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
Pairs of conditions carry mortality beyond the sum of their separate effects
Among 61,400 Danish adults having major emergency abdominal surgery between 2002 and 2022, mortality was 11% at seven days and 31% at one year, and several comorbidity pairs were associated with excess mortality beyond their effects in isolation.
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
Vapers who never smoked show no clear excess illness in an England survey
Among 7,625 adults in the 2022 Health Survey for England, adjusted odds of any long-standing condition were raised among exclusive smokers (1.87), former smokers (1.44), ever-smoking vapers (2.13) and dual users (2.35), but not among vapers who had never smoked (1.24, 95% CI 0.58-2.63).
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Only 38% of Ohio Medicaid women with early breast cancer had genomic testing
Among 1,988 Ohio Medicaid beneficiaries aged 18 to 65 with localised or regional ER-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer diagnosed between 2016 and 2020, 37.8% received genomic profiling within six months, with lower receipt among Black women (aOR 0.72) and long-term care enrollees (aOR 0.47).
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
CT surveillance after lung cancer surgery left quality of life unchanged
In the French IFCT-0302 trial, 1,775 patients resected for non-small cell lung cancer were randomised to CT-based or minimal follow-up, and time to deterioration in mental (HR 0.97) and physical (HR 1.13) quality of life did not differ between the arms.
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Item new Preprint · not peer-reviewed
A US CADASIL cohort finds raised cognitive impairment across all genetic risk tiers
Baseline data from the first US CADASIL cohort, 343 genetically confirmed NOTCH3 carriers and 116 non-carrier relatives at a median age of 47.9 years, found adjusted odds of a worse Clinical Dementia Rating of 2.55 to 5.08 in carriers across all three genetic risk tiers.
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Item confirms Peer-reviewed
School programmes in Spain cut childhood obesity by four percentage points
A meta-analysis of seven Spanish school-based programmes covering 6,716 schoolchildren found obesity prevalence 4.00 percentage points lower after them (95% CI -6.44 to -1.55) from a baseline of 10.3%, with substantial variation between studies.
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
A blood test found between a quarter and a third of cancers per screening round
In the NHS-Galleri trial of 142,250 adults aged 50 to 77, the multi-cancer blood test returned a positive result for about 1% of participants per round, with episode sensitivity of 26.7% to 37.2% for all cancers and positive predictive value falling from 58.0% to 45.8% across three rounds.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Off-label GLP-1 prescribing in US adults rose 15-fold, a third of it at normal weight
Among 92.4 million US adults with no documented type 2 diabetes or qualifying obesity, GLP-1 receptor agonist prescribing rose from 0.1% in 2021 to 1.5% in 2025, and 35.1% of the 1.13 million recipients had a normal body mass index.
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Item refines Preprint · not peer-reviewed
GLP-1 drugs cut stroke risk 17%, with blood pressure explaining little of the effect
A meta-analysis of seven randomised trials with adjudicated endpoints (50,617 participants) found GLP-1 receptor agonists lowered stroke risk by 17% in type 2 diabetes, an effect only about a quarter attributable to the 1.45 mmHg blood pressure difference.
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Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Ultra-processed food intake tracks higher mortality across 51 prospective cohorts
A dose-response meta-analysis of 51 prospective cohorts covering 8.8 million adults found ultra-processed food intake associated with all-cause mortality (HR 1.18) and cardiovascular events (HR 1.24), on evidence the authors themselves rate low to moderate.
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Item contradicts Peer-reviewed
Rising despair did not track the midlife white US mortality increase
A Bayesian time-series analysis of US adults aged 45-54 from 1999 to 2015 found all-cause mortality rose among white adults, most among those with low education, but that the rise in despair was not associated with the rise in mortality.
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
Australian care home mortality differed by ownership mainly in inner regional areas
In 205,079 Australians entering long-term care between 2013 and 2018, first-year mortality was higher in for-profit (HR 1.17) and government (HR 1.20) facilities than not-for-profit ones in inner regional areas, while government facilities had the fewest emergency presentations.
