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 refines Peer-reviewed
GLP-1 drugs did not lower new sleep apnoea diagnoses in UK diabetes records
In UK primary-care records covering 206,000 adults with type 2 diabetes and obesity, starting a GLP-1 receptor agonist rather than a weight-neutral DPP-4 inhibitor was not associated with fewer new diagnoses of obstructive sleep apnoea (HR 1.07, 95% CI 0.93-1.23).
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Item new Peer-reviewed
An oral KRAS G12D inhibitor shrank tumours in a third of treated pancreatic cancers
In a phase 1 trial of 74 heavily pretreated patients with KRAS G12D-mutant advanced solid tumours, the oral inhibitor GFH375 produced confirmed responses in 35.1% of pancreatic cancers and 35.7% of non-small cell lung cancers, with median overall survival of 9.9 and 13.4 months respectively.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Most dementia trial participants had mixed brain pathology, not the one targeted
Among 67 autopsied participants in Alzheimer's and related dementia trials at a Kentucky research centre, only 10–29% had solely the pathology the intervention was designed to target, with a mean of 2.54 pathological features per person.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Wildfire PM2.5 exposure is linked to shorter survival in older US lung cancer patients
A SEER-Medicare cohort of 414,016 patients aged 65 or older with lung cancer linked residential zip-code estimates of wildfire-related and non-wildfire PM2.5 from 2008 to 2019 to all-cause mortality, separating the two sources of fine particulate exposure.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
An exosome biomarker with CA19-9 detected early-stage pancreatic cancer in 1,785 people
A prospective study of 1,785 individuals in four countries reports that the PANXEON exosome-based blood biomarker, combined with carbohydrate antigen 19-9, detects early-stage pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma with high sensitivity.
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Item confirms Preprint · not peer-reviewed
Known dementia risk factors explain only a little of exceptional cognitive ageing
In 3,513 Whitehall II participants aged 65 and over, education, female sex, absence of hypertension, fewer depressive symptoms, higher fruit and vegetable intake and greater social activity were each modestly associated with 'SuperAger' cognitive status, none strongly.
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Item confirms Preprint · not peer-reviewed
Vaccinated Spanish women show less HPV 16/18 and fewer high-grade cervical lesions
Among 908 women in Spanish cervical screening, HPV 16/18 was detected in 0.76% of vaccinated versus 5.5% of unvaccinated women, and high-grade cytological lesions in 0.38% versus 2.4%.
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Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Advanced CKD tracks higher in-hospital death in STEMI shock on circulatory support
In 63,755 weighted US hospitalisations for STEMI with cardiogenic shock treated with mechanical circulatory support, in-hospital mortality rose from 30.7% with no chronic kidney disease to 40.7% with stage 4–5 disease, an adjusted odds ratio of 1.26.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
No epidemiological evidence yet links e-cigarettes or snus to chemotherapy response
A systematic review of alternative tobacco and nicotine products during anticancer therapy found no epidemiological study of their effect on chemotherapy response, and a single in vitro signal of e-cigarette-induced cisplatin resistance failed to replicate in a multi-centre study.
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Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Modelled estimates put 10.6m new cancers at 65+ in 2022, rising 75% by 2036
A secondary analysis of GLOBOCAN 2022 and GBD 2021 estimates reports 10.6 million new cancer cases and 6.0 million cancer deaths among adults aged 65 and over in 2022, with the modelled case count projected to rise 75.5% by 2036 as populations age.
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Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Asian Pacific Islanders had higher in-hospital death after heart attack than others in US
A propensity-matched analysis of US National Inpatient Sample admissions for acute myocardial infarction between 2003 and 2022 reports higher in-hospital mortality and more cardiac arrest, cardiogenic shock and stroke among Asian Pacific Islander patients than among others.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
GLP-1 users with obesity and asthma recorded fewer exacerbations than other weight drugs
In a propensity-matched TriNetX cohort of 4,846 adults with obesity and documented asthma, one-year recorded exacerbations were 1.7% with GLP-1-based therapy versus 4.0% with non-GLP weight-management drugs (risk ratio 0.44), with the authors ruling out causal inference.
