A new study from researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, has shed new light on the best strategies hospitals can use for medication reconciliation, the critical and difficult task of updating and verifying a patient’s medication lists and orders, regardless of where they are in the health care system. The study, published […]
A Kaiser Permanente study confirms the benefit of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir, also known as Paxlovid, as an early-stage treatment to prevent hospitalization for people with mild to moderate COVID-19, regardless of prior immunity or age. The study was published March 15, 2023, in Lancet ID. “Among Kaiser Permanente members in Southern California who tested positive for coronavirus infection, receiving Paxlovid within 5 […]
Acute low back pain is a common cause of disability. An analysis in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research examined which non-opioid drugs are best for treating this condition. The analysis, which included all randomized controlled trials published to date (18 studies with 3,478 patients), showed that muscle relaxants and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) could effectively and rapidly reduce symptoms. The combination of […]
One dose of the antibiotic azithromycin appears to reduce significantly the risk of postpartum sepsis and death among women who have a vaginal delivery. The findings were reported on Feb. 9, 2023 at the annual meeting of The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, and they were published on the same day in the New England Journal of Medicine. As background, the […]
Hundreds of thousands of Americans with heart failure are sick enough to benefit from a transplant, yet only around 4,000 heart transplants are performed annually. One reason for this gap is the time window during which a heart can survive outside the donor body before transplant hovers around four hours. And the longer it takes for the donor heart to […]
Ten percent of maternal deaths are caused by infections that occur shortly before, during or after delivery. Maternal infections and sepsis, which is a serious complication of infections, are among the top five causes of maternal mortality worldwide. Maternal infection also increases the risk of neonatal sepsis, which accounts for 16 percent of newborn deaths. A new study published today in the New […]
The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) today, may mean TB can be cured with shorter treatments. TB typically takes months to treat with multiple drugs. This poses logistical challenges in completing treatment for many people. So, it is widely agreed that shortening TB treatment is needed to thwart the global burden of the disease. Heartburn drugs […]
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has approved four new medicines at its January meeting, getting 2023 off to a low-key start. The Agency’s key human medicines committee (CHMP) recommended granting a marketing authorisation for Sotyktu (deucravacitinib) – a medicine for the treatment of moderate to severe plaque psoriasis in adults, a skin disease causing red, scaly patches. The committee adopted positive opinions […]
A large clinical study is now beginning on an approved drug for treating psoriasis. The drug will be tested on patients who were recently diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The theory is that the drug could preserve the patient’s remaining insulin production. A large number of hospitals throughout Sweden are participating in this large project, which is funded by the […]
A new study led by Ochsner infectious diseases clinical pharmacist Kevin Lin, PharmD, was recently published in PLoS One, suggesting that oral cephalosporins are as safe and effective as the standard of care fluoroquinolones (FQs) for the treatment of acute kidney infections. Cephalosporins belong to a family of antibiotics called beta-lactams which are generally regarded as “narrower-spectrum” meaning they don’t kill […]
Recent Comments