PSA and Biomarker Testing Plus MRI Appears to Improve Prostate Cancer Screening
A single round of prostate cancer screening that included a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test, a kallikrein panel, and an MRI detected one additional high-grade cancer per 196 men and one low-grade cancer per 909 men, according to preliminary results from the Finnish ProScreen randomized trial. The risk difference for the group randomized to the screening […]
Is Your Seltzer Habit Hurting Your Gut Health? Doctors Have (Mostly) Good News
LOADINGERROR LOADING Many of us drink sparkling water every single day, and some people even throw back multiple cans of seltzer per day. But every once in a while, some information pops up on social media claiming that all that carbonation isn’t great for you ― particularly for your digestion and can cause issues like […]
New COVID Shots Are Coming. Here’s What They Do And Who’s Eligible.
aire images via Getty Images “The vaccines are our single best method to protect ourselves from COVID, to protect our friends, family, loved ones, classmates, co-workers, etcetera, from COVID,” said Dr. S. Wesley Long. This week, updated COVID-19 booster shots — one shot by Pfizer and one shot by Moderna — were approved by the […]
NASH Drug Candidate Comes With ‘Serious Risks,’ Says FDA Staff
While citing obeticholic acid’s (Ocaliva) modest effect on a single surrogate endpoint for nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), FDA staff members raised “substantial concerns” over the frequency of drug-induced liver injury, along with a litany of other safety concerns. The assessment dims the prospect of regulatory approval as the oral drug makes an iffy second bid to […]
Potential ‘Game Changer’ for Leprosy Prevention
A single dose of rifapentine reduced the incidence of leprosy among household contacts of patients with the infectious disease, a cluster-randomized trial out of China found. In an intention-to-treat analysis, the cumulative incidence of leprosy among 7,450 household contacts was 0.09% with an oral dose of rifapentine over 4 years of follow-up, as compared with […]
Reclaiming the Health Misinformation Spiral on Social Media
As medical students and future pediatricians, we recognize that childhood vaccines are one of the single greatest public health achievements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet, for one of us, a pregnant cousin announced over the Thanksgiving dinner table that she wasn’t going to vaccinate her unborn child. No matter the facts, research, or […]
One Dose of Acoziborole Led to Cure of ‘Sleeping Sickness’ Across Disease Stages
A single dose of oral acoziborole proved to be efficacious and safe for adults and adolescents with gambiense human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), also known as “sleeping sickness,” suggesting its promise in interrupting transmission, a single-arm phase II/III trial showed. Over 18 months of follow-up, the treatment success rate was 95.2% in those with late-stage disease […]
Primary Care Docs Need 27 Hours a Day to Do Their Best Work
There literally aren’t enough hours in a single day for primary care physicians (PCPs) to provide the full gamut of basic, guideline-based care, according to a simulation study. PCPs would need an “infeasible” 26.7 hours each day to provide preventive, chronic disease, and acute care for a typical panel of U.S. adult patients, Justin Porter, […]
Why the Atypical Symptoms in the Latest Monkeypox Cases?
In mid-May, a young man appeared at a hospital in Montreal with a single lesion on his genitals. About a week earlier he had sexual contact with someone who tested positive for monkeypox. Over the next several days, his lesion grew in size and more lesions appeared, but they weren’t painful. He had no fever […]
A single hormone directs body’s responses to low-protein diet: Mice live longer and lose weight while eating more when FGF21 is present
A single hormone appears to coordinate the lifespan extension produced by a low-protein diet. A new study from Pennington Biomedical Research Center, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that reducing the amount of protein in the diet produced an array of favorable health outcomes, including an extension of lifespan, and that these effects depend […]