Culture
ATLANTA -- A new study shows that patients with rheumatic diseases across Africa, Southeast Asia, the Americas and Europe had trouble filling their prescriptions of antimalarial drugs, including hydroxychloroquine, during the 2020 global coronavirus pandemic, when antimalarials were touted as a possible COVID-19 treatment. Patients who could not access their antimalarial drugs faced worse physical and mental health outcomes as a result.
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute and University College London have found that some antibodies, created by the immune system during infection with common cold coronaviruses, can also target SARS-CoV-2 and may confer a degree of protection against the new viral strain.
In response to infection with a virus, the immune system creates antibodies to help fight it. These antibodies remain in the blood for a period after infection, and in the case of re-infection, they are able to tackle the virus again.
ATLANTA -- New research at ACR Convergence, the American College of Rheumatology's annual meeting, reveals that people of color with rheumatic disease have worse health outcomes from COVID-19 infection, are more likely to be hospitalized to treat their coronavirus infection, and are more likely to require invasive ventilator treatment (
The effect of dopaminergic medication on the learning abilities of patients with Parkinson's disease turns out to be linked to the presence of tremor symptoms. In patients who do not experience tremor, dopaminergic medication improves the ability to learn from rewards (reinforcement learning). Remarkably, the medication brings no benefit in reward learning to patients who do exhibit tremor.
Subarachnoid haemorrhage (SAH), the most fatal of all cerebrovascular disturbances, results in death for 40-50% of patients suffering from the condition in the first months after the haemorrhage.
The annual incidence of SAH is considered to be six to seven cases per 100,000 people globally. Due to its rarity, the effects of this cerebral haemorrhage type have been considered very minor on the population level. Furthermore, it has been previously estimated that no more than 4% of all deaths caused by strokes are caused by SAH.
A short online game in which players are recruited as a "Chief Disinformation Officer", using tactics such as trolling to sabotage elections in a peaceful town, has been shown to reduce susceptibility to political misinformation in its users.
The free-to-play Harmony Square is released to the public today, along with a study on its effectiveness published in the Harvard Misinformation Review.
The combined environmental threat of plastic pollution and ocean acidification are having significant impacts on species living in our oceans, according to new research.
An international team of scientists found that after three weeks of being submerged in the ocean, the bacterial diversity on plastic bottles was twice as great as on samples collected from the surrounding seawater.
However, in areas of elevated carbon dioxide, a large number of taxonomic groups - including bacteria that play an important role in carbon cycling - were negatively impacted.
Researchers from Illinois State University, North Carolina State University, University of South Carolina, and University of Maryland published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that examines the impact of moving nutrition labels, typically placed on the back of product packages, to the front.
What The Study Did: The association between patient demographic characteristics and socioeconomic status and engagement in telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic is examined in this observational study.
Authors: Samantha Tam, M.D., M.P.H., of the Henry Ford Health System and Henry Ford Cancer Institute in Detroit, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
(doi:10.1001/jamaoto.2020.3052)
What The Study Did: National health record data were used to examine whether the rate of positive tests for variants of the BRCA gene that increase the risk for certain cancers changed among older women in the United States between 2008 and 2018.
Authors: Fangjian Guo, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, is the corresponding author.
To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/
NEUROSCIENCE EXPERTS from the University of Leicester have released research that breaks with the past fifty years of neuroscientific opinion, arguing that the way we store memories is key to making human intelligence superior to that of animals.
It has previously been thought and copiously published that it is 'pattern separation' in the hippocampus, an area of the brain critical for memory, that enables memories to be stored by separate groups of neurons, so that memories don't get mixed up.
Expansion of Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act is associated with decreased mortality for patients with newly diagnosed breast, lung, or colorectal cancer.
The mortality improvement was due to earlier stage of diagnosis in states that have expanded Medicaid.
A new global analysis led by Imperial College London, and published in journal The Lancet, has assessed the height and weight of school-aged children and adolescents across the world.
The study, which used data from 65 million children aged five to 19 years old in 193 countries, revealed that school-aged children's' height and weight, which are indicators of their health and quality of their diet, vary enormously around the world.
Asian ethnicity is strongly linked to COVID-related stroke, reveals an analysis of stroke centre activity in England and Scotland during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic, and accepted for publication in the Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry.
Among patients with ischaemic stroke, which is caused by a blocked artery, nearly 1 in 5 (20%) of those with COVID-19 infection when they had their stroke were Asian--more than twice the proportion seen in ischaemic stroke patients without COVID-19.
Unrelated mutations, when present in the blood, can lead to false positive results in men with advanced prostate cancer who are undergoing liquid biopsies. Such tests, which look for variants in the cell-free DNA that tumors shed into the blood plasma, help determine suitable treatment options.