Healthcare today
Healthcare across the world faces existential challenges: escalating demands against constrained resources, increasing co-morbidities and widening inequalities in health.
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Healthcare today posts, most recent first.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Mental illness and hip fracture interact to raise 30-day infection risk in older Danes
In a Danish nationwide matched cohort of 100,335 hip fracture patients aged 65 and over and 498,943 comparators, mental health conditions and hip fracture interacted synergistically on 30-day infection risk, with the strongest effect in those with psychoactive substance use disorders.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
PSMA-guided radiotherapy missed its primary endpoint but favoured biochemical control
In a phase 2 randomised trial of 253 men, radiotherapy intensified to all PSMA-PET-detected lesions did not meet its primary endpoint of five-year failure-free survival (66% vs 62%), though freedom from biochemical progression was higher (72% vs 65%).
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
ORBI score marks larger infarcts in STEMI but predicts 10-year death worse than age
Among 1,574 Danish STEMI patients treated by primary PCI, those scoring high on the ORBI cardiogenic-shock risk score had more inflammation, larger infarcts and 41% versus 20% ten-year mortality, though the score discriminated long-term death less well than age alone.
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Item confirms Peer-reviewed
US deaths listing both type 2 diabetes and cardiac arrest rose faster after 2014
A CDC WONDER analysis of 258,675 US deaths from 1999 to 2020 mentioning both type 2 diabetes and cardiac arrest found age-adjusted rates rising 2.72% a year to 2014 and 9.55% a year thereafter, highest among Hispanic and American Indian/Alaska Native adults.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Japanese romosozumab starters had less recent heart attack or stroke than other users
Among 311,585 Japanese patients starting romosozumab between 2019 and 2023, 11.7% of men and 7.9% of women had a myocardial infarction or stroke in the prior 360 days, below the 8.9-17.6% among users of other osteoporosis drugs, and those with such a history discontinued more often.
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Item confirms Preprint · not peer-reviewed
German child overweight and obesity prevalence is 16.1% and stable over two decades
Measured height and weight in 3,978 representative German children aged 4 to 17 in 2023 to 2025 gave an overweight and obesity prevalence of 16.1% and an obesity prevalence of 6.7%, which the authors report as stable against waves dating back to 2005.
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Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Multi-cancer blood test detected 15.4% of stage I cancers at 98.5% specificity
A methylation and protein multi-cancer early detection blood test, assessed in a prospectively collected case-control study of 6,352 samples across 21 tumour types, had overall sensitivity of 50.9% at 98.5% specificity, rising from 15.4% at stage I to 85.5% at stage IV.
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Item new Preprint · not peer-reviewed
Nigeria's adolescent HPV programme is modelled to avert 1.82m cervical cancers by 2100
An agent-based microsimulation calibrated to Nigeria projects that continuing single-dose adolescent HPV vaccination averts 1.82 million cervical cancer cases over 2025 to 2100, a 53% reduction, while 945,000 residual cases fall in women already beyond target age.
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
Depression was associated with 65% higher cardiometabolic disease incidence at 15 years
In 1858 Dutch adults followed for 15 years, lifetime major depressive disorder was associated with a 65% higher rate of incident cardiometabolic disease (HR 1.65, 95% CI 1.30 to 2.11), with comparable effect sizes across atypical, anhedonic and typical symptom profiles.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Orforglipron against insulin glargine in the ACHIEVE-4 cardiovascular safety trial
ACHIEVE-4 randomised 2749 adults with type 2 diabetes, overweight or obesity and established cardiovascular or kidney disease to oral orforglipron or insulin glargine, testing non-inferiority for four-component major adverse cardiovascular events over a median two years.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Sotagliflozin after worsening heart failure modelled at $75,510 per QALY gained
A lifetime microsimulation built on SOLOIST-WHF trial effects put sotagliflozin at $75,510 per quality-adjusted life-year gained in patients with type 2 diabetes and recent worsening heart failure, at an assumed net cost of $434 a month.
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
England's cervical screening deprivation gap widened from 4.9 to 7.4 points
Linking 2024 general-practice cervical screening coverage in England to area deprivation gave 73.5% coverage in the most affluent areas against 66.1% in the most deprived, a 7.4 percentage point gap compared with 4.9 points in 2012, with overall coverage lower than a decade ago.
