Individuals at higher risk of developing pancreatic cancer could be identified earlier using machine learning (ML) techniques which would result in a greater number of patients surviving the disease, suggests a new study published in PLOS ONE.
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Investigators from Trinity College Dublin, the Irish Mycobacteria Reference Laboratory, St James s Hospital, and the Department of Public Health HSE East believe tuberculosis (TB) care in Irish Prisons should be supported, considering the findings of their study which is published today (Tuesday, 1st June, 2021) in the
International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease.
The study describes an investigation into a large outbreak of tuberculosis which occurred in an Irish prison in 2011. This resulted in 34 people contracting active TB from a single infectious case. The use of Whole Genome Sequencing enabled the investigators to track the course of onward transmission, and to link TB cases identified as recently as 2019 to the 2011 outbreak.
Malaria, a disease caused mainly by the parasites Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax, is associated with over 400,000 deaths each year. Previously, the spleen was assumed to mostly play a role in parasite destruction, as it eliminates malaria parasites after antimalarial treatment. A study published by Steven Kho and Nicholas Anstey at Menzies School of Health Research, Australia, and international colleagues, suggests that in chronic P. vivax infections, malaria parasites survive and replicate via a previously undetected lifecycle within the spleen.
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Most prescriptions for the drug buprenorphine, used to treat opioid use disorder, are written by a small number of the health care providers, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Published in the June 1 edition of the
Journal of the American Medical Association, the study found that half of all patient-months of buprenorphine treatment during 2016 and 2017 were prescribed by just 4.9% of the physicians and other providers who prescribed the drug during the period. These findings have important implications for efforts to increase buprenorphine access, said Dr. Bradley D. Stein, the study s lead author and a senior physician researcher at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. Our study suggests that targeted efforts to encourage more current prescribers to become high-volume prescribers, and encourage existing high-volume subscribers to safely and effectively treat even more patients, may be a potent way to increase buprenorphine treatment capacity.
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A nationwide study in Sweden estimates the elevated risk of advanced or fatal prostate cancer among relatives of men with the disease, providing new data that could help refine guidelines for the age at which screening should begin. Mahdi Fallah and Elham Kharazmi of the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, Germany, and colleagues present these new findings in the open-access journal
PLOS Medicine.
Clinical guidelines for the age to start prostate cancer screening aim to ensure that the benefits of identifying the disease early outweigh the risks of diagnosing and treating cancer that will not harm the patient. Current guidelines note that men with a family history of prostate cancer have a greater risk and should begin screening early. However, due to lack of sufficient data, the age at which early screening should begin has been unclear.