Quest for personalized medicine hits a snag

The quest for personalized medicine, a medical approach in which practitioners use a patient’s unique genetic profile to tailor individual treatment, has emerged as a critical goal in the health care sector. But a new Yale-led study shows that the mathematical models currently available to predict treatments have limited effectiveness. In an analysis of clinical trials for multiple schizophrenia treatments, […]

Want safer prescribing? Provide doctors with a plan for helping patients in pain

Physicians who are notified that a patient has died of a drug overdose are more judicious in issuing controlled substances if the notification includes a plan for what to do during subsequent patient visits, according to a study published today in Nature Communications. Compared to a letter with demonstrated effectiveness at improving prescribing safety, physicians who received notifications with additional planning guidance reduced […]

Almost 1:10 adolescents non-prescription weight loss products globally

One in ten adolescents globally have used ineffective and potentially harmful non prescribed weight loss products in their lifetime, with 2% using them in the previous week. A review, of over 90 studies of 600,000+ participants, headed by Ms Natasha Hall fro0m Monash University’s School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has […]

A universal coronavirus vaccine could save billions of dollars if ready before next pandemic

What if scientists had developed a universal coronavirus vaccine in the years prior to 2020 so that it was available at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic? A universal coronavirus vaccine targets parts of the virus that are common to either many or all coronaviruses, thereby offering some degree of protection against a range of strains. A new study suggests […]

Exercise prescription: Pioneering the “third pole” for clinical health management

Professor Chen Shiyi’s team at Huashan Hospital of Fudan University commented on the concept, policy, development and prospect of exercise prescription in the context of ” Health for All”, which was published in Research (10.34133/research.0284) under the title of ” Exercise Prescription: Pioneering the “Third Pole” for Clinical Health Management”. Modern lifestyles have led to reduced physical activity and a rise in […]

Study finds preconception stress may affect health of women undergoing fertility treatment

Stress during pregnancy is known to influence health outcomes, but a new study from Mass General Brigham researchers suggests that stress levels before pregnancy are also important to evaluate. Investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital analyzed the link between self-reported stress immediately before conception among women seeking fertility care and blood glucose levels, a marker of heart health. […]

Study finds paxlovid treatment does not reduce risk of long COVID

A team of researchers from UC San Francisco has found that Paxlovid (Nirmatrelvir-ritonavir) did not reduce the risk of developing long COVID for vaccinated, non-hospitalized individuals during their first COVID-19 infection. They also found a higher proportion of individuals with acute symptoms rebound and test-positivity than previously reported. The study appears Jan. 4, 2024, in the Journal of Medical Virology. Paxlovid treatment […]

Hearing aid use lowers risk of death

For people with hearing loss, the risk of death is lower among those who regularly use a hearing aid, researchers reported on Jan. 3, 2024 in The Lancet Healthy Longevity. “We found that adults with hearing loss who regularly used hearing aids had a 24% lower risk of mortality than those who never wore them,” said lead investigator Janet Choi, […]

New AI tool brings precision pathology for cancer and beyond into quicker, sharper focus

A new artificial intelligence tool that interprets medical images with unprecedented clarity does so in a way that could allow time-strapped clinicians to dedicate their attention to critical aspects of disease diagnosis and image interpretation. The tool, called iStar (Inferring Super-Resolution Tissue Architecture), was developed by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, who believe […]

Benzodiazepines appear to pose miscarriage risk

Researchers from a Taiwanese study report that an increase in the risk of miscarriage is associated with benzodiazepine use during pregnancy, after adjustments for cofounders. The findings appeared on Dec. 27, 2023 in JAMA Psychiatry. “These findings underscore the necessity for health care professionals to meticulously balance the risk-benefit ratio when considering the use of benzodiazepines to treat psychiatric and […]