A retrospective study that analyzed sex disparities in patients with COVID-19 and rheumatoid arthritis found that men had more baseline comorbidities and increased risk of COVID-19–related outcomes, compared with females. “Differences in genetics between sex and sex steroid hormones may play a role in predisposition to COVID-19 infection as well as modulating the disease progression,” according...

Sep 29th, 2022 - Editor's note: Find the latest COVID-19 news and guidance in Medscape's Coronavirus Resource Center. The Centers for Disease Control has changed its position on mandatory masking in health care settings, no longer recommending that it be universal. It's a "major departure" from the CDC's previous recommendation of universal masking to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, The Hill says. "Updates were ma...

Sep 29th, 2022 - Use of tighter glycemic targets for women with gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) reduced the risk for a serious health outcome for the infant, according to a trial conducted in New Zealand. These serious health outcomes included death, birth trauma, and shoulder dystocia. Infants' length of stay in the neonatal intensive care unit also was shorter. But the new targets did not reduce the infan...

Sep 29th, 2022 - A growing number of Americans with cardiovascular disease (CVD) have limited or uncertain access to food, results of a new study suggest. An analysis of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) representing more than 300 million American adults found that, overall, 38.1% of people with cardiovascular disease were food insecure in 2017-2019. Twenty years earlier, t...

Sep 29th, 2022 - Artivion Inc. has halted the PROACT Xa clinical trial that was testing whether patients with an On-X mechanical aortic valve could be safely and effectively managed with the direct oral anticoagulant (DOAC) apixaban (Eliquis) rather than warfarin. The decision to stop the trial was based on the recommendation of the independent data and safety monitoring board (DSMB), which cited a lack of evid...

Sep 29th, 2022 - Editor's note: Find the latest long COVID news and guidance in Medscape's Long COVID Resource Center. Working with physicians from multiple specialties, the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (AAPM&R) has issued the first set of guidelines related to the diagnosis and treatment of pediatric patients with long COVID. The physiatrist organization also issued separate guidanc...

Sep 29th, 2022 - A prognosis prediction model may help clinicians accurately predict death among older adults with dementia. The tool, which covers six measures ― age, sex, body mass index (BMI), and physical fitness ― may help clinicians better frame discussions about treatment and end-of-life decisions with patients, according to the researchers, whose research was published September 26 in JAMA Internal Medi...

Sep 29th, 2022 - An outbreak of acute hepatitis of unknown origin last spring, recent pneumonia cases in Argentina since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by the monkeypox outbreak ― a string of public health warnings has led some to question whether the threat of infectious disease is greater than it had been. The French Agency for Research in AIDS and Viral Hepatitis (ANRS) provided some answers an...