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Item refines Preprint · not peer-reviewed
APOE e4 dementia and liver associations differ by ancestry in 367,757 US adults
A phenome-wide study of APOE genotype in 367,757 All of Us participants found 27 associated phenotypes, with dementia risk largest in those of European ancestry and e4 protection against fatty liver disease present in East Asians but absent in African-ancestry participants.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Heart-focused anxiety was clinically elevated in 15% to 49% across 26 cardiac studies
A systematic review of 26 studies found clinically elevated heart-focused anxiety in 15% to 49% of patients with cardiovascular disease, and two prospective cohorts reported independent prediction of cardiac events and death after myocardial infarction (hazard ratios 1.30 to 1.59).
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Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Lower education was the most consistent socioeconomic correlate of obesity in Korea
A cross-sectional analysis of the 2022-2024 wave of the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found lower educational attainment the most consistent socioeconomic correlate of obesity (BMI 25 or above) in adults aged 19 and over, with income and employment less consistent.
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Item refines Preprint · not peer-reviewed
US mortality after CPR for in-hospital cardiac arrest stayed above pre-2020 levels
In 612,930 weighted US hospitalisations with CPR for in-hospital cardiac arrest, risk-adjusted mortality fell to 2019, peaked in 2021 (aOR 1.26 against 2016) and stayed above pre-pandemic levels in 2022, and it was higher for Black, Hispanic and self-pay patients.
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Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Lithium users had about 37% lower dementia risk across four pooled cohort studies
A meta-analysis of 23 studies pooled four cohort studies to a hazard ratio of 0.63 (95% CI 0.52 to 0.78) for dementia with lithium exposure, though heterogeneity was substantial and the authors state that causality is not established.
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Item new Preprint · not peer-reviewed
Fine-tuned LLM beat ICD codes for in-hospital cardiac arrest on a curated corpus
Large language models reading clinical notes identified in-hospital cardiac arrest with precision 0.88 and recall 1.00 on a curated corpus against 0.68 and 0.91 for ICD codes, though a prompting configuration reached precision 0.79 in an unselected cohort of 45,525 encounters.
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Item new Preprint · not peer-reviewed
Black participants were 4% of Black and White enrolment in landmark HCM trials
Across 13 landmark hypertrophic cardiomyopathy trials, 70 of 1,780 Black or White participants were Black, a pooled share of 3.98% against a population expectation of 16.5%, and site geography and eligibility thresholds did not account for the shortfall.
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Item new Preprint · not peer-reviewed
Offering HPV vaccine at 9-10 raised series completion by age 13 from 45% to 62%
In a cluster-randomised trial across 31 US paediatric practices, introducing HPV vaccination at ages 9-10 rather than 11-12 brought median series completion forward from 13.3 to 12.2 years and raised completion by age 13 from 45.1% to 61.6%.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
GLP-1 drug added to SGLT2 inhibitor in CKD tracked with fewer kidney and heart events
In a propensity-matched TriNetX cohort of 32,448 adults with chronic kidney disease, adding a GLP-1 receptor agonist to SGLT2 inhibitor therapy was associated with lower major adverse kidney events (HR 0.70), MACE (HR 0.83) and all-cause mortality (HR 0.55) over a median 12 months.
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Item new Preprint · not peer-reviewed
A frameshift variant in ADAP1 more than triples serious mental illness risk in Colombia
Exome sequencing of 21,958 cases and 19,826 controls in the Paisa founder population of Colombia found seven genes associated transdiagnostically with serious mental illness, led by an ADAP1 frameshift variant that raises risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder more than threefold.
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Item confirms Preprint · not peer-reviewed
Swiss children with obesity from poorer areas arrive with worse cardiometabolic risk
Among 886 children and adolescents at a Bern weight-management service, a 10-unit higher neighbourhood socioeconomic score was associated with a 2.57-point lower %BMIp95 and lower odds of insulin resistance, while treatment response did not differ by socioeconomic position.
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Item refines Preprint · not peer-reviewed
Tirzepatide starters had slightly less new heart failure than semaglutide starters
In a propensity-matched cohort of 848,538 patients with obesity drawn from TriNetX records, one-year new-onset heart failure was 1.0% among tirzepatide initiators versus 1.3% among semaglutide initiators (HR 0.9), with lower all-cause mortality also reported for tirzepatide.
