Healthcare today
Healthcare across the world faces existential challenges: escalating demands against constrained resources, increasing co-morbidities and widening inequalities in health.
Just in
Healthcare today posts, most recent first.
-
Item new Peer-reviewed
Income volatility tracks 18% higher mortality in Korean adults with depression
Among 735,922 South Korean adults newly diagnosed with depression followed for a mean 10.3 years, those in the highest tertile of year-to-year income volatility had an 18% higher all-cause mortality rate than the lowest tertile (HR 1.18, 1.16-1.19), with a steeper gradient in men.
-
Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Depressed adults with asthma lost 9.9 months of survival over 15 years in US data
Among 4,945 US adults with asthma followed through 2019, those with PHQ-9 scores of 10 or more had 9.9 months less restricted mean survival over 15 years, with the poverty-income ratio accounting for about a quarter of the association in an exploratory mediation analysis.
-
Item confirms Peer-reviewed
A random forest beat logistic regression at predicting death in US diabetic adults
In 2428 US adults with both type 2 diabetes and hypertension from NHANES 1999-2018, a random forest model predicted all-cause mortality with an AUC of 0.873, against 0.783 for logistic regression, with no external validation reported.
-
Item new Preprint · not peer-reviewed
Wastewater sequencing in Lagos found enteric viruses, cholera and mcr resistance genes
Virus-enriched sequencing of untreated wastewater from open drainage canals in Lagos over July and August 2024 recovered a human virome dominated by enteric adenoviruses, astroviruses and caliciviruses, alongside Vibrio cholerae and mcr resistance genes.
-
Item refines Peer-reviewed
Older breast cancer survivors still carried a physical function deficit at ten years
Among 45,530 Women's Health Initiative participants followed 15 years, women diagnosed with regional breast cancer scored 6.8 points lower on SF-36 physical function than age-matched cancer-free women at one year and 5.3 points lower at ten.
-
Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Abdominal obesity and high blood sugar rose in Korean screening from 2014 to 2023
Aggregated statistics from the Republic of Korea's national health screening programme show abdominal obesity rising from 21.0% to 25.5% and hyperglycaemia from 34.7% to 40.1% between 2014 and 2023, with hypertension up from 42.3% to 45.1%.
-
Item new Peer-reviewed
Parathyroid carcinoma rose fivefold in Korea, with double the ten-year mortality
In Korean national insurance data from 2005 to 2020, incident parathyroid carcinoma rose 5.0-fold and benign primary hyperparathyroidism 7.7-fold, with ten-year all-cause mortality raised in both, at hazard ratios of 2.29 and 1.22 against matched controls.
-
Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Two in five memory-clinic patients with only subjective complaints were amyloid-positive
In 194 consecutive memory-clinic patients having amyloid PET, positivity rose from 40.9% in subjective cognitive decline to 66.0% in mild cognitive impairment and 91.7% in early Alzheimer's disease, and adding structural MRI indices did not improve prediction.
-
Item refines Peer-reviewed
Drug-coated balloons showed less restenosis than stents in side-branch lesions
In 161 patients with isolated side-branch coronary bifurcation lesions treated by operator choice, a drug-coated balloon strategy was followed by binary restenosis in 7.4% against 21.3% after stenting, and repeat revascularisation in 4.9% against 15.0%, at one year.
-
Item new Preprint · not peer-reviewed
Swiss childhood cancer survivors' diets tracked social position, not cardiovascular risk
Among 802 adult survivors of childhood cancer in Switzerland, five dietary patterns identified from a food frequency questionnaire varied by sex, age, language region, smoking and socioeconomic position, but showed no association with cardiovascular disease or its risk factors.
-
Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Medicaid expansion tracked lower mortality after kidney cancer, but not for everyone
Among 284,967 US adults aged 40 to 64 diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma from 2006 to 2021, mortality was 7% lower in states that expanded Medicaid (HR 0.93), with five-year mortality down 6.3 points among Hispanic patients and unchanged among Black patients.
-
Item refines Peer-reviewed
Carried to US veterans, liraglutide's three-year benefit rises from 1.6% to 4.6%
Reweighting the LEADER trial onto US Veterans Affairs cohorts with type 2 diabetes gave a three-year absolute reduction in major cardiovascular events of 4.6% (95% CI 2.2-7.0) against 1.6% (0.3-2.9) in the trial itself, on intervals that overlap.
