Historically, Lee Memorial Health System, based in Fort Myers, Florida, has had a program to help observe patients who were potentially at risk of hurting themselves while in its facilities. THE PROBLEM This could have been a patient who was confused, either chronically or acutely, or who had other medical or psychiatric concerns. “We would then hire and assign an […]

Critically ill COVID-19 patients often have antibodies in their blood that bind to the body’s own structures, so-called autoantibodies. Scientists from the BIH at Charité and the Max Delbrück Center have now discovered that these autoantibodies frequently bind to not just one but multiple targets. This surprising finding calls into question the role of the autoantibodies in determining disease progression. […]

Vedolizumab appears to be effective at reducing intestinal inflammation and inducing remission in patients who developed chronic pouchitis after undergoing ileal pouch-anal anastomosis (IPAA) for ulcerative colitis, according to a phase 4 trial. The incidence of modified Pouchitis Disease Activity Index (mPDAI)–defined remission after 14 weeks was 31% for vedolizumab, compared with 10% for placebo. Simon Travis, DPhil “Vedolizumab works […]

Illustration: Lazaro Gamio/Axios Nonprofit hospitals that paid their board members offered less charity care than facilities that didn't, per a new Health Affairs analysis. Why it matters: Nonprofit hospitals are required to offer charity care in exchange for their tax-exempt status. But the sector has come under scrutiny for its pricing practices and for saving more in tax exemptions than […]

In a recent article published by the United States of America Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Emerging Infectious Diseases online journal, researchers conducted a cross-sectional survey to estimate severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) antibodies in children with confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) between May and July 2021 in Colorado. Study: SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence compared with confirmed COVID-19 cases […]

Poor quality sleep may bolster a person’s genetic susceptibility to asthma, potentially doubling their risk of being diagnosed with the condition, suggests a large UK Biobank study, published in BMJ Open Respiratory Research. A healthy sleep pattern seems to be linked to a lower risk of asthma, prompting the researchers to suggest that spotting and treating sleep disorders early on […]

A study of more than 8,000 comprehensively characterized Medicare beneficiaries has found that the addition of self-reported functional impairments and physical frailty to claims-based measures of multi-morbidity and frailty identifies large differences in spending attributable to impairments and frailty. The findings are published in Annals of Internal Medicine. Health care systems are assuming increasing responsibility for the expenditures of their […]

Taking care of newborns is a lot of work (around the clock!), and it can make time feel like it’s stretching out. What feels like days is only a few hours, and weeks go by like months. But while exhausted parents might need a break from their baby, it’s the opposite for Keke Palmer. She joked that her baby boy […]

Cold activates a cellular cleansing mechanism that breaks down harmful protein aggregations responsible for various diseases associated with aging. In recent years, studies on different model organisms have already shown that life expectancy increases significantly when body temperature is lowered. However, precisely how this works has still been unclear in many areas. A research team at the University of Cologne’s […]

Is our brain able to regenerate? And can we harness this regenerative potential during aging or in neurodegenerative conditions? These questions sparked intense controversy within the field of neuroscience for many years. A new study from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience shows why there are conflicting results and proposes a roadmap on how to solve these issues. The notion of […]