Study identifies multi-organ response to seven days without food
New findings reveal that the body undergoes significant, systematic changes across multiple organs during prolonged periods of fasting. The results demonstrate evidence of health benefits beyond weight loss, but also show that any potentially health-altering changes appear to occur only after three days without food. The study, published today in Nature Metabolism, advances our understanding […]
MRI-Targeted Biopsy for Prostate Cancer Reduces Risk of Overdiagnosis
Excluding systematic biopsy in favor of MRI-targeted biopsy in men with elevated prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels reduced the probability of detecting clinically insignificant cancers, but at the risk of missing some clinically significant cancers and delaying their diagnosis, the randomized GÖTEBORG-2 trial from Sweden showed. Among nearly 18,000 participants, 0.6% of men who underwent MRI-targeted […]
Presepsin a ‘Robust’ Biomarker of Early-Onset Sepsis
Presepsin holds promise as a biomarker for early-onset sepsis (EOS), a systematic review and meta-analysis confirmed. Across a dozen clinical trials, presepsin had a pooled sensitivity of 0.93 for the primary analysis of culture-proven sepsis (95% CI 0.86-0.96), a pooled specificity of 0.91 (95% CI 0.85-0.95), and a pooled diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) of 131.7 […]
Mother-to-Baby COVID-19 Transmission Likely Rare
New mothers with COVID-19 had a low chance of passing the infection on to their baby, according to a systematic review and meta-analysis. In 472 studies that included over 14,000 babies born to mothers with SARS-CoV-2 infection, only 1.8% (95% CI 1.2-2.5) tested positive on an RT-PCR test, reported Shakila Thangaratinam, MD, PhD, of the […]