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
Bempedoic acid cut LDL-C 17.5% in routine use and a quarter stopped within three months
In 641 patients at seven German lipid clinics, adding bempedoic acid lowered LDL-C by a mean 17.5% at three months, though 34.0% had a suspected adverse event and 26.7% had stopped the drug by follow-up.
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
Slow restart after cutting blood pressure drugs tracked higher cardiac risk in SPRINT
In a secondary analysis of the SPRINT trial, participants whose antihypertensive drugs were reduced before randomisation and not promptly restored under the standard target had a 34% higher rate of major cardiovascular events (HR 1.34, 95% CI 1.04-1.74).
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
Hip replacement after acetabular fracture in over-70s halved days to remobilisation
Among 60 patients aged 70 and over with displaced acetabular fractures at one trauma centre, acute hip arthroplasty was followed by walking at a median of three days against six after internal fixation, though allocation followed a changing protocol rather than randomisation.
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Item new Preprint · not peer-reviewed
Gene-burden testing adds IMPA2 to dementia risk genes and ANKRD27 to Parkinson's
A population-scale gene-burden analysis of rare damaging coding variants recovered eight established dementia genes including TREM2, SORL1 and GRN, and reported new associations at IMPA2 for dementia and at ANKRD27 and CCL7 for Parkinson's, in a preprint that is not yet peer reviewed.
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
Shared genetic risk across cancers appears only in specific regions, not genome-wide
An analysis of 16 cancers plus a pan-cancer phenotype found only 20 genome-wide correlated cancer pairs but 82 genomic regions with shared local effects across 66 pairs, with cross-cancer polygenic score associations concentrated in immune and inflammatory pathways.
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Item confirms Peer-reviewed
Cancer ran at 5.6 per 1000 person-years in treated HIV, tracking age and smoking
Among 7507 people with HIV on antiretroviral therapy in the global REPRIEVE cohort, 219 cancers arose over a median 5.6 years, an incidence of 5.6 per 1000 person-years, with older age, high-income country residence and current smoking associated with risk but CD4-based markers not.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Type 2 diabetes fell by a quarter among Australian sleeve gastrectomy patients
Among 34,738 adults having laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy in New South Wales between 2017 and 2022, type 2 diabetes prevalence fell 24.4%, from 148.8 to 112.5 per 1,000, while 72.3% still carried at least one cardiovascular risk factor.
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
PSA density stratifies later significant prostate cancer risk after a negative MRI
Among 1,685 Swedish men with a negative prostate MRI in the Gothenburg-2 screening trial, seven-year cumulative incidence of clinically significant prostate cancer was 5.5% where baseline PSA density was below 0.10 ng/mL2, against 13.8% and 11.9% in the higher bands.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Norway's ischaemic stroke fall over two decades left AF-related stroke unchanged
Norwegian national registry data on 227,575 incident strokes from 2001 to 2021 show non-AF ischaemic stroke falling from 204.4 to 130.8 per 100,000 person-years while atrial-fibrillation-related ischaemic stroke stayed flat at about 68.
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Item new Peer-reviewed
Combined GLP-1 and SGLT2 use was linked to lower mortality after AF ablation, not less AF
In propensity-matched US health records for 2018 to 2024, atrial fibrillation recurrence after catheter ablation was similar whether patients took a GLP-1 receptor agonist, an SGLT2 inhibitor or both, while all-cause mortality was 40% to 46% lower with the combination, on small numbers of deaths.
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
H-FABP discriminated coronary disease poorly (AUC 0.56) but tracked eight-year mortality
In 2,690 patients with suspected functionally relevant coronary artery disease, heart-type fatty acid-binding protein discriminated poorly at diagnosis (AUC 0.56), yet eight-year all-cause mortality ranged from 7.7% in its lowest quartile to 44% in the highest.
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Item refines Peer-reviewed
Adolescent movement behaviours explained 2.0 points of a 6.9-point CVD risk gap
In 6,608 US adolescents followed for over two decades, the 6.9 percentage-point gap in predicted 30-year cardiovascular risk by parental education fell to 4.9 points in a scenario removing all unhealthy physical activity, screen time and sleep, and the relative gap was unchanged.
