Body

An immunotherapy drug given after surgery improved disease-free survival rates in patients with kidney cancer at high risk of relapse.

Interim results of a phase 3 trial of adjuvant therapy revealed a 32% decrease in the risk of recurrence or death with pembrolizumab compared with a placebo

This is the first positive study of immunotherapy in patients with kidney cancer at high risk of relapse.

While early detection of breast cancer is critical, early prediction of how well the neoadjuvant chemotherapy treatment before surgery is working also may provide a window of opportunity when treatment could be altered and have a big impact on the patient's quality of life.

A new method to monitor epidemics like COVID-19 gives an accurate real-time estimate of the growth rate of an epidemic by carefully evaluating the relationship between the amount of viruses in infected people's bodies, called the viral load, and how fast the number of cases is increasing or decreasing.

PORTLAND, OR - Patients with high-risk melanoma who had a course of pembrolizumab after their surgery had a longer time before their disease recurred than patients who got either ipilimumab or high-dose interferon after surgery. These findings of a large SWOG Cancer Research Network clinical trial, S1404, will be presented at the ASCO annual meeting June 6, 2021.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- A different type of surge may be on the way more than a year into the pandemic - a baby surge.

The COVID-19 shutdown initially seemed to hit pause on pregnancy and birth rates, new research from one major hospital system suggests, but that trend is quickly reversing.

"Birth rates declined early on in the pandemic, but we expect a dramatic rebound soon," says lead author Molly Stout, M.D., MSci, maternal fetal medicine director at Michigan Medicine Von Voigtlander Women's Hospital.

"We're already seeing signs of a summer baby surge."

After a 2020 Vanderbilt University Medical Center study showed women have a difficult time accessing treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD), investigators analyzed comments received from the study's participants to further shed light on barriers to care, which included everything from long on-hold times to difficult interactions with clinic receptionists during phone calls seeking appointments.

A new study from the University of Chicago and Scripps Research Institute shows that during the last great pandemic--2009's H1N1 influenza pandemic--people developed strong, effective immune responses to stable, conserved parts of the virus. This suggests a strategy for developing universal flu vaccines that are designed to generate those same responses, instead of targeting parts of the virus that tend to evolve rapidly and require a new vaccine every year.

June 3, 2021 - LA JOLLA, CA--Mining the world's most comprehensive drug repurposing collection for COVID-19 therapies, scientists have identified 90 existing drugs or drug candidates with antiviral activity against the coronavirus that's driving the ongoing global pandemic.

Among those compounds, the Scripps Research study identified four clinically approved drugs and nine compounds in other stages of development with strong potential to be repurposed as oral drugs for COVID-19, according to results published June 3 in the journal Nature Communications.

The number of people engaging with life-enhancing cardiac rehabilitation clinics has declined during the pandemic, according to a BMJ clinical update which makes the case for more home-based and virtual alternatives.

Before the covid-19 pandemic, 100?000 people were admitted to hospital with heart attacks and approximately 200?000 were diagnosed with heart failure annually in the UK. There was a 40% decline in the number of patients admitted with heart attacks (acute coronary syndromes ) in 2020.

New York, NY (June 2, 2021) - A phase 3 clinical trial co-led by Mount Sinai researchers is the first to show that immunotherapy after surgery to remove bladder cancer can reduce the risk of relapse for patients who are at high risk of their cancer returning in a deadly metastatic form, according to results published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The immunotherapy nivolumab was used as an adjuvant therapy, which is given after surgery in the hopes of maximizing its effectiveness.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- In patients with insulin-treated type 2 diabetes, the use of continuous glucose monitors is associated with better blood sugar control and fewer visits to the emergency room for hypoglycemia, a Kaiser Permanente study published June 2 in the journal JAMA found.

The monitors have previously been shown to improve glucose control for patients with type 1 diabetes. Continuous glucose monitors are now the standard of care for these patients.

A new analysis of crime rates in 27 cities across 23 countries in Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East has found that stay-at-home policies during the pandemic led to an overall drop in police-recorded crime of 37% across all the sites in the study.

A team of researchers led by the University of Cambridge and University of Utrecht examined trends in daily crime counts before and after COVID-19 restrictions were implemented in major metropolitan areas such as Barcelona, Chicago, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, Brisbane and London.

June 5, 2021 marks the 40th anniversary of the first report of AIDS cases and the onset of the American AIDS epidemic. In a new, thought-provoking paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, Professor Ronald Bayer and co-author Gerald Oppenheiner capture the experiences of the physicians who were central to the AIDS epidemic. In the words of the doctors, they relay what it meant to look back after 40 years and how they "aged together."

MINNEAPOLIS - Older people with type 1 diabetes who have been to the hospital at some point for both low and high blood sugar levels may be at six times greater risk for developing dementia years later. The research is published in the June 2, 2021, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study also found that people with type 1 diabetes who visit the hospital for just one of the blood sugar extremes may also be at greater risk for developing dementia.

ITHACA, N.Y. - Influencing millions of people on social media and being paid handsomely is not as easy as it looks, according to new Cornell University research.

Algorithm vagaries are just one of several challenges social media content creators face, according to study author Brooke Erin Duffy, associate professor of communication at Cornell.